Faux Education Reform or Improved Education (Both are NOT Possible!)

22 Nov

Two years ago, I had the opportunity to share my thoughts about education policy with Congresswomen, Susan Davis (Democrat CA-53). Like many high government office holders, Davis got her start in the 1980’s as a member of the local school board. I immediately launched into my heartfelt belief that standardized testing was destroying public education and leading to the privatizing of public schools. She almost immediately asked me what I find a peculiar and telling question, “How are we going to monitor schools without testing?” This question implies that standards and standardized testing do indeed present a way of evaluating quality of teaching or schools. They do not. It also implies that monitoring schools is the job of the federal government. It is not. And for someone that had almost a decade working with schools not to know what a good job accrediting organizations do monitoring and guiding schools is significant. It demonstrates why it is so important to promote professionalism in the operation of our schools. Politicians and rich businesspeople are not well enough informed about the intricacies and variables involved in education to run schools and dictate policy. We respect the opinions of professionals in other arts such as the medical field when we make policy because they are experts in a complicated field, likewise we should respect professionalism in education because it is an even more complicated field. The bottom line is that since the passage of NCLB the education of children in how to think has atrophied. Like Diane Ravitch prophesized, “And so we may find that we obtained a paradoxical and terrible outcome: higher test scores and worse education.”1 Higher test scores because we made that the ultimate goal of our pedagogy and worse education because children are taught discrete pieces of information to recite but get no practice in using that information to reason and create.

While writing about how standardized testing and mechanical literacy are undermining the experience in school, Francis Lucerna, the co-founder of La Puente, observed, “This is not by accident; there is a reason this is happening and why it’s happening in public schools and not in private schools and other places. This is the education for followers, not for leaders.”2 In other words this type of education reform is the kind of class based reform that John Dewey warned against in 1916, “His own purpose will direct his actions. Otherwise, his seeming attention, his docility, his memorizing and reproductions will partake of intellectual servility. Such a condition of intellectual subjugation is needed for fitting the masses into a society where the many are not expected to have aims or ideas of their own, but to take orders from the few set in authority. It is not adapted to a society which intends to be democratic.”3 In a similar vein, Daisaku Ikeda, the founder of the constructivist oriented Soka Education system states, “Learning that has forgotten creativity is a servant of authority. If learning is to serve people, it must continue to create value.”4 For more than a century great education philosophers have warned us about how standards based and behaviorist education vitiates pedagogy; yet here we are in the second decade of the 21st century bringing this kind of injury to the public education system.

How did we get here? Recently I read a book by the renowned educator; cognitive and computer scientist, Roger Schank called Teaching Minds. In a discussion of scripts he writes, “Scripts tell us what will happen next in the aspects of the world that repeat frequently. Anyone who goes to a restaurant knows that when you order food, someone will bring it to you and later you will be expected to pay for it. … People who have scripts often generalize them so that in their own mind they are experts on things they have never experienced. This is what stupid looks like.”5 This seems to be a real cogent explanation of modern education reform led by the likes of Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Arne Duncan and the endless list of education reformers with no personal experience either studying or practicing education yet they went to school so they think they are experts. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute wrote about the Race to the Top (RttT) reforms brought to us by the non-educator education reformers that joined the Obama administration from the NewSchools Venture Fund. He observed that they have “published a list of 19 of its best ideas, few of which are truly ‘evidence-based,’ regardless of what President Obama says, and told states to adopt as many of them as possible if they want to get the money. It’s as if a bunch of do-gooders sat together at the NewSchools Venture Fund summit and brainstormed a list of popular reform ideas, and are now going to force them upon the states. (Wait, I think that is how this list got developed.)”6

Almost One hundred years ago John Dewey wrote Democracy and Education, in which he made many cogent and insightful statements about education. Here are a few:

(Page 46) “Why it is that teaching by pouring in and learning by passive absorption, are universally condemned, that they are still so entrenched in practice? That education is not an affair of ‘telling’ and being told, but an active and constructive process, is a principle almost as generally violated in practice as conceded in theory.”

(Page 122) “An aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established externally to the process of action is always rigid. Being inserted or imposed from without, it is not supposed to have a working relationship to the concrete conditions of the situation.”

(Page 158) “Translated into details, it means the act of learning or studying is artificial and ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely presented with a lesson to be learned.”

(Page 177) “While all thinking results in knowledge, ultimately the value of knowledge is subordinate to its use in thinking.”

(Page 203) “Imposing an alleged uniform general method upon everybody breeds mediocrity in all but the very exceptional.”

(Page 207) “Were all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth something hardly less that a revolution in teaching would be worked.”

(Page 303) “Narrow modes of skill cannot be made useful beyond themselves; any mode of skill which is achieved with deepening of knowledge and perfecting of judgment is readily put to use in new situations and is under personal control.”

