The next President should select John Kuhn, superintendent of schools in the little Perrin-Whitt District in Texas as Secretary of Education.
Why?
Because John Kuhn has the heart, the vision, the love of children, the courage, the honesty, and the integrity that the position requires. The Department is the kind of bureaucracy that runs itself, no matter who is the Secretary. Like any big organization, it lacks a heart and soul. That’s what the leader should provide. Kuhn has plenty of both.
He first burst onto the national scene with a stunning speech at the Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C., in 2011. Who was this man, we wondered, this man who embraced all children and wanted to do the best for every single one of them?
This is the way his speech started:
Let me speak for all public school educators when I say unequivocally: We will. We say send us your poor, send us your homeless, the children of your afflicted and addicted. Send us your kids who don’t speak English. Send us your special-needs children, we will not turn them away.
But I tell you today, public school teacher, you will fail to take the shattered children of poverty and turn them into the polished products of the private schools. You will be unacceptable, public school teacher. And I say that is your badge of honor. I stand before you today bearing proudly the label of unacceptable because I educate the children they will not educate.
Day after day I take children broken by the poverty our leaders are afraid to confront and I glue their pieces back together. And at the end of my life you can say those children were better for passing through my sphere of influence. I am unacceptable and proud of it.
The poorest Americans need equity, but our nation offers them accountability instead. They need bread, but we give them a stone. We address the soft bigotry of low expectations so that we may ignore the hard racism of inequity. Standardized tests are a poor substitute for justice.
Read the whole speech and watch it here.
John Kuhn doesn’t want to make kids compete for the highest test scores. He doesn’t want to pick winners and losers. He wants to educate all children.
Kuhn recent wrote a book about how the accountability madness started in Texas. I invited Jason Stanford, a fine journalist in Austin, to review Kuhn’s Test and Punish. I hope you will read the review and read the book and learn about a man with a vision that would transform American education.
Jason Stanford writes:
John Kuhn, the superintendent of a small school district northwest of Fort Worth, Texas, could have written several books. He could have written the story about how he became the Howard Beale of school administrators, giving fiery speeches demanding to see the Adequate Yearly Progress of politicians. He could have cast himself as the hero of the anti-testing rebellion, a modern-day William Travis defending the schoolhouse like the Alamo. Instead, Kuhn wrote a sneakily subversive book about the bait & switch that screwed a generation of American students so Texas politicians didn’t have to raise taxes.
The brilliance of Kuhn’s Test-and-Punish: How the Texas Educational Model Gave America Accountability without Equity is the choice to tell the story about how we got into this mess in the first place. And to do that, you have to look at the promise that Texas made to its citizens in its state constitution that, admittedly, is given cursory respect by the local judiciary.
Article 7, Section 1 states:
A general diffusion of knowledge being essential to the preservation of the liberties and rights of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature of the State to establish and make suitable provision for the support and maintenance of an efficient system of public free schools.
A logical conclusion by a layman would be that the legislature had a duty to adequately fund public (“make suitable provision for the support and maintenance”) schools, and as Kuhn elegantly recounts, for a while the poor folks were winning in the courts. The problem is that Texas politicians didn’t want to raise taxes to help poor minorities. Gov. Ann Richards, working under a court order, tried to spread the wealth under a “Robin Hood” plan and lost re-election to George W. Bush who preached the false gospel of accountability.
Wait, what? How did we go from trying to get more money into underfunded public schools in poor neighborhoods to judging poor students by their test scores and calling it “accountability”?
This being Texas, it was a two-step process, and kudos for Kuhn for putting these pieces together.
First, Kuhn followed the money and found John Cornyn, then a lesser light on the Texas Supreme Court and now our senior senator. Cornyn represented the privileged business class on the court and did not agree that adequately funding would yield better schools. Instead—and this was clever—Cornyn ignored the requirement that the legislature “make suitable provision” and focused instead on the word “efficiency.”
This, Kuhn writes, changed everything:
The way Cornyn saw it, the constitutional demand for efficiency required the legislature to establish appropriate educational results, not merely evenhanded fiscal inputs (Farr and Trachtenberg 1999, 33). Cornyn implied that funding in and of itself did not directly equate to educational quality, that other factors were in play, and that the legislature must have some means of measuring basic educational quality in order to ensure efficiency.
