David Leonhardt of the Néw York Times interviews Arne Duncan, Mitch Daniels, and John Engler on the state of the “reform” movement.
How fitting that Duncan would be paired with two of the very conservative Republican ex-governors, and the three sound alike.
What is interesting to me is that I hear a subtle shift in tone. They are admitting that scores are up and graduation rates are up, but that whatever progress we have made is not good enough. Do I detect a new line of rhetoric? Did someone summarize the first few chapters of “Reign of Error” for them?
Did they skip the chapter about international comparisons?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Today at the university I carried a copy of Reign of Error with me. The prominent title on the jacket caught many eyes and was an opener of many conversations. I am now going to do this daily so I can quote not only the first few chapters, which perhaps Duncan has read, but the entirety. If I had a book bag with more copies, could have sold many today.
Let’s hope Arne shifts attitudes…but I will not hold my breath.
Blume today, however, seems to be getting sarcastic about the IPads, $1 billion worth, and he does report that no one seems to have thought ahead on any of it, and no one knows what to do about loss or theft…Broad seems to have done a bum job in his training of Deasy and Aquino.
Duncan knows how to read????
So scores are up, and graduation rates are up – and this is progress, right? But I thought some people here felt that tests were not a good measure of student achievement. So should we be happy scores are up?
(I think tests are one, but certainly not the only important measure. So I am glad that scores are up.)
Also glad hs grad rates are up. Might this be in part because millions more youngsters are enrolled in various forms of public school choice programs, designed to help them succeed? Might this be because some school districts like NY, Boston, St. Paul, Cincinnati and LA have allowed teachers to create new options within the district? Might this be in part because some charters work with kids with whom traditional schools are not succeeding?
Might this be in part because a relatively few really ineffective district & charter public schools were closed?
As has been noted, poverty rates are up too (this is horrible and a really bad commentary on America, which is an incredibly rich country. I do mean that).
So…if test scores are up, grad rates are up, and poverty rates are up…is it possible that some of the changes over the last decade, like encouraging students to do better on tests, providing more public school choices (including within district and charters) might have had something to do with this progress….not the only factors, but some?
Not having a single payer national healthcare system that is proprely managed and that has an array of guarantees as well as preventive measure requirements is part and parcel of the poverty scene.
There is also a new class of people who have to sell off their assets to pay down medical debt and/or qualify for aid that will pay for furtner medical services.
This is an abject failure in the United States. In Germany, schools compete for public funding based on outcomes and excellence, but there is a national social safety net of healthcare and incredibly strict housing laws that protect renters’s interests, beginning with the cost of housing.
The United States is in the process of some severe growing pains, and we are still a young, immature and experimental democracy.
I wish the public good of healthcare were to accomodate this “reform” movement in education. The affordable healthcare act is NOT at all an example or even shade of what Western and Northern Europeans have realized.
We don’t need change in the United States.
We need a revolution . . . . Hopefully the peaceful kind.
I suppose what you state is possible. Of course, education has undergone so many changes that it would be unlikely to attribute these results to any set of ideas or changes.
For instance, some charters do work with kids who did not thrive in the public system. Where I live in Michigan, that would be about 1% of the charters so I think that’s a non-starter. Very few charters do this specifically but rather have lotteries to attract the most functional families in the lowest-income neighborhoods. (Trust me, I’ve seen plenty of kids who come from charters mid-year and I have yet to see one who was anywhere near grade-level in any skill.) Whereas, my district has an “alternative school” where these types of students have smaller class sizes and a more practical curriculum. We also work with a vocational training center. So here, those options are available without a need for charters. (Which are still a very small percentage of schools and only recently became “uncapped” in numerous states.)
Of course, if you can find a study that links school choice to these results, I’ll believe it. But until then, you’re merely guessing like anyone else. My own impression is that smaller measures that are more widespread are a greater reason for better performance like teacher teaming and goal-setting improvements. I’d also add that teachers and schools are also getting better at test preparation. There will be an adjustment with Common Core tests and the same thing will happen.
Joe, why don’t you read my book? Scores are up over the past 40 years. They actually went FLAT from 2008-2012 when NCLB and Race to Top converged.
Are you trying to credit Duncan with last 40 years?
No, I’m not trying to give credit to any individual. I’m trying to understand the point of saying that test scores and hs grad rates have never been higher – but what’s happened over the last 10-15 years is bad.
Also – for what it’s worth, Mass and Mn – which have an array of things often criticized by people here such as statewide testing, public school choice including charters, rank above Finland, which often is praised. Both states have shown some improvements…although both have plenty of work to do, as does the whole country.
