Gary Rubinstein wrestles with the issue of language and rhetoric of reform.
Long ago, a reformer was someone who wanted to improve the public schools.
Now, a “reformer” advocates closing them and replacing them with privately managed schools.
Once upon a time, a reformer was someone who wanted to raise standards for new teachers.
Now, a “reformer” wants to hire teachers who have only five weeks of training.
The word “reform,” he suggests, has become hopelessly tainted among educators by those who now claim it.
The question today is what to call those who object to the punitive methods of the “reformers”?
They say we are “defenders of the status quo,” when in fact we are opponents of failed ideas.
Gary says we are people who care about evidence.
But what is the one- or two-word description that positively defines those who want to improve schools and teaching, not demolish them?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A true reformer in education is someone who humbly leads one student at a time to a better life than that student would have had without them, who willfully fades into the memory of a confident adult member of society. Only teachers can really be those type of reformers.
It exceeds your word limit but I like “public schools advocates”
And as for a catchy slogan to complete with “choice” and “charter,” which seem to take on magical qualities among the uninformed, this would actually fit on a bumper sticker: Good Schools For All Kids.
I agree with using the word “advocates.” Since charters are technically other kinds of public schools, using the words “public schools” might be confusing to some. We could just say simply and say, “education advocates,” which implies supporting and growing, as opposed to the destroying and replacing of “reform” today.
How about “School improvers”?
That had been my first thought as well.
How about:
Student Defenders
Evidence-Based Educators
Reality-Based Educators
Education Empiricists
Education Realists
How about the term ‘debunkers’, or possibly ‘reform debunkers’? Let’s keep on debunking those pernicious education zombie ideas that often get completely slaughtered when brought out into the light of proper argument but keep on coming back like the ‘undead’.
I did not seek the title, but in my work on behalf of what is right and good for education, my faculty and students see me as a champion of education. “Champion: One who fights,defends, or advocates a cause or another person; one who defies or challenges; a warrior.”
The New Hampshire Superintendents Association has a good catch phrase: “Champions for Children”. To that you could add a tag line “… Not for Shareholders”.
I LOVE this one!
That’s the name of a small day care chain where we live. But it’s still a good one.
Improvement Advocates?
Honestly, it is impossible to use the word “reform” without scare quotes nowadays. Look at “entitlement reform” which uses the word “reform” as a stand in for “cut the last shreds of the safety net”.
As a bonus this is sold as something to protect our children’s future. Please go running when “reformers” are speaking of doing it for the children.
Yeah, I wanted to gag when I first saw the words “entitlement reform.”
I don’t think I’ll ever stop putting quotes around “reform” and I was thrilled to read that it bothers the so-called “reformers” that we do that!
I think we need to steer clear from words co-opted by”reformers.” Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion” is the drill and kill military type approach, NCLB and RTTT are riddled with calls for “evidence-based.”
The “reformers” have employed too many non-educator PR people and wordsmiths who have co-opted so much of our language. Quite simply, are we not “Educators Reclaiming Education”?
Many of us are parents defending neighborhood schools and democracy. Educators are not in this alone; your language should be inclusive of the greater community that supports public schools for all.
Great point. Thanks!
This maybe somewhat off-topic, but it might be useful to consider the “reformer vs. relinquisher” distinction made by Neerav Kingsland: http://goo.gl/i8und. A “reformer” is someone who wants to improve the existing traditional public school system. A “relinquisher” is someone who wants to improve public education by relinquishing school management to charter schools.
I think the distinction is increasingly important. For example, as a “relinquisher”, I would like to close more underperforming schools and replace them with well-run charter schools. However, as a “relinquisher”, I have no opinion on hiring teachers with little experience. I’d leave that up to the well-run charter schools to decide. (It seems strange to me that we think it is the public’s role to figure out what types of teachers public schools should be hiring. I wrote a post on this last year: http://goo.gl/23cJB.)
Thanks, Ken, for the useful distinction.
Those of us who are supporters of public education are “reformers.”
Those who want to turn it over to private interests are “relinquishers.”