This doctrine, originally appearing as a dissent but soon becoming a majority opinion on the court, explains how “accountability would eclipse as the primary consideration for policymakers and education thinkers in the state,” Kuhn writes.
One of those thinkers was a Democratic lawyer whose political ambitions found no purchase in Dallas. He tried running for congress and chaired the county party for a bit.
He found more luck as an advocate for education reform in Dallas, which has traditionally meant the white business elite in North Dallas worrying about what to do about the schools in South Dallas where the black and Hispanic students went. Backed by the business community, Sandy Kress headed up a working group that devised a plan that is “nearly identical to the guiding principles baked into the federal government’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act,” writes Kuhn.
Except there was one important difference early on, and I’m still miffed at Kuhn for finding it because I was hoping to be the first one to write about it.
The Kress committee’s proposal in Dallas ISD different from much of modern educational accountability in one significant way: it called for adjustments to be made in the performance expectations for children coming from impoverished backgrounds. For a Dallas school to be considered successful, its poorest students wouldn’t be required to achieve the same scores as higher-income pupils. This kindler, gentler approach to holding schools accountable for student performance wouldn’t last long.
Given the opening by Cornyn on the Supreme Court, Bush took Kress to Dallas as governor and implemented a plan to use test scores to measure efficiency in education. Only this time, they judged everyone by the same standard, poor and rich, Hispanic, black and white. No excuses.
You know the rest of the story: After two decades, poor kids get worse scores than rich kids. By relieving ourselves of responsibility to improve inputs, we focus exclusively on outputs and wonder why we’re not getting better results. Switching funding equity for efficiency and then making tests the sole measure of accountability combined to give Texas schools “spankings instead of supports,” writes Kuhn. “It was tough love, only without the love.”
Thank goodness Kuhn wrote the book he did. He’s still the William Travis of the Texas testing rebellion, but the research and analysis he invested in Test-and-Punish has given me a broader perspective on the failed ideology that has infected our public schools. Kuhn was one of the people who drew my attention to over-testing in the first place, and now my thinking on the subject owes a new debt to his book.
I was at the SOS event in DC in 2011. John Kuhn’s words moved me to tears. Since then, I have been inspired by his writings and tweets. He is the real deal. Thank you for bringing this fine human being to a larger audience.
Yes I was there and heard his words in person as well. 2011 seems like a decade ago to me now. I can Imagine having John Kuhn as Secretary of Education the same way I can imagine having Bernie Sanders as President. In fact Bernie Sanders might be the one person who would appoint a man of character like Mr. Kuhn. Unfortunately it is not at all likely to happen.
Yes, moved to tears, but then the anger and fire in the belly must set in to stop this debacle!
This is a very interesting post. I am ex ited to read more about some of the points you mention and glad to know about this man.
It is interesting to me that Texas sort of started the accountability trend, but stayed away from RttT. The big question I have in NC is that even though it is my understanding we were trending towards standards like those of CCSS when we decided to sign in for them (and were this able to compete for RttT), but my question is did we go to accountability model only because of RttT? And did Texas stay clear of RttT because they already had accountability?
Last night at a huge country club oyster roast I did my usual asking people questions, when the conversation allowed, about education. I like to keep up with what I hear from a class of people who typically do not rely on public school. One teacher told me she likes CCSS because it is so clearly focused, but that the MClass assessments she does not like, and she feels as if she has no room for more creative lessons (kids acting stories out, singing songs etc).
Another friend and I discussed a mutual friend whose son (a high school child with Asbergers) got jumped and beat up by two housing project peers (of a different race) and how she thinks this is why vouchers are a good idea. Of course I do not agree. Vouchers should not be used to keep children away from other children. Also, I pointed out to her that this problem rested with these two boys and the risks they were willing to take and their moral compass, etc and not with the school. (I do go to church with the principal of that school but have decided not to ask about the fate of these two boys at the high school). Anyway, the point being that many see vouchers as away to get away from the effects of poverty. At this point I cannot say I agree.