(Page 417) “Discipline, culture, social efficiency, personal refinement, improvement of character are but phases of the growth of capacity nobly to share in such a balanced experience. And education is not a mere means to such a life. Education is such a life. To maintain capacity for such education is the essence of morals. For conscious life is a continual beginning afresh.”7

John Dewey may have been America’s greatest thinker about teaching and learning and yet our modern reformers completely ignore him. I suspect many of them have never actually studied education philosophy and many others of them have other motives that have little to do with improving public education. Dewey is hardly the only person to have these same observations about good pedagogy. Roger Shank humorously made the point by stating, “Math and science are not important subjects. There, I said it. Start the lynching. One can live a happy life without ever having taken a physics course or knowing what a logarithm is. … But being able to reason on the basis of evidence is important.”8 Tsunesaburo Makiguchi the insightful Japanese philosopher-educator was fighting against an education philosophy based on producing subjects for the emperor at the same time that John Dewey was fighting against a behaviorist philosophy of education in the United States. Makiguchi wrote, “In-school education should be closely connected in practice with actual social life so that it can transform unconscious living into fully conscious participation in the life of society. Education integrated into the life of society will yield benefits of well-planned living, without the undesirable effect of mechanical uniformity an inherent danger in standardized education.”9

The Swiss psychologists, Jean Piaget called Dewey’s discovery-based approach to education “constructivism.” Piaget believed that “children play an active role in making sense of things, ‘constructing’ reality rather than just acquiring knowledge.” The philosophy of “constructivism” is a move away from the educational philosophies of behaviorism and social conservatism advocated by men like B. F. Skinner and Edward K. Thorndike. Howard Gardner, the creator of the theory of multiple intelligences, writes, “Piaget’s account of the passage from sensori-motor actions to concrete to formal operations is the best worked-out trajectory of growth in all of developmental psychology.”10 In addition to Piaget’s work, the Russian developmental psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, observed that children have a “zone of proximal development.” “Vygotsky and other educational professionals believed education’s role was to give children experiences that were within their zones of proximal development, thereby encouraging and advancing their individual learning.”11 This approach to “constructivism” has lead to the idea of scaffolding. The teacher identifies the student’s needs and helps them through the zone of proximal development by questioning or other means until the student not longer needs the aide for constructing understanding. These brilliant insights into how people develop and learn are completely vitiated by standards based education and high stakes testing.

For the past thirty years, educators have been making pilgrimages to the Italian town of Reggio Emilia to observe what may be the best preschool education in the world. The traveling exhibit, “The 100 Languages of Children” was startling to educators in 1991 when it came to the United States and they saw the amazing work of these 4 and 5 year-old students. The heart, soul and educational theorist for the Reggio schools was a remarkable educator name Loris Malaguzzi, a confirmed constructivist. He once stated, “No, our schools have not had, nor do they have, a planned curriculum with units and subunits (lesson plans) as the behaviorists would like. These would push our school toward teaching without learning; we would humiliate the schools and the children by entrusting them to forms, dittos, and handbooks of which publishers are generous distributors.”12 He did not mean there was no planning and reflection but that the Reggio educators were constantly ready to modify their plans depending on how the students engaged. Unfortunately, Reggio Emilia is one of the few places in the world where constructivist education is practiced. Ellen Lagemann, an education historian, writes, “One cannot understand the history of education in the United States during the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward K. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.”13 The same general situation in education appears to exist throughout the world.

I conclude after reviewing the observations about how people learn from the best educational minds on four continents that modern education reform in the United States is based on bad philosophy. The KIPP schools which Bill Gates holds up as a model for how education should be done are very behaviorist in their education orientation. Eli Broad completely defies reason when he promotes non-educators with business backgrounds as the best people to hire as education leaders. The Broad approach appears to institutionalize “what stupidity looks like.”  Barak Obama hires a non-educator as the top educator in the country. Together, they promulgate policies that undermine professionalism in education, lionize high stakes testing and make the future of public education vulnerable. As for Congressman Davis’s concern about monitoring schools, there are wonderful professionally based organizations that have been monitoring schools for decades. For example, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) does a great job of looking deeply into the operation and professionalism of schools in the western United States. WASC sends a team of educators from a different region into a school for a weeklong visit in which they review curriculum, school site plans, community involvement and visit many classrooms in progress. These teams are normally lead by a current school principal and are made up of current teachers who all know exactly what a well run school should look like and based on the evidence they gather give the schools valuable feedback. Schools that fail these inspections truly are failures and face the possibility of losing accreditation. If legislators think they need more, then the answer is to add resources to these accrediting agencies that make informed judgments about schools. Standardized testing is an unreliable methodology for evaluating teaching or schools and fuels the impulse toward behaviorism. The one consistent finding about the results of standardized testing is they are most influenced by the financial condition of the neighborhood. Using this unreliable method for evaluating teachers and schools is foolhardy and has lead to great schools being closed and great teachers being unjustly labeled failures.

