Once again, we are treated to a New York Times editorial on education that is a mix of good and bad.
Bottom line: The Times blames teachers for the U.S. scores on PISA. And once again, the Times assumes that the scores of 15-year-olds on a standardized test predict the future of our economy, for which there is no evidence at all.
On the good side, the Times recognizes that entry standards into teaching in this country are far too low. In many states, a college graduate may become a teacher with no professional training or with an online degree or with only five weeks of training (TFA). That is not what the much-admired nations cited by the Times do.
On the good side, the Times notes that Finland has extensive social services for children in its schools. Entry into teacher education programs in Finland is rigorous. Teacher education is a five-year program.
On the bad side, the Times fails to mention that state after state is busily dismantling the teaching profession by eliminating collective bargaining (which Finland has); teacher tenure; salary increments for masters’ degrees; and actively discouraging and demoralizing experienced teachers. To call for an improved teaching profession, as the editorial does, while demonstrating total indifference to the widespread attacks on the teaching profession shows an astonishing ignorance of the political realities on the ground.
On the bad side, the Times never acknowledges that Finland has NO standardized testing until the end of high school.
On the bad side, the Times never notes that nearly one-quarter of children in the U.S. live in poverty, as compared to fewer than 5% in Finland. The editorial completely ignores poverty as a cause of low academic performance.
On the bad side, the Times cites the NCTQ as if its review of course syllabi and reading lists made it a credible research organization, which it is not.
On the bad side, the Times assumes that Shanghai has included all the migrant children in its schools and in its PISA testing, when Tom Loveless has demonstrated that this is an aspiration for 2020, not a reality.
Here is Tom Loveless’s comment on the New York Times‘ gushing praise for Shanghai: “dumb and dumber.”
Here are some tweets from this morning:
-
@chingos Draws causal conclusions from X-sectional data. And praises Shanghai for equitable migrant ed. Dumb and dumber. -
2020 is the
#date set for#Hukou#reform– http://bit.ly/1kUeTM0 -
@pasi_sahlberg@nytimes NYT draws causal conclusions from X-sectional data. Praises Shanghai for equitable migrant ed. Dumb and dumber. -
@NeeravKingsland@nytimes Bold isn’t the right word. Too bad NYT didn’t do some reporting before it editorialized.-
More
-
-
Amazingly uninformed! NY Times praises Shanghai for equity in migrant education. Why Other Countries Teach Better
The World of Chinese 
Tom Loveless 
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“On the good side, the Times recognizes that entry standards into teaching in this country are far too low. In many states, a college graduate may become a teacher with no professional training or with an online degree or with only five weeks of training (TFA). That is not what the much-admired nations cited by the Times do.”
Read what they’re really saying. They have nothing against TFA. Their main issue is that we have “low academic standards” for who gets into education school. Too many “dumb” people becoming teachers. How do you suppose those academic standards should be measures (according to the NYT)? By test scores, of course. What they’re saying is that only people with high test scores should be teachers – hence, TFA should be the best teachers because they are among the highest test scorers. I honestly don’t think the NYT cares a whit what aspiring teachers learn during their training, it’s just assumed that “smart” people (as measured by test scores) will make good teachers. All that child development and pedagogy and lesson planning nonsense is all a waste of time.
I’ve said it dozens of times on these boards – there is nothing inherent in being “smart” (as measured by test scores) that makes one a good teacher. What makes for a good teacher is understanding how different kids learn and having the ability to connect with kids.
5 bad sides and two good, hhhmmmmm!
But who’s keeping score?
Duane Swacker: the NYT editorial board being clueless about the basics of PISA & related issues reminds me of a pithy comment by an old dead German guy:
“Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action.” [Goethe]
Word salad, anyone?
😎
Are they being clueless, or deliberately misleading? Inquiring minds would like to know.
Yeah, I read it and there were so many things wrong about it I didn’t comment. If I had I would still be writing.
Finnish public school teachers must pass an academic college entrance exam that requires a good knowledge of several languages, in addition to math.
I wonder how many people who worked on the Common Core would even qualify to be teachers in Finland. A lot of them seem to have backgrounds only in engineering and math and/or economics (i.e., ideology) or math and political “science” (i.e., ideology). Period.
I don’t believe the one test they take in Finland– college admission — is anything like the arbitrary mass produced fill-in-the-bubbles ones Pearson proposes.
PISA’s own administrative board swallowed the Chinese Kool-aid about Shanghai.
