John Thompson, historian and teacher, understands the long view of history. He thinks deeply, tries to see different sides of issues, and given his training in the study of history, knows that bad things eventually collapse, wither, die, fade away.
And so I am glad to see his support for my belief that the current ungrounded attacks on public education and on teachers will not survive. It is such a nonsensical campaign that it cannot succeed. Its basic belief that the private sector is inherently superior to the public sector in supplying essential services has no basis in fact, nor does its bottomless faith in the data produced by narrow-gauge standardized tests.
As is his way, John talked to people who see merit in these ideas. But his fundamental fairness and his strong sense of history led him to see a correction in the works. This moment of error wil not last. Historians will pick over the bones of discredited ideas. And the time will come when teachers will be free to teach and students will be free to learn, chastened by the lessons of an era of data-driven mindlessness.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We have to see it that way; just like we have to believe the world is a wonderful place in which to live.
I’d be careful about that “Spring” metaphor. I don’t know how well “Arab Spring” worked out for them. Sure, five countries threw off dictators, but none have managed to replace them with better alternatives. Most are still in a great deal of internal upheaval and/or have been taken over by even more repressive regimes.
Not saying a revolution isn’t in order, just saying that the aftermath is probably going to be ugly, and we need to have a vision for what education should look like in the end and how we’re going to get there.
I suspect that those who have already been thrown on the trash heap are going to be viewed as collateral damage. The future with no Medicare and reduced pensions and benefits is scary to those who have little chance for “course corrections.”
Having respect for the profession restored (not that it was ever overwhelming) could, if genuine, lead to more collaborative approaches to the delivery of education. It would be a great relief to be able to teach to the developmental needs of the children.
As a former special education teacher, I caution anyone who thinks individual IEPs for every child are a good idea. If they involve anywhere near the same level of bureaucracy that special ed IEPs demand, they will quickly become a horror. The goal statements are very prescriptive and behaviorally oriented. We don’t talk about the joy of discovery when writing a plan and the focus is on remediating weaknesses.
In the Chicago area, spring is an over-rated season. Now the fall is another matter…
Yes the “measurable goal” part could get cumbersome if all individualized. However, more “attainable” goals across the board would be good when considering the recent trend of “raising the bar.”
JOhn’s words are cross posted at Oped and my facebook page.
http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Diana-Ravitch-s-Grand-Synt-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Attack_Belief_Education_Error-140507-140.html#comment487588
Ed deform will, of course, eventually collapse under its own stultifying, mind-numbing, soul-crushing dead weight. Of course it will.
But a lot of damage will be done to kids in the meantime.
Exactly. Will they fix this mess before my twin kindergartners hit mega-test age? Or will my kids end up part of a lost generation whose zeal for school is tested right out of them?
I want to be optimistic that most of the “education reformers” are good people with good intentions who soon will see the error of their ways. But what will they try next?
One of the reasons why I love Diane Ravitch’s brilliant Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms is that it chronicles our unfortunate tendency in this country to buy into some new voodoo prescription, every few years, for “solving the education problem.
Back when I was first teaching, the magic potion was supposed to be behavioral objectives, and every classroom was supposed to be some sort of Skinner box. The state education authorities were mandating behavioral objectives for every lesson despite the fact that, by that time, Behaviorism was effectively dead as the primary model in psychology proper, having received, a couple DECADES earlier, death blows at the hands of Noam Chomsky (his review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior) and Karl Lashley (his paper on serial behavior). But despite the fact that professional psychologists had moved on to new cognitive models, Behaviorism was treated, in the 1970s, in U.S. education, as the latest, greatest ride on the K-12 education carnival midway.
A few years ago, there was talk throughout the American education establishment about testing disappearing entirely, fading into the instructional process and becoming formative feedback. Now, a blink of an eye later, we have a federal department of education, many governors, chief state school officers, and a lot of wealthy plutocrats ratcheting up an already clearly failed policy of high-stakes testing and evaluation based on test scores. This particular magic medicine is long past its shelf life.
(Amusingly, one of the leading proponents a few years back of the disappearance of testing into the instructional process is now one of the biggest cheerleaders for mandated standards and value-added measurement based on high-stakes tests. I won’t name names, but I will say that toadying to plutocrats pays handsomely.)