As the new millennium started, I decided to leave my position as a researcher in Silicon Valley to become an educator. I sought a master’s degree in education at University of California San Diego (UCSD) where I met two amazing educators and thinkers; Professor of Sociology, Hugh ‘Bud’ Mehan and Professor of Mathematics, Guershon Harel.  From Dr. Mehan, the founder of the Pruess School, I learned about the history, politics and theory of effective education. From Dr. Harel, the founder of the Algebraic Thinking Institute, I learned about his amazing theory of education, Duality, Necessity, and Repeated Reasoning (DNR). Dr. Harel taught us about the subtle difference between the ways of thinking and ways of understanding. He presented us with evidence showing that poor teaching methods hurt students’ abilities to understand and their desires to learn. In 2001, all of us in my cadre at UCSD were thrilled to be studying with these great educators and with the idea that we could bring this kind of pedagogy to public schools. But, in 2002, the federal government mandated behaviorism through requiring standards and testing. In the past 10 years, this benighted reform has led to more and more money leaving the classroom to commercial pockets and to schools becoming a more and more onerous places. Now we have Common Core State Standards (CCSS) which are accelerating money out of the classroom to consultants and testing companies and undermining professionalism in education. This week I am presenting a lesson and an assessment on quadratic functions developed by a corporation hired to help us prepare for CCSS. The lesson is not bad but not really remarkable for anything other than more money left my classroom of 40 math students to pay for it. This kind of reform is faux reform which is worse than no reform. We can survive a budget crisis but bad philosophy of education is deeply destructive. Let us have real reform led by professional educators or faux reform led by businessmen and politicians will continue to engender ever degenerating education in America!

1. Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Page 219.

2. Kohl, Herbert and Tom Oppenheim, ed. The Muses Go to School. New York: The New Press. 2012. Page 58

3. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Page 356.

4. Ikeda, Daisaku, The New Human Revolution Volume 15. Santa Monica, California: The World Tribune Press. 2008. (Page 189)

5. Shank, Roger. Teaching Minds. New York: Teachers College Press. 2011. Page 101.

6. Petrilli, Michael. “The Race to the Top: The Carrot That Feels Like a Stick,” Flypaper blog, July 23, 2009. http://www.educationgadfly.net/flypaper/2009/07/the-race-to-the-top-the-carrot-that-feels-like-a-stick/

7. Dewey, John. Democracy and Education. New York: Macmillan, 1916.

8. Shank, Roger. Teaching Minds. New York: Teachers College Press. 2011. Page 83.

9. Ikeda, Daisaku. Soka Education. Santa Monica, California: Middleway Press. 2001 Page 18

10. Garner, Howard. Frames of Mind. New York: Basic Books. 1993. (Page 133)

11. Berk, L and Winsler, A. (1995). “Vygotsky: His life and works” and “Vygotsky’s approach to development”. In Scaffolding children’s learning: Vygotsky and early childhood learning. Natl. Assoc for Educ. Of Young Children. p. 24

12. Edwards, Caroline, Gandini Lella and George Forman, ed. The Hundred Languages of Children 2nd Edition. Westport, Connecticut:, Ablex Publishing, 1998

13. Kohn, Alfie. The Schools Our Children Deserve. Boston – New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1999. Page 7.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Transferring Money for the Classroom to Corporate Coffers

23 Sep

There might be some failing schools out there but I suspect most schools that are labeled as failing are in fact competent institutions in failing communities. In the testing era, scores on multiple choice tests have been used as a measurement of school quality but that is a gross error. The one statistically relevant aspect of student life revealed by this type testing is the social economic status of their family. 100% of schools in upper middle class neighborhoods are successful under these measures and 100% of schools in poverty zones are failures by the same measures. Clearly, this would not happen if these tests were measuring quality of schools or teaching. These tests have errantly labeled great schools in poor neighborhoods as failures and under the new strong mayor systems many excellent institutions have been closed in the name of school reform. A much better measure of schools is that done by teams of educators from accreting institutions like the Western Association of Schools and Colleges. The biggest success of modern reform is the transfer of large amounts of money from the classroom to corporate coffers. That is the cause of most damage to public schools.

Tags: , ,

Common Core State Standards – Are Dangerous

5 Sep

Another untested therefore dangerous theory is being foisted on public schools. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are still being written but we already have schedules for implementation. Budget strained school districts across the country are spending money on CCSS implementation. This is not a reasonable approach when radically changing education in America. A new airplane design is tested, a new marketing system is piloted but a radical and significant restructuring of public education is being instituted with no field tests.

Diane Ravitch recently wrote, “The Common Core will be implemented in 45 states without that kind of trial. No one knows if they will raise expectations and achievement, whether they will have no effect, whether they will depress achievement, or whether they will be so rigorous that they increase the achievement gaps.” This risky endeavor with the future of America’s children at risk should be abandoned. It is based on bad education philosophy; however, if this foolish approach to education reform cannot be stopped at the minimum it should be implemented in a prudent way. Slow down the entrepreneurs lusting for new business, be responsible stewards for America’s schools and run some thorough field tests on these proposed Common Core State Standards.

