The corporate reform crowd thinks that fixing schools will fix poverty.
They say that poverty is an excuse for bad teachers.
They think that closing schools where test scores are low will improve education.
They have all kinds of wrong ideas, but wrongest of all is their notion that schools by themselves will fix the social order.
Gary Rubinstein has some interesting thoughts on that subject.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is just more sophistry by the reformers. I suspect the following are the real motivations behind this latest nonsense:
First, the reformers have yet another scapegoat for poverty. Now it’s the schools that are at fault, not the destruction of our social safety net, not the elimination of worker protections, not the imposition of fair taxation that enables the government to maintain our national infrastructure, and certainly not the actions of the 1% to extract all of the wealth of the U.S. economy for themselves alone. We don’t need to fix the failed and irrational policies of the past thirty years. No! We just have to reform the schools with for-profit charters, voucher plans and virtual “distance learning” that just happens to divert more tax money to … wait for it … the 1%!
And of course, never mind how all of these reforms are failures. By the time the public is fully aware of that fact, it will be too late to change and we’ll be on to the next scapegoat.
Second, this is just another impossible goal against which to conclude our schools are failures. The logic here is brilliant: Set the standard so impossibly high that the schools will be failures by default. Keep the focus on the unions and test scores, so the public won’t make the real connections between the economics policies of the past three decades but instead will follow the reformers in blind rage.
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Dear Mr. Job Creator, (I would have added Ms., but I’m not sure that will be an option in the near future.)
So you are a job creator. You will provide jobs today and in the future, for workers who have grown up in an over-tested society.
Will you evaluate every worker every year, from your lowest employee to the top (including yourself)? Will you evaluate them ALL by using the same test? Will you expect every member of your organization to know every aspect of your organization? (If so, there will be no need for ‘Undercover Boss’.) Will you lower your expectations of your high end employees, in an attempt to level the playing field? Will you expect the same expertise from your employees who have been there just two weeks, as you do those who have been there ten years? Will you use the same test as those in other industries? I mean, of course, you do want to standardize the testing to make sure all workers, no matter where they work, are proficient in all areas. When you have workers that the test indicates are not proficient, will you spend extra money and time to pull your workers from their usual assignments to drill them in the areas in which they failed (even if it has nothing to do with their current assignment)? Will you then employ extra people to drill these employees? Will you allow people outside your industry to develop the tests? When you have failing employees for too many years in a row, will you allow me and others like me, to come in and take over your company? It’s obvious that those in your industry don’t know what they are doing, or ALL of your employees would be proficient in all areas of every job. It will take someone from outside your industry to fix all your problems.
You can be a double job creator. Not only can you create jobs for your industry, but you can also create jobs in the testing industry. Perhaps you can get a double tax deduction for that.
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Hmm, as corporate education reform and privatization have proceeded over the past dozen years, poverty rates and income polarization have increased.
Like all compulsive liars, the ed deformers are in so deep, they can’t keep track of their dishonest statements, but will corporate media ever inform the general population of that?
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Anthony Cody hit this question out of the park this morning, in his blog over on Edweek Teacher.
Dialogue with the Gates Foundation: Can Schools Defeat Poverty by Ignoring It?
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/08/can_schools_defeat.html
My posts are being held this AM, so I’m going to try tweeting this. It’s an important discussion, and people should be following it in real time.
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That was excellent, and I think the nugget about test scores going down every time there is a murder nearby is especially worth noting.
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Poor interactions between family and child negatively impact brain development, relative to children from more advantaged backgrounds. This is science, not speculation. We don’t have to eradicate poverty to change that. Quality early childhood programs have been shown to change the path of disadvantaged kids’ lives. A 40-year study showed that disadvantaged children in a high-quality pre-school program started school with higher IQs, had less special education, higher graduation rates, less trouble with the law, and higher adult incomes than those without. Source: Schweinhart, L. J., Montie, J., Xiang, Z., Barnett, W. S., Belfield, C. R., & Nores, M. (2005). Lifetime effects: The HighScope Perry Preschool study through age 40.
The link between disadvantages in early childhood and subsequent school failure deserves a more prominent place in the education debate.
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“We don’t have to eradicate poverty to change that.”
The Perry Preschool Program was not just about early childhood education nor just about any kind of curriculum. It had strong parent compenents, such as weekly home visits by teachers who provided parent training. They also implemented the High/Scope curriculum, which is a play-based child-centered curriculum that focuses on active learning, not the academically oriented drill-for-skill curricula with flashcards and workbooks seen in many Preschool programs today. (I’ve implemented High/Scope and it addresses the whole child.)
Additionally, the Perry Preschool students had certified teachers, a low teacher-student ratio (1:6) and, while children in the study “had less special education” in subsequent years of schooling, they also had more non-special ed remedial services than those in the control group: http://www.promisingpractices.net/program.asp?programid=128
I’m a specialist in Early Childhood Education (ECE), so I know the importance of this study and don’t want to minimize the impact of it, because there were very significant results. However, there are also shortcomings that were pointed out to me in my doctoral training. The best outcomes were lower involvement in special ed, increased graduation rates and a decrease in the preschool to prison pipeline. However, this 21/2 hour per day preschool program could hardly be noted for lifting people out of poverty and into prosperity, considering we are not talking about many kids who went on to attend and complete college, and, by age 40, the average annual income was less than $23K –which is not very high, especially for those with children. (There is no data that I could find on these kids’ involvement in vocational and technical education training in their secondary education.)
http://evidencebasedprograms.org/wordpress/1366/65-2/
For the outcomes mentioned above, high quality ECE programs, with certified teachers, low teacher-student ratios and strong parent components, are a very worthwhile investment. However, just like education alone has not eradicated poverty over the past 50 years, I think it would be a huge mistake to believe that earlier education alone can do this either.
It’s time that we use more than a single pronged approach to addressing poverty, including providing vocational training in high school for those who want it and paying workers livable wages.
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A very thought-provoking article by Mr Rubinstein.
It does a good job of describing the out-of-school factors that impact school achievement and it accurately reflects the magnitude of those impacts based on current research.
Most importantly, it emphasizes that birth circumstances are not destiny. There’s some very good research on the impact teachers have on their students based on teacher beliefs about what those students can achieve. Even among the most challenging group of students, teachers who believe their students can succeed end up with more students succeeding.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting “teacher belief” is a panacea. It doesn’t turn the majority of children of poverty (and other risk factors) into high-school and college graduates. It doesn’t change the fact that out-of-school factors weigh more heavily than in-school factors. It’s not a substitute for lifting families out of poverty. To Diane’s main point, schools by themselves will not fix the social order.
I think Rubinstien makes two important points. First:
“And I think that everyone agrees that there is ‘some’ limit to what schools can overcome. It really is just a matter of degree.”
That’s a key in the debate. It’s not about the false notion that teachers don’t try to educate poverty-stricken chidren. It’s also not about the false notion that teachers and schools should able to offset all of the disadvantages children in poverty face every day.
Second:
“The thing everyone agrees on is that schools can be improved. So ‘reformers’ think they can be improved a lot and I [Rubinstein] think they can only be improved a little.”
I believe our schools can be improved more than a little – apparently more than Rubinstein – but not as much as he says ‘reformers’ believe.
Beyond that, all of us can choose examples to make our case that schools can be improved just a little, more than a little, or alot, according to our beliefs. There is research to support all of these claims. It’s a matter of which research one finds most compelling.
Michael, I think your name-calling of all education reformers (as “like all compulsive liars”) is unprofessional.
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