And I agree with Kuhn that at this point public school teachers are not heralded as heroes and those with the means to send their children to private schools really are not interested (for the most part) in the nuts and bolts of the public school dialogue.
I will add that in my opinion in working with children, if we are stuck on accountability, portfolio models can still factor in accountability. And likewise instead of “21st Century Skills” (and by the way will we still be using that term in 75 years because you know the century will encompass 100 years by definition and I have a pretty good feeling folks in 80 years will be laughing at today’s notion on 21st Century Skills—that term just needs to go away) portfolios should encompass resourcefulness (that is a valuable word for coming generations!!!) and application of knowledge (a blue fuzz ball is glued onto a piece of recycled card stock. The child turns it into a picture. They write a story about the character in the picture. They create math word problems and solve them related to the picture. They sing dings related. Etc. integrated thematic instruction showing resourcefulness, application of knowledge, creativity, writing, math etc. ). This more the direction we should head. And you can keep teachers accountable with this model without letting do much hinge on one moment in time.
Full of typos. Woops.
I’m going to read the book. It is no surprise to me that a state like Texas is the model for bad education policy for the rest of the nation. Look what AZ’s SB1070 did for the immigration policy discussion. Bad ideas travel like wildfire in the new corporate America.
Thanks Diane and Jason! What a wonderful thing to read this morning.
John: I second that emotion!
😎
I had a front row spot at the SOS Rally in DC and was WOWED by John Kuhn. I had hoped that when Ravitch said she was organizing a team to debate against Michelle Rhee, that she would chose Kuhn! It is an interesting point in the review that the start of “corporate ed reform” involved “twisting” the law so that it focused on “efficiency” in order to serve the goals of the emerging “corporate ed reform”. This “strategy” of taking words within a law out of context is not unfortunately new. This strategy has enabled the co-opting of other laws for unsavory movements – even our Constitution – thinking of “The Right to Bear Arms”. Bearing arms was supposed to be about arming citizens if ever the government were in danger of being taken over. But the NRA “co-opted” the citizen’s rights to bear arms by paying legal scholars of their choosing to “research” this meaning within the constitution. They then pushed the notion that all citizens have the right to bear arms (for any reason). The end result was a relentless push to free the nation from control gun laws. All roads seem to lead to money and profits. This is why it is so important to restore “checks and balances” to our government by proper campaign finance controls! Our politicians have no business BEING IN BUSINESS when they are supposed to be serving the PEOPLE. I look forward to reading Kuhn’s book!
I was with you up until your example. This is a fair site (it debunks false quotes that support the individual right to bear arms as well as provides authentic quotes that support it) that might provide more information on the topic of the right to bear arms: http://www.guncite.com/
Aside from that, I agree with you about John Kuhn, and it is always wise to follow the money. Crony capitalism, on both the Left and the Right, is a scourge that needs to be dealt with.
Your analogy, Art Segal, between a presumed distortion of the state Constitution of Texas and a presumed distortion by the NRA of the Second Amendment of the federal constitution is, I believe, completely upside down. Whatever may be the case with the Texas constitution, your characterization of the meaning of the second amendment seem to me to be completely off base. I believe that the fundamental purpose of the second amendment was in fact to protect the right of every citizen to bear arms, i.e. keep guns, for his or her individual self protection, even against the federal government, not as a resource of a militia should the nation as a whole be invaded. I know you do not agree, but I think I am right, and the SCTOUS has in fact up held my and the NRA’s interpretation. I think each of us, as individuals, has an absolute (God given, or intrinsic) right to extend our personal self defense via fire arms and that the second amendment is written into the federal constitution at the behest of the states to keep the federal government from disarming the citizens of the states for any reason whatsoever. Thus, I do not believe you analogy supports in the least your reading of the term “efficiency” in the Texas constitution. I like it when the blog expands from education to other social issues, becasue it is easier then to comprehend the fundamental assumptions of those who post here. In finding the substance of your analysis of constitutional law totally wrong, it raises the question, unfortunately, of whether your analysis of the provisions of the Texas constitution are equally wrong, and possibly for the same reason. That reason would be the propensity of those who agree with you to deprive citizens of their fundamental rights, another of which is the right to property. I