A recently released Brookings Institute Study called “The 2012 Brown Center Report on American Education: HOW WELL ARE AMERICAN STUDENTS LEARNING?” tells us “Don’t let the ferocity of the oncoming debate fool you. The empirical evidence suggests that the Common Core will have little effect on American students’ achievement. The nation will have to look elsewhere for ways to improve its school”

The Professional Educators of Tennessee’s blog site has a primer on the CCSS which quotes several expert views:

“The Obama administration has pressed hard for the speedy acceptance of the so-called common core standards, arguing that the establishment of centralized norms replacing those in 50 states will raise the achievement of students who most need help. The opponents say that a system created in Washington will become captive to the education establishment, and that the standards, as currently written, will promote mediocrity across the board. …

“Critic Alfie Kohn, the author of a dozen books on education and human behavior, states ‘uniformity isn’t the same thing as excellence; high standards don’t require common standards. And neither does uniformity promote equity’….

“Sandra Stotsky a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas takes a different approach, but reaches a similar conclusion:   ‘The Common Core standards may accomplish the  goal of equalizing education but not in a way the supporters initially hoped: they may lead to more uniformly mediocre student achievement than we now have.…’

“Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, suggested: ‘standards threaten to further routinize pedagogy, filling students with bits of reified knowledge — leaving behind the essence, the humanistic genius of liberal learning.’ Then Fuller points out: ‘The strange thing in all this is that the political left is now preaching the virtues of systems, uniformity and sacred knowledge. Lost are the virtues of liberal learning, going back to the Enlightenment when progressives first nudged educators to nurture in children a sense of curiosity and how to question dominant doctrine persuasively.’”

Jim Arnold  Pelham City, Ga., school chief writes:

“Common Core is a standardized national curriculum. Why is this problematic? From an historical context, a centralized school curriculum serves the goals of totalitarian states. Jefferson warned us about that.

“There are additional issues: 1) there are few interdisciplinary connections between subjects. Research for many years has shown the positive effects of interdisciplinary connections on student learning and achievement; 2) citizenship, personal development and the promotion of democratic values is ignored.

“It is rather troubling to note the number of educational ‘reforms’ that ignore educational research, as if invoking the magic word ‘reform’ is enough to allow any imposition however implausible.

“With adoption of the Common Core standards, you can rest assured that Common Core standardized testing is not far behind. How can we expect a single, nationwide standardized ‘pick-a-bubble’ machine scored test to effectively measure what is taught in practically every school system in the United States? The documented testing issues we already see with state assessments will increase exponentially.”

Lynn Stoddard a retired educator from Utah and the author of four books on the need for authentic reform of public education wrote this month in the Deseret News:

“One big problem with the Common Core Curriculum, recently adopted by Utah and 46 other states, is this feature. It specifies what all students should know and be able to do at grade-level check points. It pressures teachers, with excessive testing; to make students fit the curriculum. The testing draws forth low level teaching by trying to measure student growth in likenesses. Never mind that it’s impossible to standardize students; the Common Core is exactly what it says it is, ‘common.’ It tries to make students “common” in knowledge and skills. It’s a generic, narrow curriculum designed by subject matter specialists who have never even met the students it is designed to serve.”

There are several valid reasons why so many voices across the nation are speaking out against the CCSS:

(1) They are untested, so no one knows whether they will work or not.

(2) They are based on a bad theory of pedagogy. It is a theory of pedagogy that encourages direct instruction and the development of fact knowledge and the accountability portion will narrow curriculum. What is tested is what is taught in a high stakes environment. It is the behavioral theory of education that was promoted by Edgar Thorndike and BF Skinner.

(3) Professionals in the classroom have had no authentic input into the standards development which means the standards are not likely to be appropriate for various aged students. They are being written by university professors, noble laureates and businessmen none of whom have a reputation for knowing how to teach even at the college level and are especially clueless about how to teach third graders.

(4) Who has control over the standards is a big concern. Are the standards being perverted for various business or religious or political purposes?

In his recent book Teaching Minds, Roger Schank – the founder of the renowned Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, where he is John P. Evans Professor Emeritus in Computer Science, Education and Psychology – makes several important points about good pedagogy. He point out, “There is no evidence whatsoever that accumulation of facts and background knowledge are the same thing. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Facts learned out of context, and apart from actual real-world experience that is repeated over and over, are not retained.”

In another section of the book, Dr. Schank quotes many politicians and describes their lack of understanding about how people learn and why they support accountability. He states:

“Accountability must play well in Peoria because every politician is for it.

“Accountability must mean to voters, I assume, that teacher will be measured by how well they teach their students. Political candidates, always willing to hop on an uncontroversial point of view, are all quite certain that the voters know what they are talking about. No matter how stupid NCLB is, no matter how mean spirited, no matter how awful for both teachers and students, its very horror rests on the premise that no one seems to be disputing that the federal government has the right to tell the schools what to teach and to see whether they are indeed teaching it.”

