Anyone who attended public schools knows there was plenty that was wrong with them.
I grew up in Texas and attended segregated schools. That was wrong then, and it is wrong now, even though it is no longer mandated by law.
I had some great teachers and some awful teachers.
Over the years, in my studies of American education, I have documented the rise and fall of reform movements. Some were more successful than others, but one thing is certain: Public schools must constantly get better, and they should today.
In this article, Marion Brady explains what he thinks was better about the era before today’s test-driven, data-driven, privatization-friendly reforms. He thinks the drive for standardization is a big mistake.
What do you think?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s INSANE to think that a culture that is MORE diverse and more specialized, one that needs more variety in proclivities and abilities, will be better served by MORE standardization. Doesn’t make the slightest sense.
It was pretty easy to make a list of what everyone needs to know and care about back when we all needed to be able to plow and build a barn. Now we need yoga instructors and graphic designers and computer programmers and, yes, farmers. It’s valuable to have some shared learning, but it’s also absolutely necessary that schooling enable kids to find their genius, what they care about enough and are inclined toward enough to succeed at it. Kids do not come to us in standardized forms, and we shouldn’t try to give them standardized form. We need to do PRECISELY the opposite of this, for their sakes and for the sake of the country.
These privatizers keep pointing to Finland and other countries that don’t have the diversity this country has, plus they are way smaller.
You can’t have national standards in a country this large and this diverse. State and local control is paramount.
While she makes a few good points, she ultimately concedes that schools weren’t all that great in the past and therein lies the conundrum. We do need education reform. The problem isn’t whether we need reform. The problem is that we need the right reforms. We can’t reform our educational system by spending less money on it and increasing class sizes to the point where even the best teachers can’t manage a class room, let alone provide quality education. We can reform our educational system by holding the highest levels of education leaders, i.e., State and local superintendents, state and federal education department heads, and most of all state legislatures and Congress who continue to fail to: a) provide sufficient funding; and b) insist on holding the real decision makers (including themselves) accountable.
Marion Brady is male.
Here’s the thing…back in “the day” teachers made their own decisions. If they wanted kids sitting in rows and listening and taking notes that’s what they did and they did not have to defend the decision. If they wanted Johnny sitting next to Billy because they worked well together it did not have to be confirmed with data that they were both deficient or proficient in similar skills. If they wanted to have a 30 minute lecture one day and a full day of hands on exploration the next they were not give a ‘U’ for the “mini lesson” being to long or there not being a “share”. Teaching was based on innate skills as well as honed skills that were developed over many years. Yes there were “bad” teachers, we all had them. Today teachers must defend every move thy make with endless data. As a result very little actual learning is taking place
Thank you, HistoryTuenes. It all comes down to lack of freedom/professional respect.
Back in!”the day”, teaching K-12 was one of the very few occupations open to women. Might that have had an impact on education?
Thanks for posting another excellent article, Dr, Ravitch. The following excerpt really hit home with me …
“…an increasing number of American kids, tired of the guessing game, no longer take tests seriously.”
This is so true of the students I teach. Regardless of their ability levels, students are sick and tired of being tested. They feel powerless but, nonetheless, are exercising what power they do have. Adults cannot control how carefully students answer each test item. That, of course, would be cheating and is, in the end, impossible anyway. Students that have the ability to read far above grade level, are purposely choosing wrong answers on the MAP test to “get it over with”.
How will the “expert number crunchers” account for this? The whole testing mania is just a very expensive circle of insanity.
‘Students that have the ability to read far above grade level, are purposely choosing wrong answers on the MAP test to “get it over with”.’
Yes! The darn test keeps giving you more questions the more you answer correctly! “Miss, when is this test going to be over!”
I’m not suggesting, mind you, that we should have career-focused, vocational education. Far from it. We should expose kids to lots of possibilities but also enable them to run with those that they are inclined toward, with the focus on development of broadly applicable skills and knowledge in those areas and in related areas. There’s a long list of skills that go into making a good graphic designer or a good programmer. And these are not narrowly vocational. One can have a very broad education with roots in many subjects, one that creates cultural ties across disciplines, while at the same time having that education be different for different students, depending on who those students are and what they want. I’m sorry, but it’s just not the case that we all need to understand algebra or masters of rhetoric. In fact, most adults do not/are not. However, the student who has discovered graphic design and is running with it should have the opportunity to learn some applicable mathematics. There’s a LOT of applicable mathematics. We need a complete redesign to provide many alternative tracks for kids.