deplore the testing movement as much as you do, but in making “equity” of funding the touchstone of your position, you seem to me to be as willing to take away people’s money as you are to take away their guns. In my view that makes you an advocate for thievery as well as tyranny. I don’t doubt you are a very nice man, and I also see quite clearly that your tendency toward abridgement of the rights of property and self defense doesn’t solve the problems of educating the under class. I don’t have an answer yet to that, myself, so, in a sense, my critique of your position is not complete because I don’t think I have a solution. I doubt John Kuhn has a solution either. But that is why we are all here, to try to figure out how to keep the public schools effective. It is clearly not enough just to say: “The problems are intractable.” But until we are all on the same page about what the purpose of education is, we will be disputing and debating. I do think the Texas constitution has it right when it says (in Diane’s quote) that the purpose of education is to have students understand their fundamental rights and liberties. I think that in defending public education, neither you nor Diane actually understand what the fundamental rights and liberties of the individual citizen ARE, and you are led to substitute for those fundamental rights and liberties (such as the right to bear arms and the right to have and retain your own private property) a totally different right, namely the right to an elite education. It’s a great idea in some respects, but even the President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t believe that. By his actions, he seems to believe that a child can have an elite education if his or her daddy can pay for it. He certainly can pay for it and he purchases it for his own two daughters. But he does not seem to think that an elite education is an entitlement, as you probably would, and Diane does (see the epigraph from Dewey in her book). The purpose of education in America is NOT to achieve equity of anything EXCEPT freedom and liberty. Perhaps life would be better if the constitution of Texas really guaranteed social justice, but it doesn’t. I go to such lengths to explain this in the hope of changing your understanding of the constitution of texas and of the Federal Constitution. If we have common ground on those two documents we can probably cooperate in solving the educational problem in a way that is consistent with liberty and freedom, rights that supercede equity.
This statement from your article so clearly illustrates the issues that have surfaced recently in the “pipeline to prison” punitive methods that have been used as behavioral engineering in the Title I elementary schools of Austin.
…….making tests the sole measure of accountability combined to give Texas schools “spankings instead of supports,” writes Kuhn. “It was tough love, only without the love.”
These school administrators who are more obsessed with their own recognition from winning Exemplary “prizes’ , and without recognizing their methods are psychologically harmful, has brought in the “Skinner Nazi Management Style”. This environment of sophisticated “bullying” does not provide children who live in poverty what they need. Instead, it inspires them to hate school and disrespect those who bully them and take revenge on greater society. Children who live in an oppressive environment of poverty need kindness and respect. They need teachers who care about them and can inspire them to love learning. They need to be valued as a unique person with individual talents and gifts to be nurtured, not turned into an emotionally void human who can only follow orders from an abusive master.
“This environment of sophisticated “bullying”. . . ”
The realm of public education and the current reforms are all based on the “F” word…FEAR. Fear of the type that bullies use to get their way. And that fear unfortunately percolates all the way down the students. Most teachers attempt to be the “impermeables” and prevent that fear from going any further, affecting their health and well being in the meantime. Education administration at all levels thrives on this fear based bullying.
There’s much to say about this; however, I’m going to pick just one part: “The Department is the kind of bureaucracy that runs itself, no matter who is the Secretary. Like any big organization, it lacks a heart and soul. That’s what the leader should provide.” I’ve heard of corporations being considered “sociopaths,” and this statement pretty much says the same thing. When big business / bureaucracies have a leader at the helm who’s only interested in profit, it becomes destructive, and I would go so far as to say “evil.” THAT is the corporate ed. reform movement in a nutshell.
This is one of the most “brilliant” arguments – I — ever – read! Thanks for the effort. I intend to “re-post” your essay because, all … ought to have access to this work. My Blog posts are intended to address our need for “systemic” educational reform. I have been following your blog for … Want to visit/follow my posts? http://kennethfetterman.wordpress.com
Reblogged this on kennethfetterman and commented:
“Blame Standardized Thinking”
Imagine expecting all students to play the violin!
Diane Ravitch’s post–attributed to Jason Stanford–is “brilliant”…; You must read it!