In his book Dr. Schank excoriates the quality of teaching at universities. He attributes the poor quality of teaching to what he calls the star system in higher education. Universities that want high ratings look for Nobel Prize winners and other internationally famous professors. They do not look for good teachers. Dr. Schank himself came to Northwestern via the star system when Northwestern made him a better offer than Yale was willing to match. The point is that quality of teaching is not a consideration, yet these same professors who gained fame through the star system and not their understanding of pedagogy are writing the CCSS.

Dr. Schank shares and interesting anecdote to bolster this point:

“At MIT, where students are different than they are at Northwestern by quite a bit, there are a number of superstars that I know quite well. Two of them, whom I will not name but are about as famous as a professor can be, are people I have heard lecture many times. I have never understood what they were talking about in any of those lectures. Now, bear in mind that I know their fields very well so I should have been able to understand them. Also, bear in mind that I was a terrible student, which means my attention fades fast when I am bored or irritated.”

The CCSS are purported to be the result of a group of states voluntarily agreeing to a set of curricular standards. The reality is the Gates foundation paid to develop the standards, paid to evaluate the standards, and is underwriting Pearson’s program to create online courses and resources for the standards, which will be sold by Pearson, for a profit, to schools across the nation.

We are told, “The Common Core State Standards Initiative is an effort led by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers.” However, the reality is different. An example of the real process is the present Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) which are in progress. Officially the NGSS development is “a joint effort between the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Achieve.” When queried about the NGSS the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) and Achieve are the only sites that give current information. The information at NSTA is illuminating:

“In a process managed by Achieve, 26 states are leading the development of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The science education community got a first glimpse of the NGSS draft when it was released during the first public comment period from May 11 through June 1. According to Achieve, the writers are now working to review all of the comments and develop a second draft to be released for public comment in the fall 2012. Achieve has removed the first draft from the web while it undergoes revision.

Achieve is the lead partner writing the science standards, but achieve is a private non-profit that is only accountable to its founders and donors. The Achieve web site lists their contributors: The Battelle Foundation; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; The Boeing Company; Brookhill Foundation; Carnegie Corporation of New York; The Cisco Foundation; The GE Foundation; IBM Corporation; Intel Foundation; JP Morgan Chase Foundation; The Joyce Foundation; Lumina; MetLife Foundation; Nationwide; Noyce Foundation; The Prudential Foundation; Sandler Foundation; State Farm Insurance Companies; and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

It is really these corporations and foundations who are writing the NGSS. The people of this country and professional educators have already lost control of these standards. They are in the control of these corporations which is exactly what is to be feared, an unaccountable group gaining sway over national education standards.

The state of New York recently published some sample English language and mathematics Common Core questions for third graders. Jeff Nichols a parent of a 3rd grader responded:

“Well, I looked at the sample 3rd grade ELA questions. Utterly bizarre (sic). I would never put this material in front of my 8-year-olds (avid, enthusiastic, proficient readers both). The Tolstoy translation is stilted and boring, and full of inappropriate vocabulary (hoarfrost? caftan? threshing-floor?) It’s as though the selection were made to project this to the kids: ‘reading is excruciatingly dull and confusing; maybe you thought you could do it, but I’m here to tell you 8-year-olds are stupid and teachers (and test designers) are smart. You’re going to have to work like a dog and suffer a lot if you want to pass this test.’

“Honestly, I thought the practice tests that came home all year as homework were bad, but they were just meaty, unreadable trivial passages followed by absurd and confusing questions. This CC sample is worse: it’s perverse, overtly hostile to young children. A former 3rd grade teacher commented, ‘I just looked at the 3rd grade math assessment and they are asking the children to understand algebra.’ They are asking third graders to understand algebra because it is in the CCSS math standards for third grade.”

These standards and tests are not ready for prime time. They are being rushed through without regard for the possible damage.

STEPHEN KRASHEN is professor emeritus at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education. He recently wrote:

“The mediocre performance of American students on international tests seems to show that our schools are doing poorly. But students from middle-class homes who attend well-funded schools rank among the best in world on these tests, which means that teaching is not the problem. The problem is poverty. Our overall scores are unspectacular because so many American children live in poverty (23 percent, ranking us 34th out of 35 ‘economically advanced countries’).

“Poverty means inadequate nutrition and health care, and little access to books, all associated with lower school achievement. Addressing those needs will increase achievement and better the lives of millions of children.

“How can we pay for this? Reduce testing. The common core demands an astonishing increase in testing, far more than needed and far more than the already excessive amount required by No Child Left Behind.

….

“The cost will be enormous. New York City plans to spend over half a billion dollars on technology in schools, primarily so that students can take the electronically delivered national tests. Research shows that increasing testing does not increase achievement. A better investment is protecting children from the effects of poverty, in feeding the animal, not just weighing it.”