The current testing mania is just the latest of a long line of crazy ideas, failed reform after failed reform, foisted on our nation’s schools and teachers by educrats, politicians, and commercial interests. I’ve come to think that American education at the rarefied levels where policy is made is trendier than are either popular music or haute couture. Turning our schools into test prep factories, mandating one-size-fits-all standards and pedagogical practicess, and basing educator and school evaluation on test scores is just the latest of a long series of failed EduFads. Sadly, the cost of this one is enormous.
In schools across the country, a third of each school year is now being spent doing test prep, administering practice high-stakes tests, and administering the high-stakes tests themselves. The opportunity cost of all that high-stakes testing and of deriving curricula and pedagogical approaches from amateurish standards and invalid tests is breathtaking: kids are being robbed, and teachers are totally demoralized. If history is any guide, and what other guide to we have, the policy makers will soon enough see what a mistake this has been and move on to the next magic solution to be foisted on our schools. But in the meantime, enormous, enormous damage will be done by this extrinsic punishment and reward based on mastery of the invariant bullet list of skills model that has been foisted on us all with no support, whatsoever, in common sense or in research.
When will we ever learn?
“(Amusingly, . . . handsomely.)
That ain’t right Bob, leaving us hanging like that!!!
“Amusingly, . . . handsomely” is a pretty decent screen name.
Eh, on second thought, it’s a little overwrought.
Skinner isn’t dead. Look at the current fad behavior management tools (PBIS). Most of the high school students found it vaguely insulting that they should “perform” for a free hamburger or two. (I am exaggerating a tad but not by much.)
No, 2o2t, you aren’t exagerating. They tried to get that BPISS nonsense in our school 2-3 years ago and the faculty rejected it. Now we have a new supe and he brought in a new principal for next year here at the high school and guess what we’re going to be doing-Yep BPISS. They’ve tried to slide some of it in up till now and the HS students scoff at it and do find it insulting.
I rather like your “misspelling” of the acronym. 🙂
They are doing it now. Maybe High School students scoff at it (as they should) but my 1st grader is learning to do it happily. My 3rd grader has been in the PBIS system for 4 years now! This is the only school culture she knows. Sad and scary!
NCLB was a ten-year-long referendum on the whole standards-and-testing approach. It failed. It failed utterly. No progress was made, and a great deal of narrowing and distortion of curricula and pedagogy occurred, undoing a lot of progress that had been made before NCLB, stopping that forward momentum cold.
And the deformers’ response was to double down on their failed idea. Son of NCLB, NCLB Fright Night II: The Nightmare Is Nationalized.
These people are VERY, VERY SLOW LEARNERS.
Are they slow learners, or are they sociopaths who will do or say anything to feed their insatiable appetites?
Some of both, Michael. I like to think that for the most part they are simply slow learners. Of course, there are those who are simply rolling in all the green that deform has generated. These are the Vichy collaborators with deform–among them are some of the foremost (as in “well known”) figures in U.S. education–professional edupundits and consultants who have brought shame upon themselves by their collaboration.
You’re more optimistic than I am, Bob: in my encounters with these people, I find the overwhelming majority of them to either be willful naifs, opportunistic conformists or sociopaths.
Youth, idealism and innocence start to weaken as an excuse once you reach your mid-twenties. After that, you start to bear some responsibility for what’s being done in the name of your “idealism.”
Tell that to the Bolsheviks.
But, the damage being done is now so great that all that will become clear in time. In time, it will be received wisdom that Ed Deform was a dark, dark era. I could write, right now, the reports and op-ed pieces that will be written a decade from now reporting on those clearly failed policies–the learned and not-so-learned explanations of why the tests were invalid, why the standards were puerile and misconceived, why extrinsic motivation via punishment and reward doesn’t work for cognitive tasks like teaching and learning, and so on. And many of those pieces will be written by people who collaborated in the deforms, pretending that they were against them all along. In the meantime, enormous, enormous damage is being done. But it’s not just that damage that’s the problem. An ever greater one is the opportunity cost–there is so much that could be done, instead, that would have been positive–creating wrap-around services for poor kids from birth on, creating a crowd sourced and open sourced national portal for competing innovations in standards and pedagogy and curricula and learning progressions–a lot of opportunity lost.