They want to relinquish the public responsibility for public education.
This is helpful.
Of course, it does not have to be either or.
Some of us think it’s possible to help improve existing public schools and to help educators/parents/community groups create new schools that could help some students do better.
If we were to take ownership of the word “reform,” wouldn’t we still need to distinguish ourselves from the people who are relinquishers and use the word “reformer” to describe themselves? Maybe we could use the hyphenated term “reform-relinquishers” for them and something like “reform-improvers” to describe ourselves.
On the other hand, while “relinquishing” schools is the end goal for such “reformers”, for me, the word “relinquish” is not strong enough, because it doesn’t describe the destructive process they instigate. They contribute to the demise of schools, especially in low income areas, by ignoring poverty and strangling schools with increased mandates, regulations and testing, and deny necessary resources, before ultimately relinquishing schools –all of which seems to be part of the privatization plan. “Relinquish” sounds too benign, given all that leads up to that final step.
Off the top of my sleepy head, Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody, Susan Onihan, Mark Naison and too many others to name are Champions of Education Empiricism, Folks like me are Education Empiricists. Taking and holding the high ground of fact based, research based policy positions is our cause, based on our core beliefs.
In the way of “The Customer Comes Second” (by Hal Rosenbluth & Diane McFerrin Peters) we defend teachers and advance the teaching profession so that teachers may remain in their rightful position of being champions for children.
Empiricism works for me, too, since it includes qualitative research, while the evidence-based research called for by politicians and “reformers” is quantitative data.
TeacherEd,
You are unfairly adversely characterizing qualitative research and, by definition, those who conduct it. The reformers are neither using quantitative or qualitative; they are perverting both forms of legitimate research by conducting shell games with data.
I support qualitiative research. Since when do the “reformers” see systematic observations and work samplings as legitimate measures of growth? They want hard data.
The so-called reformers have perverted data by subtracting test data from one cohort of students from the test data of another cohort to somehow derive a measure of school improvement or failure when there is no correlation between the performances of different cohorts. Dr. Stephen Adamowski used this method to completely destroy Hartford Public Schools during his tenure as superintendent. He used such data to drive his model of redesign, ignoring the basic statistical reality that, if there is no correlation between the performance of differing cohorts, there can be no statistical reliability, hence, doing so has no statistical validity.
That’s one of the reasons why I wish the powers that be valued qualitative data, including student portfolios.
Someone please tell me what to do when this “reformy” stuff is bought by the district one works in. It feels toxic! Stay or run for your life??
I also have a distaste for the word “champion” because the Whitehouse has a “Champions of Change: Educators” initiative with “DoE Classroom Fellows” and they include “teachers” from fast-track training programs and charters.
anti-privatizers?
education progressives?
I wonder if the word “improve” – which Diane uses in her post several times to describe the actual goal – is sexy enough to serve as a label. Being just one word, it stands against the catchy “reformer” with a nice balance: reformers vs improvers. It indicates that there are actually some aspects of the status quo worth defending on the way to making things better. Makes those reformers seem like wild eyed radical bulls in china shops.
It’s ironic that, for decades, America’s almost entirely private/corporate health system enjoyed the reputation of “best health care in the world” when on most measures it was mediocre. Meanwhile America’s public education system’s reputation is mediocre when on many measures it produces great results (not PISA tests obviously, and not saying it can’t be improved!) The private sector has the PR dollars to spend.
I have started joking with some Moms in NYC that we should drum up interest in founding an expensive Manhattan private school whose stated mission is to offer the style/methods/curriculum of NYC public schools pre-NCLB. We would call it “Old School” or maybe Old Skool.
kids not corporations?
pupils not profits?
unrelated, kind of but just sent to me by a friend who has been watching the West Wing series on Netflix. At a speech during his re-election campaign, the banner behind Bartlett says “Great schools for all kids.”
Hi Gary. Thank you for your contribution. You have given me a breathe of fresh air this morning. I read the Ravitch column where most of the time it makes me boiling mad (will explain later). I would certainly be labeled a reformer by most of the writers here, many of the times I end up calling the contributors nothing but a bunch of Cry Babies!