We are in a period in which states across the country are slashing education budgets but the CCSS which will cost billions up front for: text books; infrastructure such as high speed networks, new software and more computers; training; consultants; tests; and much more is being pushed through as if it were going to stop the end of civilization.

This push to spend money we don’t have on standards that are not fully developed and are based on questionable pedagogical theory is unreasonable. The only thing certain about the CCSS is that a lot of private businesses will make a lot of money. A likely outcome of CCSS is less money will reach the classroom and another likely outcome is that education in America will be harmed!

Tags: , ,

DFER and Education Policies

16 Jul

            In August 2008, many teachers in America and this one in particular were thrilled about Barack Obama’s nomination. Linda Darling-Hammond was a leading spokesperson articulating the Obama campaigns’ education positions. Darling-Hammond had pushed for professional education standards for teachers and had presented data showing the importance of teacher training. Yet, by November Alexander Russo of the Huffington Post was reporting “The possibility of Darling-Hammond being named Secretary has emerged as an especially worrisome possibility among a small but vocal group of younger, reform-minded advocates who supported Obama because he seemed reform-minded on education issues like charter schools, performance pay, and accountability. These reformists seem to perceive Darling-Hammond as a touchy-feely anti-accountability figure who will destroy any chances that Obama will follow through on any of these initiatives.” In December, Obama tapped Chicago’s Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Because Duncan had no real education experience it was considered highly likely that Darling-Hammond would be the Deputy Secretary of Education. On February 19, 2009 the New Republic reported, “Darling-Hammond was a key education adviser during the election and chaired Obama’s transition education policy team. She has been berated heavily by the education reform community, which views her as favoring the status quo in Democratic education policy for her criticisms of alternative teacher certification programs like Teach for America and her ties with teachers’ unions.” They reported that she was going home to California to work on other priorities and would not be a part of the new administration.

            So, what happened and who were those “small but vocal younger, reform minded advocates that supported Obama” but hated Darling-Hammond? In August 2008 a pre-convention Democrats for Education Reform seminar, billed as “Ed Challenge for Change” previewed a coming attack from within the Democratic Party on teachers and especially their unions. David Goldstein of the American Prospect reported:

            “It was sponsored by a coalition of foundations, nonprofits, and businesses supporting the charter-school movement, including Ed in ’08, the advocacy group founded by Bill Gates and real-estate mogul Eli Broad. The evening provided a truly unusual spectacle at a convention: A megawatt group of Democrats, including Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., and former Gov. Ray Romer of Colorado, bashed teachers’ unions for an hour. Amid the approving audience were Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, an icon of the civil-rights movement; Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia, (in)famous as a high-profile African American Hillary Clinton endorser; and Mayor David Cicilline of Providence, the reformer of that once-Mob-ridden New England city. Cicilline took avid notes.”

It was from this crowd that Darling-Hammond was receiving her harshest criticism and where the non-traditional (meaning no education background) leader of the Chicago school system, Arne Duncan, was championed as the next Secretary of Education. The loudest voices were those of a new organization calling themselves Democrats for Education reform (DFER), led by young extremely wealthy hedge fund operators from New York City.

            In the May 31, 2007 issue of New York Sun there was a report about one of the first victories of DFER:

            “A money manager recently sent an e-mail to some partners, congratulating them on an investment of $1 million that yielded an estimated $400 million. The reasoning was that $1 million spent on trying to lift a cap on the number of charter schools in New York State yielded a change in the law that will bring $400 million a year in funding to new charter schools. The money managers who were among the main investors in this law — three Harvard MBAs and a Wharton graduate named Whitney Tilson, Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, Charles Ledley, and John Petry — are moving education-oriented volunteerism beyond championing a single school.

“They want to shift the political debate by getting the Democratic Party to back innovations such as merit pay for teachers, a longer school day, and charter schools. …  The group — actually two separate political action committees — has raised money for senators Obama, Clinton, and Lieberman; Governor Spitzer; Rep. George Miller; state senators Malcolm Smith and Antoine Thompson; assemblymen Sam Hoyt, Hakeem Jeffries, and Jonathan Bing, and City Council Member Vito Lopez. They count the charter cap lift, signed by Mr. Spitzer in April, as their first major victory.”

The two political action committees the Sun mentioned are Education Reform Now, a 501c3, and Education Reform Now Advocacy, a 501c4. To lead these committees the hedge fund operators chose Joel Klein, the form chancellor of the New York City schools. It seems likely that Mr. Klein was influential in these young businessmen from elite schools developing the view of education reform they have adopted. Until April of this year, Klein has been the director of Education Reform now. In April he joined his former protégé, Michele Rhee at her advocacy group Students First which is also supported by DFER, the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation. When I looked on the DFER web site the first image that popped up was that of a favorite basketball player of mine and the current mayor of Sacramento, California, Kevin Johnson. He also happens to be Michelle Rhee’s husband.