Standardization kills innovation and creativity. It makes for an educational system that is not an organism, that does not grow and does not respond to the needs of individuals or to the changing needs of the culture at large.
Brady’s logic and reasoning are weak, but his message is on target.
Teachers are saying they have lost control of their classrooms to politicians. That is understandable if a community sees its schools delivering a less than satisfactory education. However, if you read the comments on Brady’s article, you will see readily that there are several different points of view and none of the holders can see or understand another’s point of view. It’s as if a dozen blind people are describing an elephant by touch. All speak the truth but a coherent understanding is lacking which prevents any effective resolutions to perceived problems.
We must go deeper and understand (and be able to defend) all views before we attemp improvements.
Standardization is, of course, for the masses, not for the elite. It’s predicated on the notion that one needs a servile sameness in the working classes because they are pretty much interchangeable. They are replacement parts and need to be identically machined.
When I was a kid, the people in charge of my school threatened me with reform school.
Now, the people in charge of my school threaten me with school reform.
Quote of the day.
Wow! What a classic. Just wish it was 140 characters for Twitter.
It is not a matter of canon or standards — it is possible to have canons of culture that include the full wealth of cultural diversity. And all of us once-and-future true data hounds know that the current use of “data-driven” as a pejorative is due to a lot of phonies, pretenders, double-think-tankers giving the art of measurement a bad name.
As a lifelong student, I have personally survived more curriculum reform movements than I can count, beginning with the New Math of the Sixties and extending through a welter of acronyms in college. In my experience, most of those were quite beneficial, arising as they did from serious reflections on pedagogy and subject matter by professionals who cared about the health of their disciplines. And when I came North for college, my cohorts from all over the country knew the same history and humanities and had more or less the same sense of what education and inquiry were all about as I had learned in the South.
The difference that makes a difference is the locus of control — back then the control of the curriculum and its inevitable evolution was in the hands of the educators themselves, while today the push is to turn them all into guildless serfs of the corporations.
Good point about “the hands of educators”. I think the common core is a good idea, if it were the democratic product of the collective intelligence and tribal knowledge of America’s educators.
Looking at Garfield High and the MAP test, I would say that now is the time to challenge the wisdom of the common core. Before billions are spent on training and stuff, educators need to at least assert a collective opinion now.
That is to say, control was in the hands of the local citizens. Today, the vast number of requirements and regulations concerning education emminate from government, not corporations. Government, as you all know, is a monopoly. The bigger the government, the more powerful (e.g. No child left behind, race to the top).
Put control of education back in the hands of the local communities and then see what happens.
Yes & No. The difference then was that the local citizens trusted the local teachers to know their stuff and, aside from the occasional book-banning, left the teachers free to teach. And the Federal DOE supplemented the local funding and watched over equal rights but still depended by and large on the academic and educational community to set the content and process.
The difference today is that Corporate Owned Government — the portion of government that represents corporate interests above the interests of the people — has grown to such a size that the democratic process is being supplanted by the ALEC model.
“Today, the vast number of requirements and regulations concerning education emminate from government, not corporations.”
Don’t be fooled. The laws are enacted by corporate sponsored politicians, a la the ALEC, which provides state legislators with model laws that serve the best interests of corporations. And now that corporations are considered “people”, corporations can more readily buy elections.
But it doesn’t have to be an elected official. Arne Duncan is an example. To the benefit of his corporate sponsors, Duncan has done a lot of end-runs around Congress, such as by giving waivers for NCLB and offering money to cash-strapped states and districts that will comply with his RTTT agenda to lift caps on charter schools, evaluate teachers based on student test scores, and adopt illegal national standards with the intentional misnomer of the Common Core “State” Standards. He also changed the FERPA regulations so that corporations can get their hands on personally identifiable student data –again, bypassing Congress and to the benefit of corporate sponsors with data warehouses.
No one benefits more than the corporations that promote such moves, such as Pearson and Gates. If they’d had to past muster by locally elected schools boards, they probably would not have become policy in so many districts across the country.