It’s a dark, dark time in U.S. education. Yes, we shall emerge from this. But the damage will have been incalculably great.
“NCLB was a ten-year-long referendum on the whole standards-and-testing approach. It failed. It failed utterly” and “why the tests were invalid, why the standards were puerile and misconceived”.
No doubt!
Well we were forewarned by more than one-Hoffman and Wilson being the most damning critiques-about the travesties of relying on those educational malpractices.
It’s not too late to read and understand exactly why these educational malpractices are COMPLETELY INVALID AND UNETHICAL. To understand why start with Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
The opportunity cost factor makes me ill. We could have built (or restored. or maintained, or repaired) a lovely public school for every kid in the country and it would have been a hell of a public works project after the financial crash. You could COMBINE vocational training in skilled building trades WITH a works project for a public asset. I’m sure you guys could come up with more ways to spend that money in educational…ways, given that this isn’t my field and all 🙂
Instead we’re measuring teachers, testing students, and grading schools.
The opportunity cost factor makes me ill.
Yes, yes, yes.
So much missed, lost opportunity. So much wasted money.
I don’t even work in a school and none of ed reform ever feels positive. It hasn’t since I first encountered it (or became aware of it, I should say) under Bush. It’s just relentlessly grim:
“Critics of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s $1 billion iPad program gathered Wednesday outside a downtown school to call for money to be used on school repairs and funding for teachers.
Standing outside Esperanza Elementary School, Matthew Kogan, a teacher and creator of the Facebook page “Repairs Not iPads,” accused district Superintendent John Deasy of neglecting basic services at district schools.
The iPad program launched in 47 schools this fall and is being paid for in part by voter-approved construction bonds.
“The bond was intended for repairs and construction … that money is going for a vanity project,” Kogan said.
Since going live in December, Kogan’s Facebook site has earned more than 1,000 “likes” and features photos of broken school bathrooms, cracked floors and other unsightly images in district facilities. District teachers have shared many of the photos eager to show off the neglect at their schools.
Koegan was joined Wednesday by a dozen students, teachers and parents.
“We have ancient portable classrooms here, where the walls are falling apart and we have termite damage, and like a lot of schools, paint that’s crumbling,” Esperanza Elementary first-grade teacher Anne Zerrien-Lee said.
http://www.dailynews.com/social-affairs/20140219/los-angeles-unified-parents-teachers-criticize-ipad-rollout-call-for-school-repairs
You could COMBINE vocational training in skilled building trades WITH a works project for a public asset.
yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
OK, Chiara Duggan. I want you to be our Secretary of Education. That is the single best suggestion that I have ever read on this blog.
These words I hold near and dear to my heart, “… And the time will come when teachers will be free to teach and students will be free to learn, chastened by the lessons of an era of data-driven mindlessness…” But for now, I am deeply saddened because I have very real title one students before me who are fast growing up under these horrific times. Will they ever get to have time (even a year) to really learn in a true education environment?
What proof is there that change will come? Nazism only went away because 80% of the world fought to destroy it for six years. Would Nazism have disappeared if the Germans had not invaded Russia? No way. How long did the Soviet Union survive or the Gulags? Change could be a long time coming, and probably not in our lifetimes. Let’s be realistic. There is no great force fighting these “reforms”.
No great fighting force will be needed. They have created a system that is simply unsustainable. It will collapse under its own weight and a little help from the lawyers. Two years max, and NCLB/RTTT/CCSS will be unrecognizable and Bob Shepherd will be publishing the editorials that he wrote in advance.
Your discussion here is a very popular one the site where I write. Robert Reich , Chris Hedges, and a slew of brilliant progressive minds argue about the end of our democracy, the oligarchy that is in charge.The site publisher, Rob Kall has written some wonderful pieces on how America is sleepwalking. He is a voice calling for activism.