On the DFER’s official web presence they take at least partial credit for the selection of Arne Duncan instead of Linda Darling-Hammond.

There is a glaring lack of experience or knowledge about education amongst the leaders of DFER. Michael Hirsch writing for the United Federation of Teachers explains, “What do these folks know about education? With the exception of Williams, who’s the hired help: nothing! Understand that DFER’s endgame has little to do with learning and everything to do with marginalizing public-sector unionized workers and bringing down the cost of taxes for social programs. It’s about creating new business and investment opportunities in areas that are still publicly run and serving as a pre-emptive strike against any hope for private-sector union renewal. Where better to start than with attacking teacher unions, one of the few labor strongholds in this country?” His point is a least in part validated by a cursory look at the present Board of Directors of DFER and the Board of Advisors:

Board of Directors

Kevin P. Chavous (chair) – Former Washington, DC, City Council member and chair of the Education Committee; Board Chair of Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO).

Boykin Curry – Eagle Capital; Co-Founder of Public Prep. Public Prep launched in 2008.

Tony Davis – Co-founder and President of Anchorage Capital Group, LLC; Board Trusteer for Achievement First Brooklyn charter schools. Achievement First has grown into a network that includes 20 academies under ten charters in four cities.

Charles Ledley – Highfields Capital Management; Board Member of the Tobin Project.

Sara Mead – Bellwether Education Partners, Associate Partner; Former Director of Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation.

John Petry – Columbus Hill Capital Management; Co-founder of Harlem Success Academy Charter School in NYC. Success Academy Charter Schools operate nine public charter schools in NYC.

Whitney Tilson –  Managing Partner, T2 Partners LLC and Tilson Mutual Funds; Board member of KIPP-NYC, and National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

DFER Board of Advisors:

Steve Barr – Founder and CEO, Green Dot Public Schools.

Cory Booker – Mayor of Newark, N.J.

David Einhorn – Founder of Greenlight Capital, LLC.

Joel Greenblatt – Founder and Managing Partner of Gotham Capital.

Vincent Mai – Chairman of AEA Investors, LP.

Michael Novogratz – President of Fortress Investment Group.

Tom Vander Ark – Partner, Revolution Learning.

            In February another self-appointed expert on education policy from Seattle, Washington, loudly bashed teachers and their unions. An editorialist for the Seattle Times, Lynne K. Varner reported that “Major Democratic funder Nick Hanauer’s recent email blasting Democratic lawmakers for failing to buck the teachers union and push for education reforms will go down as the tough-love message heard around the state. ‘It is impossible to escape the painful reality that we Democrats are now on the wrong side of every important education-reform issue,’ wrote Hanauer, a Seattle venture capitalist, to other party faithful. ‘Today, the (teachers union) is literally strangling our public schools to death with an almost infinite number of institutionalized rules that limit change, innovation and excellence.’” In that same editorial Varner said, “Reformers watched in dismay as Democratic leaders blocked key reforms including exchanging an outdated seniority-based layoff policy for one based on performance and overhauling the billion-dollar health-insurance program for school employees.”

                Diane Ravitch famously anointed these modern education reformers, “the billionaire boys club” and has valiantly fought off their benighted positions. They call for the end of seniority rights, lessoning of health benefits for teachers, the destruction of the teachers union, privatization of public schools, standards based education, national standards, high stakes testing, no excuses, non-traditional school leadership, imbuing mayors with untrammeled control over schools, trigger laws, lessoning the rigor of teacher certification, and value added measures to evaluate educators. Every one of these positions undermines the American public education system which is not failing and never has been failing. There has been a forty year campaign starting with the Reagan administrations falsely premised document “A Nation at Risk” to convince people that our public schools are terrible. Of course any institution can be improved but destroying the greatest education system the world has ever known is not an improvement. Across the United States, schools are staffed with well trained, experienced and dedicated employees and lead by competent administrators. For students who live in poverty zones that are often drug riddled and crime infested, the local school is often the only functional institution in the area. On standardized tests, poor students do not perform as well as students who live in wealthier and safer communities, but these schools still produce students who excel and win their way into some of the world’s most prestigious universities. John Dewey observed in 1916, “education will vary with the quality of life which prevails in a group.” Even as President Obama was cheering the closing of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, many success stories from that school were following the path out of the poorest neighborhood in the state of Rhode Island opened by their school. These schools are not failing; the communities they are in are failing and schools are being unfairly blamed for it.

