Our education leaders are in love with ideas that are proven not to work and they ignore evidence that their preferred strategies don’t work.
After a decade of No Child Left Behind, Congress won’t admit that it failed. There are still many millions of children left behind–not “no child”–yet Congress can’t bring itself to ditch its failed program.
Every day brings new evidence that the policies of Race to the Top are hardly different from those of NCLB. They rely on the same strategies of testing, punishment, and choice, with an added dollop of privatization. Why is a Democratic administration so devoted to a Republican policy agenda? Why is a Democratic administration even more devoted to privatization than NCLB?
If we ever come to our senses, there is a better way. Our policymakers decided to treat schools as totally separate from society, to ignore the social and economic conditions that affect student performance. This is wrong. Here is a nice summary of policies that have worked wherever they were tried, but are ignored by our leaders. The formula is simple: Improve the lives of children, and their academic performance will improve.
When will they wake up? When will Arne Duncan and President Obama and the governors and legislators and state chiefs and mayors wake up? When will Stand for Children start standing for children? When will StudentsFirst actually put students first, not teachers last? When will the education reformers realize that schools and society are intertwined?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Paid parental leave and expanded early childhood education — the ideas cited in the linked article — are excellent ideas.
Narrowing the focus to school systems themselves, common sense suggests alternatives to the NCLB/high-stakes-testing/charters school reforms. Students in many/most US schools are doing reasonably well; the problem that has driven the school reform movement is the perception — probably accurate — that many/most low-SES/inner-city schools are failing adequately to educate the students. Indeed, in the low-SES/inner-city schools, parents, when given a choice by charters or vouchers, often “vote with their feet” against the neighborhood public schools.
If you ask veteran inner-city teachers to identify the major in-school problems, they’ll usually cite minor-but-endemic misbehavior that constantly disrupts instruction/consumes teaching time and students reading far below grade level that makes academic instruction extremely difficult. You see these same concerns identified in teachers’ comments on ed blogs and in first-person “I-taught-in-the-inner-city” books.
Clearly, societal reforms to reduce poverty and the impact of poverty on children would indirectly address the misbehavior and reading problems. However, there’s a lot that the inner-city schools themselves could do to address these problems within the instructional program. Unfortunately, the school reform debate largely — almost totally — ignores these issues.
We should poll our veteran inner-city teachers/principals for school-based ideas for dealing with the behavior and reading problems. Then we should test the ideas in pilot programs and implement the most successful ideas system-wide.
Ideas suggested to me by veteran teachers regarding the behavior problem: add a second adult (aide, not teacher) to the classroom to address behavior issues; expand classroom management instruction in teacher training and professional development programs; train teachers to consistently use the TV Supernanny technique in dealing with minor misconduct (announce/post/repeat rules, 1 warning, time-out-like discipline, minimize teacher/student interaction re the misconduct, criticize the behavior not the student); require principals to support not reprimand teachers for referring insubordinate students to “the office”; create a strong presumption that the teacher is right regarding credibility disputes and discipline decisions — that is, discourage students/parents from challenging teachers on discipline; train administrators and teachers regarding what the law allows/requires regarding discipline with the focus on what the administrator/teacher can do rather than what they cannot do; establish a behavior asst principal to handle the administrative burdens of discipline — to take the burden off the teacher and thereby make it easier for the teacher to impose discipline; and establish/staff an in-school-suspension room.
Ideas regarding the reading problem (this is more a specialized-expertise area than behavior): Track students by reading level and, for those below grade level, devote increased time to reading until at grade level; create after-school/Saturday/summer programs for students below grade level; to combat the lack-of-context problem, show movies after school/Saturdays/summer to get the culturally-deprived students up-to-speed.
If we don’t have realistic alternative reforms for the inner-city schools, the corporate reformers will certainly prevail.
the corporate reformers’ solutions solve nothing.
it they skim the best students and exclude or kick out the problem kids, they get higher test scores.
but how does it improve our society to create a dual school system?
if they enroll the same kids, they get the same results.