From Dick, the Bully!
My favorite is “good schools for all kids” (or “great schools for all kids”). The charters, the privates, etc., are never inclusive of *all* kids.
This whole idea that reform = privatization reminds me of the times when “family values” somehow became about hating people (a favorite bumper sticker of the time was “Hate is not a family value!”). Or that patriotism = xenophobia.
Tim, some of the most progressive, student centered charters were started by public school teachers frustrated with their inability to use project based approaches in traditional school systems.
As evolving under NCLB, education reform is directly endangering the lives of our children. Charter schools, vouchers for private schools, all add to the percentage of children traveling to schools away from their “inferior” community schools. With more travel every morning and evening, not only will hundreds of hours be lost every year in travel, but lives will be lost due to the increased time and distance traveled. Over 40 thousand people a year loose their lives in automobile accidents.
Educational reform from the 1950’s contributed to the same trend with the spread of middle schools. The very existence of middle schools increases the number of students who must travel at an earlier age away from their community school. Combined with the increased discipline problems in middle schools, and the decrease in student achievement, one must wonder why we continue to build middle schools. If data is the center for our management of schools, why do we continue to have middle schools? (See more data and recent research on the middle school damage issue at http://schoolarchiveproject.blogspot.com/2012/02/separate-middle-schools-vs-k-8.html .)
That’s what I’m wondering too. I read the James Kunstler blog. None of this makes any sense from the perspective of a world running out of gas. Walkable community schools are the rational future. Their is no federal law to provide transportation to school. Let people pay for their own transportation and competitive sports. Society’s responsiblility is to provide high quality neighborhood schools, that’s it, IMHO.
Peak Oil has some pretty scary implications for public education.
Reform has become a word associated with punishment, forced change, coercion. The reform school conjures up an image of prison for children. I prefer the word renewal. It suggest keeping what is right, and having that positive can do, win attitude, improving from there, rather than ferreting out what is wrong and who done it. I think more than anything, those governing education and misguided educators have been looking at what is wrong for far too long, and do not know how to improve from a positive stance, which is what renewal suggests, making new again and what our schools need to be nurtured. Renewal allows for change to occur in a natural, positive way, like spring following winter. Stop using the word reform and the thinking that goes with it, and start thinking about the renewal of our schools, and all the good we do and can continue to do.
The word “Reform” has been chosen as part of a very sophisticated p.r. disinformation campaign to disguise the real nature of the corporate takeover.
Yes. Google the term FUD.
Right, and the dominant techniques of the”reform” movement come from the business practices of corporate “reformers, as alluded to by Diane. They are used to direct public attention and drive policies towards their”reform” agenda, and also to divert attention away from the real problem, which is poverty, including the following strategies:
FUD: Instilling fear, uncertainty and doubt by disseminating negative, often false information (the “failing schools” and “bad teachers” narratives, claiming that teachers are more important than class size and more influential than SES, etc.), in order to influence perceptions and promote overt agendas, like high-stakes testing, as well as covert agendas, such as privatization
The Straw Dog: Setting up something so it can be seen as mediocre and then knocked down (traditional neighborhood schools, formally trained, experienced teachers,etc.), so that people will then accept the hidden agendas (charters, school “choice,” vouchers, novice teachers with limited training, etc.)
Shock Doctrine: Pushing through free market policies (privatizing public education) while people attend to an existing or a fabricated disaster (the supposed decline of public education, unionized teachers, etc.)
Stack Ranking: Also known as “Rank and Yank,” the process of evaluating employees based on the assumption that 10% are ineffective and should be fired (used by Gates at Microsoft and promoted in education by Hanushek and other “reform” economists)
The word “reform” has been used in education for a long, long time.
While I disagree with some things that Diane has written, her books do point out that for as long as people have been talking about schools in America that are supported by taxes, there has been talk about reform.
A quick example – Catholics were frustrated with many of the schools that Horace Mann helped set up in Massachusetts because they used the Protestant version of the Bible. Battles over this helped produce the Catholic school system when there was not a willingness to be more inclusive in the “public” schools.