                At the DFER web presence is a section called the Brian Bennett Education Warrior Award. Not surprisingly, the awards go to political activists who opened the path for charter schools or who helped close “failing schools” or did some other deed that promoted the DFER agenda in most cases against the will of the local community. When citing previous heroes of education reform, the very first name cited is Alan Bersin. The citation says, “Appointed in 1998 as Superintendent of Public Education of the San Diego Unified School District, Bersin led the eighth largest urban school district in the country. In 2005, Governor Schwarzenegger appointed him as California’s Education Secretary. Bersin led the way as one of the nation’s first ‘non-traditional’ big city school leaders, promoting ambitious reform to raise the quality of education and bolster student achievement. Bersin currently serves as the Commissioner of US Customs and Border Protection. Bersin was a founding board member of DFER.” By ‘non-traditional’ they meant he had no education experience or training. I worked one year under Bersin’s leadership. Amongst all teachers and most San Diegan’s the Bersin administration is considered a colossal failure. Today, San Diego Unified School District is bankrupt having just issued a 1000 certificated and a 1000 non-certificated layoff notices and still suffers from the loss of experienced teachers and administrators suffered during Bersin’s tenure.

                It was under Bersin that some of the first DFER style reforms were implemented. It is a fundamental tenet of DFER style reform that there are many failing schools and bad teachers especially in poor communities. DFER Executive Director Joe Williams (“the hired help who has some education experience”) reported about Bersin’s success in changing two “failing schools” into charter schools. He wrote about the valiant fight Bersin put on to defeat the anti-reform teachers union and misguided parents who stood in the road of real reform. In November 2006, Wilson stated, “The conversion of Gompers and Keiller  to charter schools in San Diego suggests that with the right combination of top-down and bottom-up pressure for reform, and with sufficient support for reform efforts from inside and outside of school districts, even the most troubled public schools are able to turn the corner toward educational success. The question is whether education policymakers will act on the lessons that schools like Gompers and Keiller teach us.”  Joe Williams claimed victory for the students and parents who lived in the service areas of Gompers and Keiller, but like most “reform” success it is a complete mirage, because the only thing wrong with the schools was they were in poverty stricken gang infested neighborhoods. The charter school replacements were not a magic bullet the repaired the neighborhood and are likely doing worse than their public school predecessors would have. For a comparison, I picked two public schools that are nearby and have similar populations, Granger middle school and Spring Valley middle school and used the vaunted but often misleading standards based testing data.

API (Academic  Performance Index-California)   AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress-Federal)

Gomper  charter              2011 API 657       2006 API 551       +102      Failed 2011 AYP

Keiler  charter                    2011 API 748       2006 API 687       + 61        Failed 2011 AYP

Spring Valley Middle       2011 API 786       2006 API 737       +49         Failed 2011 AYP

Granger Middle                2011 API 817       2006 API 693       +124      Achieved 2011 AYP

Data from California Department of Education.

                Like the supposed miraculous achievements of the Harlem Children’s Zone based on one class in one year or the dramatic improvement in the DC schools based on questionable testing practices, a closer inspection causes great doubt about actual success. The pattern is to claim victory for a reform and berate those who question the wisdom of the reform, but these claimed successes always turns out to be a mirage. The San Diego, New York and DC experiences are being repeated across the nation. Corporate entities are gaining more and more leverage over the education dollar and schools are not being improved! This week in San Diego, the San Diego Unified School district who recently announced the massive teacher layoffs because of budget shortfalls announced they were spending $15 million on i-pads.  The corporate lobbying influence is warping school leadership values to the point where how a corporation like the testing giant Pearson is affected becomes more important than the schools, students or teachers.

                During the 1990’s education reform in America turned in a positive hopeful direction. Throughout America young educators were being introduced to the thinking of Dewey, Piaget, Vygotsky, Gardner, and others. They read case histories of how social constructivism was being introduced in classrooms around the globe. The Soka education revolution in Japan based on the ideas of Makiguchi and the Reggio Emelia preschools of Italy led by Loris Malaguzzi presented young educators with decades of practical application of constructivist theories. In Japan, the concept of lesson study and in America the developments of action research were leading to a model of continuous improvement based on peer reviewed application. Darling-Hammond’s professional teaching standards were codified in California promising a path of growing professionalism for educators in all California public schools. The factory model of education was being replaced by a more humanistic model that engendered a love of learning and engaged children in developing understanding. Then NCLB happened and progress in education was stopped by a mandated return to Edgar Thorndike’s behaviorist model that Dewey had resisted so strongly. All positive education reform and improvement in pedagogy stopped and was replaced with privatization, disrespect of the teaching craft and hubris. Ravitch, Meyers and Darling-Hammond were deemed anti-reform and the thinking of Whitney Tilson, Eli Broad and Bill Gates became the guidance for good pedagogy. It is as if night were called day. Sadly, educators and union members can no longer count on the Democratic Party – the support of one hedge fund manager seems to be drowning out the voices of 100,000 educators.

Tags: , , ,

Hello world!

28 May

I am using this blog to oppose the privatization of public schools in America. I believe that American public schools are excellent and important institutions that are being maliciously maligned by foolish people, arrogant people and greedy people. Education reform should be about improving pedagogy not about increasing profits! The billionaires Gates and Broad have done vast harm to the education of children in America with their arrogant belief that they have insights into education that trump those of professionals who have spent their lives studying and practicing education.

Newer Entries →