What I always say is “When things seem to break down and defy logic, always follow the money…and in this case the votes.” For politicians money and votes rule the day, not reality and reason. I can give a great example that believe it or not I can tie back into education.
Recently Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin announced his drought relief plan for dairy farmers here in America’s Dairyland. His professed concern is that he doesn’t want the state’s dairy herd to be decimated by the drought. So, he has done some mostly symbolic things like offer govt backed low interest loans for farmers to buy feed, given executive orders to expedite the permit process for tranporting oversized loads of hay, executive order to expediate permitting process for emergency irrigation systems (notice he didn’t just order the police not to pull loads of hay over, or state officials to lay off enforcing water irrigation regulations), created a state farmer-to-farmer internet networking site for farmers to find food throughout the state, and he is encouraging farmers in non drought stricken parts of the state to plant a late forage crop of non-traditional foodstuffs like potatoes and other vegetables to feed the herd in drought areas of the state.
Well this all may seem like nice things to help the farmers out. However, back in the 80’s I remember farmers struggling to succeed because they were so far in debt and couldn’t make enough money to keep the farm going because milk prices were so low. Govt tried to intervene by buying the herds of farmers who had to agree not to get back in to farming for 5 years (i think) in an attempt to drive milk prices up. Then came the drought of 1988 which was worse and longer in duration than this current drought here in WI. I remember my grandfather (I grew up on a dairy farm by the way, but ended the family tradiion and became a teacher instead) would put my dad’s mind at ease by telling him “We need a good drought every once in a while. It gives us a chance to cull the herd.” This of course means downsize/streamline the herd by getting rid of your low porducers, older cows, ones prone to certain illness or complications with reproduction and giving birth, the list goes on. In the long run you end up with a stronger, greater profit yielding herd and you cut costs. This is what good farmers do.
In any case this is not what Scott Walker is doing, not in farming anyway. He claims that these things are what the farmers are telling him they need. Well this is the same guy who spoke to Harvard University on education and his reforms recently and told the audience that everywhere he goes in Wisconsin that the early elementary teachers keep telling him over and over that they just don’t have enough good data to help kids learn to read better. This of course is why he bought the PALS test for $740,000 to beat all the kindergarten kids over the head with 3 times this coming year. So, do the farmers really want a potato crop? Don’t know, but I doubt it.
So, here is my point, culling the heard is a tried and true and effective strategy when it comes to farming and dealing with adverse times, but he’s doing everything possible to try to prevent that from happening. Keep in mind of course that the net gain in the production, profit, and herd quality would improve in the long term because of this. However, he won’t do it even though the experts (farmers) know it works. Besides, isn’t that also how the freemarket works free from govt intervention? In schools however, he has no problem culling the herd of teachers and students through his reforms, accountability, data driven decision making, VAM, and of course love for charters which base their entire success story on the herd culling strategy. This story should sound absurd and preposterous as it is, but sadly true. It is here that I again say “when things seem to break down and defy logic, always follow the money…and in this case the votes.” This is just one former farmer/current teacher’s opinion.
Don’t count me as a part of the “we.” I am not Citibank or Goldman Sachs that offshore my money for me. I’m not Bobby Jindal taking taxpayer funds to teach creationism w/o science as a comparative. I’m not Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, a Walton, or a Rhee, or a Broad who listens to no one. I am not a member of the U.S. House of Representatives or Mitch McConnel who’s sole purpose in life is to do nothing to help Americans. I am not the owner or CEO of main stream media that feeds lies into the homes of millions like CNN did recently featuring Michelle Rhee’s view of the educational universe w/o opposition or counterpoint. Fair and Balanced?
Teachers, parents, and people—Ha, people, Americans, voters—only 25% of them know that “something” is happening about private and corporate money buying elections—when these people get a clue that the extractionist, corporate, privatization, offshoring of America’s wealth is not going to listen, admit anything, or care about when and care about why, then maybe we might grow our numbers and work together to fight back and retake our public schools, our country.