One more on the plus side: recognizing that other countries (Canada in the Times example) use public resources to put schools that serve the children of the poor on a more even footing with schools that serve the children of the wealthy, so that all children can go to school in safe and well-kept buildings with qualified teachers, limited class sizes, playgrounds and auditoriums, art and music classes, librarians and social workers. What upper-middle-class families want and take for granted in their public schools should, as Dr. Ravitch has pointed out in the past, be standard in all schools.
This is a bunch of crap. Test scores use a completely different mind set than does real authentic learning. You use deducation, elimination and other techniques to get the right answer. Little is learned and it shows little about what the child knows. It’s time to get out of stupid http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html
Remember, this is the same newspaper that went all out to convince the American people on the merits of the Iraq War. Enough said.
And the merits of the current President. Nuff said.
The current president is just a product of the neoliberal/libertarian views so favored by you Tea Partiers. What is it that you object to about him? I mean, other than his race?
I like his race. I don’t like his policies. That you think he is inspired by Tea Party philosophy is rather surprising to me. We want a balanced budget to start with. Repeal of the ACA next. Perhaps even simple truthfulness from the President wouldn’t be out of order. You can keep your health insurance if you like it. My son couldn’t. I could be spending a minimum of 24 hours detailing the President’s errors and failures, and I wouldn’t have to even mention Arne Duncan.
Are YOU defending his policies?
Agree with HU and Lou!!
Agree with Harlan on this one!!!!!!!!!!!!
Am I defending his policies? Hell no. Tea Party libertarianism/neo-liberalism is just recycled Eugenics all over again. The fact remains that, despite his pretty words, Obama’s policies line up much more with your views than with mine – you should be the one defending him.
Harlan: Can you name a President from which we always got the truth? Was GW Bush always truthful? Reagan? Clinton? Ford? Carter?
Is anyone else noticing a difference between how “ed reform” is treated at the K-12 level and the higher ed level?
I was looking at editorials on the Obama Administration reforms for higher ed and they are VERY deferential to the college leaders, very skeptical.
Compare that with how K-12 public ed people are given these stern, patronizing lectures on how they have to go along to get along or they’re “opposed to high standards” and how teachers and others actually in these schools are completely ignored.
I just think it’s really interesting, looking at it from the outside (I don’t work in education). College-level educators seem to get a measure of respect and deference by both the administration and pundits in a way that K-12 educators do not.
What is that? Is it a class thing?
More likely than not a gender thing!
Arne Duncan:
Another fantastic @nytimes editorial on where we are & how we need to improve to have the world’s best school system http://nyti.ms/JC5rB4
Just remember that this is an administration that spends two hours a week meeting with pundits like Tom Freidman. That’s who they talk to about public education. Not parents, not teachers, but Tom Friedman. Has Tom Friedman ever physically entered a public school? What about the other guy who opines on public schools, the restaurant reviewer?
The chief value of PISA is that it serves as a full employment program for pundits.
Is anyone writing a letter to the editor of the NYT???
Sigh of relief. Ok. That wasn’t the lambasting of teachers or public schools I expected. If we overlook the use of PISA scores as accurate measures of anything other than ‘crystallized intelligence’, does it not point out some ideas American education reformers might want to consider? Finland absolutely does some things better than the USA: as a nation they realize their path to prosperity leads through their public schools; they have rigorous standards for becoming a teacher; they pay their teachers fairly well; they respect teachers as being highly trained professionals deserving of prestige; and most important of all, Finland trusts its teachers to do their very best for the children. Contrast this with our situation here in the USA: our leaders and policy makers believe the path to prosperity is through the board room, not the classroom; entrance into teacher preparation programs is largely non-selective; there are no national standards for teacher certification- some states will take anyone with a bachelor’s degree, some want a masters, some are so desperate for teachers that they will accept Teach For America ‘educators’ with a paltry five weeks of ‘training’; many states have Alternate Route to Certification pathways that ill prepare beginning educators for the realities of the classroom. The result- America’s educators run the gamut from awful to awesome, and Americans are fed up with the stories of the bad ones we read in the press daily. Teachers guilty of lewd conduct in the classroom; teachers having sex with their students; teachers posting X rated pictures of themselves on the internet; ‘administrators’ failing the children they purport to champion by missing large amounts of work while gallivanting around the country raking in huge personal profits for speaking engagements. It’s oh so true, a few bad apples do spoil the bunch! Certainly we can learn something from Finland.