A second example, there was an effort to make schools more responsive to students’ interests and to help students see connection between school and life. This was known to some as Progressivism – an approach that many but certainly not all should be available to all families.
I like the term “progressive reform” – It’s Deweyesque. Since NCLB we’ve been stuck with regressive reform. Progressive reformers focus on values not value-added.
This is from Dewey on Democracy and education. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm#link2HCH0018
We cannot establish a hierarchy of values among studies. It is futile to attempt to arrange them in an order, beginning with one having least worth and going on to that of maximum value. In so far as any study has a unique or irreplaceable function in experience, in so far as it marks a characteristic enrichment of life, its worth is intrinsic or incomparable. Since education is not a means to living, but is identical with the operation of living a life which is fruitful and inherently significant, the only ultimate value which can be set up is just the process of living itself. And this is not an end to which studies and activities are subordinate means; it is the whole of which they are ingredients. And what has been said about appreciation means that every study in one of its aspects ought to have just such ultimate significance. It is true of arithmetic as it is of poetry that in some place and at some time it ought to be a good to be appreciated on its own account—just as an enjoyable experience, in short. If it is not, then when the time and place come for it to be used as a means or instrumentality, it will be in just that much handicapped. Never having been realized or appreciated for itself, one will miss something of its capacity as a resource for other ends.
It equally follows that when we compare studies as to their values, that is, treat them as means to something beyond themselves, that which controls their proper valuation is found in the specific situation in which they are to be used. The way to enable a student to apprehend the instrumental value of arithmetic is not to lecture him upon the benefit it will be to him in some remote and uncertain future, but to let him discover that success in something he is interested in doing depends upon ability to use number.
It also follows that the attempt to distribute distinct sorts of value among different studies is a misguided one, in spite of the amount of time recently devoted to the undertaking. Science for example may have any kind of value, depending upon the situation into which it enters as a means. To some the value of science may be military; it may be an instrument in strengthening means of offense or defense; it may be technological, a tool for engineering; or it may be commercial—an aid in the successful conduct of business; under other conditions, its worth may be philanthropic—the service it renders in relieving human suffering; or again it may be quite conventional—of value in establishing one’s social status as an “educated” person. As matter of fact, science serves all these purposes, and it would be an arbitrary task to try to fix upon one of them as its “real” end. All that we can be sure of educationally is that science should be taught so as to be an end in itself in the lives of students—something worth while on account of its own unique intrinsic contribution to the experience of life. Primarily it must have “appreciation value.” If we take something which seems to be at the opposite pole, like poetry, the same sort of statement applies. It may be that, at the present time, its chief value is the contribution it makes to the enjoyment of leisure. But that may represent a degenerate condition rather than anything necessary. Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things. It has had an enormous patriotic value. Homer to the Greeks was a Bible, a textbook of morals, a history, and a national inspiration. In any case, it may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it—or else the poetry is artificial poetry.
Excellent and proven curriculums exist. One of them is the famed “Singapore Math” (actually an adaptation of “Soviet Math”, but don’t tell anyone), another is Inga Dubay’s Italic handwriting method. A third is the Kodaly/ and Koday-inspired “Color Strings” music methods. There is (or was) also an Oxford history of the United States for children that was supposedly top notch.
Big media doesn’t want to use these methods because it wants to retain and expand its monopoly through the use of copyrights and yearly changes in text that force States to buy new materials every year at vastly inflated prices. Not to mention fill in the bubble tests beginning in nursery school! They are like a parallel and parasitic education department. Or like Big Pharma and Big health insurance, which exist to extract rents from tax payer funded institutions.
What is the point of throwing this up in Diane’s face? She has admitted that she was wrong. Her past positions are irrelevant. What matters is that she’s grown and has greater insights today from having viewed the issues from multiple perspective, It’s called critical thinking, and the wisdom of elders. Back off, Bub.
I struggled with this term when I was active in the environmental club in high school, but here goes; ‘conservative’.