I have a difficult time believing local school boards are manipulated by corporations or even that federal government regulations are fully manipulated. Those regulations have been emanating from Washington for years — long before Citizens united and long before charters became the vogue. From my view, what we are seeing is a federal bureaucracy on steroids after Citizens and with statist politicians (GWB and BHO among them).
When
(a) 60+% of parents are actively involved in PTA’s and their kids schools and
(b) “regulations” from the states and federal government shrink
the schools will improve – no additional funding needed. Teachers will revert their focus from behavior issues and politically correct testing to teaching.
Wouldn’t that be great?
America should focus on (a). In all low achieving schools I have seen, that is what is missing.
If you had to sell textbooks, would it be better to convince one person and sell the book for every student in the LA Unified school district or have to sell it to every school individually?
It is now quite bvious that you are either totally clueless or deliberately disingenuous about the current scene in education.
Right. I’m clueless.
TESTS come from parents across the lands wanting many standardized tests for the kids and want teachers to teach to the tests and be graded based on the kids’ scores.
Charter Schools were demanded by and funded by local parents.
+Jon Awbrey – you are joking, right?
Taking two standardized tests a year for grades 1thru 8 doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. Much more will just produce test burnout. Kindergarten is just plain evil. High school they have the state basic skills tests which should be enough.
TC, in my kids’ school, my kids’ tests consist of 2 mornings of reading and 2 days of math testing; additionally, 5th-graders also spend a morning doing science testing. For the 2 weeks of schoolwide testing, grades 3-5 have completely reworked schedules, as all music, art, and PE teachers are pulled into classrooms to proctor the tests and/or to administer modified tests to kids with disabilities. There is no music, art, PE, computer lab, media/library for those two weeks in the mornings for ANY kids of ANY grade in that school, and hallways are dead silent for 2-1/2 hours a day for TWO WEEKS; even the 3YO Head Start kids don’t get to go past the upper classrooms for recess for TWO WEEKS.
But wait, there’s MORE!
Because school test scores are now tied to funding, and especially because our school is in a low-income neighborhood, kids are being taught to “game” the system by learning how to “find the best answer of 4” and fill in bubbles to spec, and how to write formulaic responses in which grammar and spelling are secondary – meeting the rubric is primary, so students are taught how to make their 3-5 sentences “count.” They aren’t being taught good writing, they aren’t being taught how to THINK – just how to score better.
This test prep take up the majority of the school year here. Our first practice test was before Thanksgiving, and kids have been put to work improving their specific test-taking skills to remedy their weaknesses as seen by the test scores (not by their teachers); the SECOND practice test was about 2 weeks ago, and from now until the real test in MARCH, about 30%-plus of the instructional day (my estimate) is going to be devoted to MORE test-taking skills: “Find the main idea!” “Find the best answer!” “Cite [x] examples from the given contrived text!”
You wanna know why 2 standardized tests a year is a problem? Come to my school and see it in practice. All those WEEKS – WEEKS!!!! – spent testing and practice-testing could better be spent LEARNING!
If that doesn’t outrage you, I’d be very surprised.
PARDON MY PARAPHRASING BUT OUR EXPERIENCES PARALLEL:
In that earlier era, I taught in THREE high schools. They differed — SUBURBAN, urban, rich, poor, big, small — but on certain measures, they were alike.
In all … my professional judgment was respected. I was free to capitalize on what educators call “teachable moments,” free to make use of local issues, free to appropriately pace instruction, free to experiment with alternative approaches, free to adapt to a class’s distinctive “personality.” And probably most importantly, I was free from mandates directing me to try to standardize kids. That meant I could deal differently with them, could, for example, know who was most likely to be reading scholarly articles 10, 20, 30 years down the road and steer them appropriately.
Second, all the schools offered more elective classes than are now available. Freedom to adapt their schedules to their interests and abilities put fewer kids in classes in which they held back those future readers of scholarly articles. THESE INCLUDED EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING AND SENIOR PROJECTS THAT ALLOWED STUDENTS OF ALL TYPES TO STEP OUT OF THE SCHOOL TO LEARN VALUABLE INSIGHTS ABOUT A SUBJECT THEY HAD A PASSION FOR.