You might enjoy getting their daily newsletter, but let me warn you, with the exception of my voice, there is almost no conversation about the destruction of the public schools. For all his talk about finding truth and getting active, he appears to be blind to the destruction of our schools as the main step in ending democracy. This link to the important position paper, “Thinking Curriculum” which I put up yesterday and which was headlined in the newsletter, got only 64 views, and no commentary ensued. People would rather blather on about Snowden and the NSA.
http://www.opednews.com/index.php which he headlined in the newsletter
That said, It is a very interesting site, where people around the country post quick links to articles they find important, adding tags, an intro and a comment. I often follow the commentary threads as these good minds debate the way things are.
I link often to Paul Krugman, to science news, and all the time to educators who know the score, especially to Diane’s blog and the links she provides.
I have over 160,000 views of my links!
One article that I, myself, wrote has over 2000 views.
I became a trusted writer, a few years ago, simply because I write about observable reality and post links that point to truth.
I plan to write some ‘diary entries. Diary is a journal-like tool for speaking in your now voice, but even here, Rob insists on LINKS to back up and gov evidence for views. He expects argument but he threw off the ‘trolls’ whose only interest is to disrupt… every now and then, one interrupts a thread, and in no time, Rob is there demanding evidence for views.
I have nothing invested in recommending this site. I find the conversations interesting and philosophical.
Yesterday’s top stories.
http://www.opednews.com/index.php
There is, actually, mike, but it is called charter schools, vouchers, on-line learning, and private schools. Parents are looking for ways of sneaking out of the public school system so the tyranny of testing won’t be used on their children. I like that phrase: Testing Tyranny.
I noticed in his post that John Thompson did not mention a single thing about the ACT, or the PSAT and SAT, or the Advanced Placement program.
The ACT test is produced by ACT, Inc. The College Board produces all the others. Both testing organizations were instrumental players in the development of the Common Core. Both say their products are “aligned” with it.
While some colleges have dropped any admissions requirement for the ACT or SAT, the number of those tests given each year to high school students is increasing, not decreasing. So, there has been no wholesale abandonment of the ACT and the SAT. Moreover, it’s not only corporate “reformers” (for example, Exxon Mobil) who push hard for more AP courses and test-taking, it’s also parents and teachers, and school counselors and administrators, and school boards.
The VAM lawsuit in Houston offers another. One of the teachers involved is an AP History teacher at a “gifted” magnet school. He’s been lauded as a “merit award winner.” That is, until his VAM score dropped him. Now he’s suing. So, why’d he take the bonus money if the first place? And why is he only questioning VAM which is, but the way, seriously worth questioning and fighting)? Why is he not also questioning the value of a small “gifted” magnet school that severely restricts its admissions which are based an awful lot on test scores? And why isn’t he questioning the value of the AP program, which research finds to be marginally helpful to students?
The Common Core has a lot of critics. Rightfully so. But it’s hard to condemn an engine of “change” when you keep using the engine’s essential parts.
So, can someone explain how the Common Core/corporate “reform” will die a slow (or fast) death when its essential elements are woven into the fabric of public schooling?
A very good question “democracy.”
Anyone?
Too stereotypically true. Is that Eugene Levy????
Ben Stein.
It’s not about win or lose between us and them. It is about a generation of students being improperly educated and it’s effects on our society. I, for one, don’t want these kids to be my doctor.
In trying to make AYP, schools have allowed students to act in appropriately because attendance was a second indicator, states have lowered the standards of proficiency in order that more students can pass, and parents have been conditioned to believe that the teacher is at fault if their child doesn’t do well. So now we have kids who think they are gifted because they got a 75 percent on a state test. We fool parents into thinking their children are proficient by deeming 50percent on a state test as “Meets Standard.”
It’s bigger than us versus them. It’s bigger than an educational trend. It’s about these kids entering society. It’s about how they they are not being taught personal responsibility because everything is the teacher’s fault. It’s about two hours of work being more important than a years worth. It’s about students who are not proficient being issued documents saying that they are.
The pendulum will swing. It always does. My grandma, who taught 50 years in Detroit Public Schools, told me that, but what do we do about those who have already been negatively impacted by these policies? What do we do with the kids who were cheated in the APS scandal? What do we do if this mass field test of Common Core fails? That is the true issue!!!