It was an honor, a joy and a privilege to have seen John Kuhn and to have heard him speak at the SOS Rally in 2011. He is a hero and an exemplary human being. As far as I am concerned, his speech is one of the greatest ever given in American history. We need him in the national arena defending & promoting public school students and teachers like Dr. Ravitch so eloquently does! Wow, it would be a dream come true to have him become the Secretary of Education. His conscience wouldn’t allow himself to sell his soul to the highest bidder as so many other leaders have done including Arne Duncan & Dennis Van Roekel, etc! I will buy his book today & begin reading it ASAP.
Reblogged this on Roy F. McCampbell's Blog.
Reblogged this on Learning Principals and commented:
True educational leadership is education those that others will not (or cannot). I appreciated Dianna Ravitch’s blog on Superintendent Kuhn’s speech and wanted to share it here.
A very dangerous man…
Diane – I nominate John Kuhn to your heroes list.
I was feeling just so dispirited after reading about the incursion of hedge fund managers into Idaho that I was in tears. John Kuhn moved me to tears of a different sort – fighting mad tears.
Direct link:
Thanks for posting the vid. That was excellent.
Getting bullied with psychological “spankings” and “tough love without the love” is so true of what has been happening to children and exposed in Austin ISD Title I Schools:
How could there be empathy for children when there are professional bullies like lobbyist Bill Hammond and the Austin Chamber of Commerce making policy, and they are only concerned about their own agenda. Their agenda has created an Austin school district of systemic bullying for keeping minority children in oppressive environments so they will become submissive workers but not strong leaders who can think for themselves. The west side of Austin ISD would never have tolerated the punitive systems of “Skinner Nazi Management Style” that have been used in the Title I Schools of AISD for some time.
I forgot one more comment from an upper middle class patron of private schools yesterday. She said one teacher had done a good job, she had heard, because her scores were high. And another random lady at the YMCA today was shocked that public schools still have music.
Our public has been trained to expect the least for and from our public schools and can detect success only with a test score (as trained) and is stunned when something good like music is part of a public school experience.
We gotta change that perception. We have to change that expectation and mindset.
She was talking about a public school teacher (per scores).
Dear Ms. Ravitch:
I read this blog with great interest as I was Sandy Kress’s “lieutenant” and member of the Commission for Educational Excellence (Commission) that wrote the report that you referenced. As an educational historian and advocate for children, I thought you might want to read the Commission report as well as an accompanying newspaper ad that we had printed and distributed in the Sunday edition of the Dallas Morning News. Based on your new book and your blog postings, I think you will find the report more than just a statement about accountability. In addition, the Director of Research, who worked with the recommendations, wrote an excellent follow up report describing the statistical methods that were developed to create the accountability measures.
If you are interested in having the documents, please email me an address that I can FEDEX them to and I will send them to you quickly. If is more trouble than seems worthwhile, my feelings will not be hurt.
Cordially,
Bob Weiss
Vice President for Administration
Meadows Foundation Inc.
3003 Swiss Ave.
Dallas, TX 75204
(214)826-9431 xt. 8109
bobweiss@mfi.org
I was there, along with my 3 (at the time) teenagers and John Kuhn impressed them FAR MORE than Matt Damon! They stood in the pounding sun and walked away asking if we could hire him in our little school!! They kept after me until I found that speech on YouTube and watched it over and over again.
John Kuhn is one of my personal heroes – he speaks the truth and when I’m feeling like there is no more gas in my tank, he will tweet something that reminds me why I have to keep fighting.
Thinking of schools as contract service providers and thinking of schools as an integral part of the public life of communities are two different approaches.
That’s why this insistence that the two approaches are THE SAME is infuriating to me.
They’re not. I heard Kuhn speak in Texas and I read his book. To say that Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee are talking about the same thing, the same idea, is ridiculous. I don’t have to parse their motives. I can just read what they say.
You have to value public schools to work to improve public schools. Ed reform doesn’t value public schools, anymore than I “value” my cell phone provider, or my life insurance company. They’ll never “improve” public schools until they see the value in them outside a “ROI”. That’s the first requirement, and it should be the first requirement for hiring. Duncan doesn’t meet the minimum bar. He’ll replace a school with a national chain, or a computer screen, or whatever “works”. That’s not good enough.