Third, no test-based, stress-creating fog of fear permeated the four schools THE SAME WAY. IN THE RICH SCHOOL AN INCREDIBLE OBSESSION WITH AP TESTS PERMEATED POLICY…BUT WE PREVAILED. AP COURSES WERE ENDED. The usual, sometimes-stupid policies that came down from state departments of education (often stemming from some powerful state legislator’s whim), could be ignored AND SPOKEN OUT AGAINST.without threatening loss of professional reputation or job.
Thanks for this post, Diane. Marion Brady is spot on.
There is an old Chinese saying that Dr. Yong Zhao explained to me when I interviewed him and asked his opinion about the educational reforms ala Federal policies. This is what he said, “…drinking poison to quench thirst.”
I agree with Dr. Zhao. We are indeed drinking poison to quench the thirst to feed a for profit, corporate driven school agenda…not a good idea.
And yes indeed, the students think the tests are a joke and at the same time the students are also being harmed by current educational policies. The DEFORMS started with Reagan and has gotten worse with each POTUS.
Ask, “At whose behest?”
Loved reading the comments.
Yvonne Siu-Runyan: I read this blog hoping to find big ideas expressed in succinct fashion. “Drinking poison to quench thirst.”
Props to Dr. Yong Zhao and to you for bringing this to our attention.
I continue to be a fan of streamlined standardized tests–tests that measure some skills and help us to engage in common conversation about some specific skills. I think we have to see these tests as what they are–a part of the whole.
There is much more to education than a standardized test, but sometimes a standardized test can point out a child in need, and sometimes, if the test is used well, that helps that child get the services he/she needs. I’ve seen this happen since the advent of standardized tests with regard to essential skill development in reading and math.
On the other hand, our happiest and most successful Americans didn’t necessarily take or do well on standardized tests. Happiness and success depends on essential skills (which good standardized tests can asses) and many, many more factors–hence education has to be holistic and much broader than a test.
Today I went to the funeral of a wonderful man and educator. As I was entering the church a friend of mine was coming to pay respects as well. We stopped in passing,
hugged and remarked on how special this man, Mr. William Mosca, was to us and thousands of others. The man I was speaking with is a local doctor and his remark was that Mr. Mosca was like a surrogate father to him. I am seventy years old and Mr. Mosca was my eighth grade teacher. He was then a first year teacher and full of enthusiasm to meet each student with his belief that we could all achieve. He never changed and as a principal he mentored his teachers in the same way.
I was a struggling undiagnosed learning disabled learner. He knew, but took the time
to find my strengths. I did struggle through school and eventually went on to achieve as a college graduate and became a strong outspoken advocate for the disabled. What I learned about myself was encouraged in those early learning years through a teacher who looked at the whole person and not the failing math scores that screamed failure in
todays education light. To him I was a value added person, not a commodity or a
lost learner to be pushed through and potentially dropped out. He believed, and better
yet, made me believe that my potential was just waiting to be awakened.
I work in an urban school district and have been fortunate to see how the school families of each of the eleven schools I get to interact with each day try with sincere concern that their students learn and try to meet their needs. Many come with problems that require more then classroom instruction. Our schools are like clinics and teachers try to
give children a love of learning while helping to keep them alive with hope for survival.
We have open enrollment and children with some challenging learning style needs have to be met, from gifted to very low functioning, from socially disenfranchised, immigrant, disabled, poor to wealthy, all converging into a system that must attempt to meet their challenges and needs. More importantly laying a foundation for them to thrive
and survive. It is a calling that must be met by those who are trained and care and who,
like Mr. Mosca, want a better life for each munchkin that becomes their child. Public school is a wonderful place to meet the world as it really exists and be strengthed by
that wholistic experience.
By the way, from that Public School experience my classmates became lawyers and doctors, teachers, university professors, businessmen and scientists, military officers
and others who perished in war, inventors, artists of all sort, and on and on and on.
Thank you Mr. Mosca!
Amen to all teachers like Mr. Mosca. I had one of those myself.
Thanks, +Ronee Groff
As others have pointed out, computer programmers have an appropriate acronym for irrelevant data: “GIGO”—“Garbage In, Garbage Out.” If data fed into a computer is nonsense, the data coming out will be nonsense.
The non-educators now in charge of education have the teaching profession awash in GIGO.
BINGO!
Bad Input No Good Output ❢