Canada handles the funding of public education much better than we here in the USA. In order to sustain their system and enable it to achieve uniformly across their geographically huge country they take steps to level the playing field for all children by funding to eliminate the negative effects poverty has on the delivery of quality education. Makes sense when compared with our model in which local property taxes are the main funding source, resulting in huge funding inequalities that lead to huge inequality in education quality. True, some states do have programs to supplement education funds for their towns and cities with small tax bases, but these would be far less effective than the Canadian funding method. To boot, such systems can be manipulated by unscrupulous politicians at great detriment to the public. One need only look at the malfeasance committed by Connecticut’s shameful Governor Dannell Malloy that Diane blogged about recently in Wendy Lecker: CT Governor Dannell Malloy Can Tell It To The Judge. Perhaps America should consider adopting the Canada model of education funding?
China and Shanghai treat their schools far differently than the good old USA according to the Times editorial. Their educational system has been largely rebuilt in the past 38 years- ours has reached it current state after simmering for over 200 years. Theirs is a top down, authoritarian state that has long had a national preoccupation with scholarship and national academic achievement- ours a democracy, where individual liberties are the sacred cow, in which every state has their own way of managing public education. China sees the education of children as the responsibility of the nation- in the USA children are the responsibility of their parents only. China has radically altered its education system to be more egalitarian- not so in the USA, where there have long been great disparities in the education children receive from state to state. Can’t we see something in the China model that might be used to better the state of education here?
I don’t believe the Times editors intended this to be a soup to nuts piece on all that ails our public schools, but a glimpse into international practices that might be used to improve our educational system here in America.
I am appreciative that the Times didn’t bash teachers, call teachers unions ‘roaches’, advocate for Common Core, push for burning down and privatizing education, or blame America’s education crisis on any group or party. I believe their aim here was to simply say that these other nations succeed by doing things a bit differently than we do here in the USA. In the grand scheme of things, doesn’t this piece offer ammunition that we supporters of public schools could use to better education in the USA?
No, it does not, because it suggests that the problem is our teachers, not that there are systemic problems that shortchange children living in poor districts.
The problem is not with the teachers it is with the tax evading billionaires who are seeking investment opportunities, busting unions, and planning on lining their pockets selling “educational” hardware and software to the 99 percent while sending their own children to Waldorf, Montessori, John Dewey, and Quaker schools that teach the whole child.
Are there any traditional zoned public schools that are Montessori, Waldorf, or John Dewey for the “1%” to send their children too? There certainly should not be any Quaker schools in the public school system.
John Dewey is probably an allusion to the Chicago Lab School which Rham Emmanual’s children attend and Quaker likewise an allusion to the Sidwell Friends School attended by the President’s two daughters.
Harold,
I share your disgust for the people who feel their deep pockets entitle them to dictate how others should live. I am trying to be a realist though. There are very real, very serious faults with our education system in the USA that must be addressed if we are to create the education system all children deserve- the type with schools that teach the whole child, the type that treat children as the individuals they are, and the type that produce lifelong learners. If we want such a system we must confront every issue our schools face, not just the ones motivated by greed. Are our teacher certification programs the best they can be? Are we funding education as effectively as we could be? Are we respecting and trusting teachers as much as we could be? Are we taking every opportunity to improve our education system? We are kidding ourselves if we think our schools are perfect, our teachers are perfect, and the only issue is Bill Gates and Common Core. And we are shooting ourselves in the foot if we don’t look around the globe, identify best practices, and use the learning of others to our benefit. In my eyes, there are positives in Finland, Canada, and China that we must look at in addition to poverty, standardized testing, and the appropriateness of a one size fits all set of standards that dumbs down our children. Did the Times address the most insidious foe we face at the moment? No, but they did offer a look at some factors we would be remiss to ignore.
The serious faults we now have with our schools can be laid at the door of the same text book companies that are now pointing their big guns on teachers. And who exemplify an a-moral for-profit, free market ideology that is incompatible with true education or freedom.
I agree with Diane Ravitch, if you want to fix our schools, we know what how to do it: make them like Sidwell Friends, Waldorf and John Dewey (the Lab School) and the fancy schools in the suburbs and less like prisons with padded cells and people with megaphones yelling at five-year-olds.
The most pressing need — for appropriate early ed — has been understood since the 1960s, though nothing has been done about it. Early ed is not the same as accelerated learning, as many of the “reformers”, the B.S. brigade, with their stupid charts and stupid tests, stupidly believe. It should be “slow learning”.
There was a time actually that I would have agreed that our educational system was in need of repair. But now I see that the corporatizers are using the rhetoric of educational “reform” to attack, loot, and immiserate those groups whom they perceive as fair game because they are relatively powerless and composed mostly of women. It is disgusting that the reformy pals of the New York Times, some of whom belong in jail, can go around identifying second-grade teachers as the enemy and calling them greedy because they want to be paid.