I
As Eeyore said about the clapping the followed his birthday poem, “Gratifying, very gratifying, if a little bit lacking in ‘smack.'” Let’s hope these black belt policy makers and shakers continue their slow crawl back from the brink.
Time to move the goalposts so that kindergartners will now be required to solve algebraic equations.
I think we’re already there. Calculus will be next.
My fellow educator, reform is not rocket science! It should not take a genius to understand that a smaller class size, especially at the middle and high school level, IS the most effective setting to ensure student achievement. Why do you think private charter schools and public charters schools operate with smaller class sizes? Why should they be the only teachers that are provided with the opportunity to work in a highly effective classroom setting? Why should they be given the golden ticket, while we – public school teachers – are left begging for the same opportunity? If you truly care about student achievement, then you cannot defend public school closure and consolidation policies. Creating larger class sizes is the wrong approach, and creates a recipe for disaster. http://wp.me/p3Lk1s-6i
Ward, I am in complete agreement that district public school teachers should havee the chance to create new options within the district and to use funds allocated for youngsters in ways that the educators and families served believe in – have in fact helped make this happen in a number of places.
Once again, we wrap up with Joe’s accomplishments. Yawn.
The article in the NY TImes was hollow, slanted, and offered to real intellecutal, profound assessment on what’ts really going on in today’s public schools. It was one big PR piece for brain-dead Arne Duncan, and his necrified colleagues . . . . .
Didn’t see it as slanted so much as being a bit softball . . . No seriously pressing questions asked. On the one hand this is not an education reporter. On the other hand he has a Pulitzer Prize. He should know to do better. But I did not see it as a cheerleader or dogmatic piece with a slant.
A Pulitzer is not a guarantee that every product a writer crafts is going to reflect excellence in journalism. This was a rushed, shallow piece that I would have respected it if it were written with great depth and scholarship, regardless of its political tone, Of course, I sniff out the politics therein and form my own conclusions, but I first look for the quality of writing, and this piece had little to none . . . .
Shallow? No, it’s deep.
Robert, the article in the Times made my blood go cold at one point. It’s chilling that men could talk this way about our children, in front of the Secretary of Education of a supposedly Democratic administration, and nobody even blinks:
“Engler: The president of Purdue and the president of the Business Roundtable – we are the consumer groups here at the table. All the products of K-12 system are either going to go to the university or they are going to the work force. The military is not here, but they’re not very different.”
You’re right, chemtchr, absolutely chilling. This comment should be read by all parents and educators. This should put to rest once and for all any arguments about the real motives behind education “reform.”
Lord, what fools these mortals be . . . . .
Agree!
The journalist and Duncan are beyond pathetic.
I dunno. Maybe you sense more disengenuity in the conversation than is there. Yes they move the goalposts. They are politicians. For all that, I do see some acknowledgement that things are moving toward better and that not all the reformy silver bullets are silver bullets. The most important thing said seemed to be engler that we can’t be graduating kids needing so much remediation. I didn’t see a lot of dogma from any of the three, frankly, about how we get there.
DSM, it about more than “how we get there”. Where are we going?
“Engler: The president of Purdue and the president of the Business Roundtable – we are the consumer groups here at the table. All the products of K-12 system are either going to go to the university or they are going to the work force. The military is not here, but they’re not very different.”
So, this means a teacher (like me) is accountable to the “consumers” of the children I teach. Not to the parents, not to the human needs of our people, not to the future families of the “products” I teach. The children will be tested for the “outcomes” demanded by those consumers. The consumers hold forth about their “competitiveness” with children in other nations.
For what, really? Structural unemployment means the 1% have no use for our children at all at this time. Unless democracy can check them, all of our public institutions are reduced by this ideology to their profit machine. “The military” then becomes, not a defender of our democracy, but an arm of their “public/private” profit machine. The last century twice demonstrated the slide into the national security command economy, regional war, and then world war, the ultimate consumer of our surplus children.
I teach chemistry just as though my students will be able to take it and serve their communities as medical workers, industrial designers, welders, nutritionists, materials development chemists, and members of an informed and powerful democratic people. They need to see opportunity paths ahead of them, not the empty pit or consuming furnace of financial speculators and corporate profiteers.
Thoughtful, anguished column from a New Orleans teacher: http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/my-students-died-while-we-debated-education-policy
How is that sincere, again? I could wish a little more of the anguish came through. Claire isn’t a teacher any more, by the way. She’s the academic dean and RTI coordinator.
An administrator says she started out with TFA talking points, but then two of her students died in the ongoing violence that surrounds New Orleans low-income students. She says she’s moved beyond talking points, so nobody should debate politics with her anymore. Then, without further ado, she adds the dead children to her talking points and keeps on talking politics for nine more paragraphs.
She laments the “reform” policies that caused students to be shuffled so many times, but somehow it’s the debate that killed them. She continues then her political discourse with a new (and much better) set of talking points, but now if anybody argues with her, she will recite the names of her students, so nobody can debate her.
In the context of the reform-dominated New Orleans, I can’t begin to fathom who she means when she says “we” did this or that. I can’t assess what she’s plugging when she writes,
“Across town, ReNew Accelerated High School works with a population that’s very similar to ours. But it offers mostly online classes, and does an excellent job …”
Her central thesis is that, in spite of the carnage, “New Orleans’ move toward school choice in an admirable one.”
There are those who will debate that with her, I’m afraid. Mercedes Schneider is one. I don’t think we need to all put our dead students’ names on our ID tags.
In eight years, Claire rode that move in New Orleans all the way from TFA recruit to a career administrator. Maybe that colors her judgement.
chemtchr: “Maybe that colors her judgment.”
Understatement is vastly underrated.
You hammered your point home loud and clear.
🙂
Thanks for the correction. As you note, she is no longer a teacher.
Here’s her conclusion, which I think is worth considering:
“I realize that politics can’t and won’t stop. In many ways they are necessary. But I ask that the next time you feel tempted to cut down the work of someone else because it doesn’t match your talking points, that instead you take a moment to say the names of these boys to yourself. Isaiah. Leonard. And the countless other young men and women who have lost their lives to violence. They died while we were arguing. We can do better.”
A number of us who post here try to learn from each other, though we sometimes vigorously disagree.
I don’t expect the disagreements to end. I don’t want to minimize that there are important disagreements. But I hope we can continue to learn from each other to help more young people be successful.
I don’t buy it Joe. Your idea of “learning” from each other is to promote yourself and put down/insult Diane. You come off as self serving and not as this noble savior.
And this I shall not forget:
Do We Need More Heroes?
by JOHN MERROW on 25. SEP, 2013 in 2013 BLOGS
Joe Nathan 25. Sep, 2013 at 5:04 pm
Well done, John.
Linda – As noted, I agree that some disagreements will continue. Yesterday I noted Diane’s comments about school choice during her appearance on NPR. I agree with some choice plans, disagree with others.
Diane said on NPR: ““I don’t believe in school choice. I believe that every neighborhood school should be a good public school. And if the parents don’t want the good local public school and they want to send their child to a private school, they should do so – but they should pay for it.” http://www.npr.org/2013/09/27/225748846/diane-ravitch-rebukes-education-activists-reign-of-error
Following this advice would mean that only the wealthy would have options. Prohibiting government programs allowing choice of schools would mean that creative public school teachers, district or charter would not be allowed to create Montessori, or Core Knowledge, or language immersion or whatever.
Over 40 years, many public school educators have been frustrated with the refusal to allow them to create distinctive programs from which families can choose. When it has been allowed, offering distinctive programs have helped many youngsters (Boston district Pilot Schools being a great example, NYC New Visions schools being another great example). And offering more choice in public education has drawn some families into public schools who formerly sent their children to private schools. I think that’s good.
So while I disagree with Diane and others on some points, I’ve learned a good deal by reading comments from others about how various reforms are having an impact on their students. I’ve learned about some terrific resources for helping students. And feedback both here and via some private emails suggest that some (not all, but some) have find some of the resources I’ve shared useful.
“some have find some of the resources I’ve shared useful”…typical, you always end with tooting your own horn.
You didn’t have any questions or concerns for Merrow, just a congratulatory note, which revealed your true colors.
Actually, I have both agreed and disagreed with Merrow many times on his blog.
I’m still amazed anyone thinks Mitch Daniels should be included in any discussion about education. Any idea that man had from the cost of the Iraq war to Right to Work for Less in Indiana has been wrong. He’s a complete fraud.
I was not surprised to see these men using consumer and product language in discussing education, but I was amazed that the Times would publish what essentially was a go-nowhere bunch of political talking points. Leonhardt asked for bad news, good news, and if we are making any progress. Political talking points are designed so you cover yourself by saying yes but no (or no, but yes). Then everyone agrees on a neutral “we’ve got a long way to go.” Leonhardt then summarized this blah-blah-blah as “the progress isn’t fast enough” and they all agreed. Daniels described the “violent” status quo and said we have to “move the rock as far and fast as it needs to move.” Diane is right though about a subtle shift in tone from Duncan in particular. He closed with “The kids in the communities who need the most help get the least.” That sounds like someone who maybe has been reading Reign of Error and figuring out how to revamp the usual talking points.