For the rest, if you really want to fix the schools, Steve Nelson has the right prescription, as quoted today by Diane Ravitch:
“Raise the minimum wage to a real living wage. Provide affordable health care for every family. End the regressive tax system that has eviscerated local communities. Provide disincentives to the multi-national corporations that have abandoned American communities while chasing the cheapest labor overseas. Put Americans to work with bold infrastructure investment. Extend the meager unemployment benefits that keep many families out of abject poverty. Stop pretending that racism is dead. Instead of telling people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, remove the boot heels of oppression.”
Absurd. Just back from China in Oct and all I heard was how terrible their ed system is because if the inferior quality of schools that are mostly for profit with abysmal education. Grads penalized for attending these third rate schools and unable to find jobs. The Times could use a dose of reality and give up their made up fantasies. With is called journalism, Remember that stuff?
Teachers have to have a high degree of emotional intelligence. I dare say Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg have just about the lowest possible emotional intelligence possible.
I’m a little scared by the way we are talking about what “our education system” needs to do to improve. Despite what the feds have managed to do over the past few decades and despite the mismanagement of many state governments, if you zero in on the local level, there are many school districts just ticking along hoping to avoid most of the nonsense. I don’t think I want an approach that continues to think that we can manage schools from the federal level. The feds have been good in the past for saying things like educate special needs children, and segregation is an abomination. I don’t want them mandating who can train to be a teacher. I don’t want them deciding on some uniform criteria for graduation from high school. Nor do I want them deciding on a list of what all schools should provide. We are much more likely to find some agreement on state or local levels that may lead to some national consensus on some issues in time. I am really tired of political pronouncements and mandates based on little more than the whims of the gods. Sometimes I think we are as bent on “creative destruction” as the reformers. We all know things that have worked in our communities. Why not start with what is or has worked and figure out what will and will not work in other communities or how programs can be tweaked to work. I do not think there is a uniform model for most changes we might want to try/pilot. We can’t do any worse by taking the time to build and try some models of providing services before jumping in and proclaiming it.
I’m ranting. I will stop.
No rant, 2O2T, just telling it like it is. Keep at it (I know how you feel as it’s how I feel). And all thank you for saying those things that most refuse to utter!!
Reblogged this on Middletown Voice.
I would like to see us start from the viewpoint of “what do people who truly have a choice, the affluent, look for when they spend their own money to send their kids to a private school”. Other than those that choose a school strictly for religious reasons, and I would think that a high percentage of affluent parents do not choose solely on religion, what do these parents consider important. That is probably what we should use as our litmus test for ed reform…are we moving all students towards attending similar looking schools. If not, what do we have to do to the local schools to make those parents want to come back to public schools? I truly do not believe most people choose private because they are afraid of diversity, although certainly a small percentage do, but for perceived safety issues. I think most would prefer their children be in diverse environments, if their safety concerns were addressed. Zero tolerance is NOT the answer, as the school-to-prison pipeline shows us. Smaller class sizes and school-based family social services would appear to be the places to start in schools where they would be the most useful. And neither requires a whole revamping of how we do education in the US, we know how to build schools, train teachers (despite what is said), and provide social services. It does require us to make it a priority financially. Think of all those billions currently being wasted on this corporate reform….
Right, or sometimes what the wealthy choose is not private school but a public school district that is very well-resourced, with a good reputation that has attracted experienced teachers for decades. Teachingeconomist above asks whether there are any traditional zoned schools that adhere to a particular educational philosophy and cater to the 1 percent. Yes, I know of at least one such district: Winnetka, Illinois, where the median home price is $990,000. The district has had a progressive philosophy of education since its beginnings, and its founding superintendent was — along with Francis Parker and John Dewey — one of the early popularizers of “learning by doing,” a “thinking curriculum,” and what we would now call project-based or problem-based learning. Winnetka has never voted down a referendum to expand funding for the schools, and of course it has a robust tax base. One of its schools, designed by Eero Saarinen’s firm, is a National Historic Landmark. So that district is an example of what public schools can look like when the people whose children attend them are wealthy and powerful. I believe that if we valued educational equity, we would support policies that make the public schools that serve the children of poor and working-class parents look more like the public schools that serve the children of the wealthy.
Safety issues are certainly important in many areas, but where safety is not the primary concern, parents are looking for personalized, individualized attention. Just like every parent, they want their child to have all the opportunities to be recognized and not get lost in overcrowded classrooms.
[…] The New York Times Editorializes on Teachers and PISA, with Multiple Errors is from Diane Ravitch. I’ll add it to The Best Posts & Articles On 2012 PISA Test Results. […]