Earlier today there was a good exchange on the idea of finding common ground. Robert Shepherd explained why it should happen, and Ira Shor said it would not happen in light of the unreasonable attacks on teachers and public schools.
As it happens, Jeff Bryant addressed the same issues two years ago..
He commented today:
“Why there is not a middle ground in the education debate:
key graph:
“Before our country can even attempt to work toward a middle ground in the education debate, we have to establish where that middle ground is. First, with over 85 percent of our nation’s school-aged children attending public schools, public schools will not go away. And insisting on getting rid of them is pure nihilism. Second, public schools cannot be run like businesses, our children are not widgets, and profit cannot be the driving motive for institutions whose mission is to provide all children access to quality education. And third, creating and administering public schools is a democratic process, and no actor in this process can be allowed to control it, no matter how much money they have.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Come into my middle ground, said the Spider to the Fly.
LOL!
No middle ground… therefore, BIG BUSINESS GET OUT! RHEEFORMERS GET OUT! DATA MINERS GET OUT! HIGH STAKES TESTING CORPORATIONS GET OUT! ANYONE WHO REFUSES TO LISTEN TO TEACHERS GET OUT!!!!! Was that loud enough?
I concur!
Amen, amen, amen. Take with you the “One Size Fits All” curriculum that insists all student brains are created equal. They are not. Throw out the notion that vocational classes are just for the “under-classes”. Don’t hold back the gifted students who crave more depth and force them to fit in the “grade level” curriculum box. Everyone will not play on the football team, be admitted to Mu Alpha Theta, or sing solo in the Concert Choir. We live in a competitive world where talent still matters. In fact, our society is obsessed with it. Discouraging students from pursuing what they love or forcing them into a rigorous academic curriculum they detest is a recipe for creating a society of angry drop-outs who take no joy in learning..
Thanks for reminding us!
It would be great to find a middle ground of compromise and consensus. But ed reformers have a scorched earth policy (done with a smile on their faces).
However, the public schools must become different than they currently are, schools for the development of the individual intellects that will carry on the work of democracy, of governance by and for and of the people, government that is humane in its ways because it truly is for the people and not for the good of corporations, unless, of course, those corporations are humane and run for the welfare of the people. While defending public schools, and they deserve our fierce support if they are the people’s schools, we must insure that they are not about indoctrination or jobs training but about a freed and democratic people engaged in the process of decision making. They should never be places where traditions places where the tradition of a democratic discourse examines traditions and does with them what is necessary to bring about good futures.
Education does need reform! Of course it does and this is a revolutionary society, revolutionary in that through the democratic process, aided by the good minds of a well educated public, thinks its way to the more perfect union. Education cannot be hogtied by scripts or tests, but, instead, it must be the means by which a free people is learn how to exercise freedom and defend that freedom so not to be stifled by those who wish to use education to control.
While it might be a good thing to fight those who are now called the “educational reformers,” it is also good to consider who it is who controls the public schools now, their agenda, and the kind of schools we need to give democracy a chance to breath life back into our other than healthy society. If those fighting the fight against the “reformers” care nothing about reform, then what is to prevent people from buying in and giving into the very people who have co-opted the title of reformer?
..and this is called developing critical thinking skills…not to happen through endless standardized tests, but rather through creative process and some Socratic method…at almost all grade levels.
We as a country need to wake up. The achievement gap starts way before our children enter our schools. Do we need to do a better job educating our kids? Yes. However, let’s quit blaming schools for what we as a society and government refuse to confront. We turn the other way as our children go unprotected. We turn a deaf ear to the children being raised in horrible environments of emotional abuse, neglect, rejection, raised under damaging stress that impacts brain development, and then we ignore the problem by getting caught up in the blaming debate on how bad our schools are. More cases than not go unreported for sexual abuse and physical abuse. Why are we not protecting our children? Damaged children grow up to be damaged adults. How many more violent acts on the innocent is it going to take, before we hold parents accountable? To reach common ground, we need to sit in a kindergarten room and see just how damaged our children are that enter our schools every day. Why can’t we work collaboratively to confront the problem and quit playing the blame game…..from both sides. It used to be said that early intervention needs to start at age five….then ages 3-4, and now we are in such crisis that the intervention needs to happen from 0-3. The ACE Study, one of the longest research study on brain development in our country, has the data and risk factors that show exactly where we need to be advocating for our children. Politicians ignore it because they don’t want to take this crisis on. It is much easier for them to blame our schools. However, we as the school system have a very important role in serving these high needs students. We have our own challenge not to label and judge these students who are acting out their pain. For me, common ground would be working in collaboration to protect our kids. Schools aren’t off the hook, we can seek greater understanding on how to work with high stress students and keep them connected verses throwing them out when they get older. There is common ground, how willing are we to stand up and say, “You do not have the right to raise your child in “toxic stress” nor negatively impact their development which puts them way behind their peers. Every child deserves to be loved and valued…..how can we start to make this happen?
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 educrats 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 practices for all students, 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 years 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 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.
When will we ever learn?
Probably never (and that’s my optimistic response). See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDZ8BN0ZfvU for Joan Baez’s version.
The steps listed above could also guide future legislation to protect public schools from “reformers” who would exploit it again.
These paragraphs, which advocate a different debate about schools from the one taking place in the media, is taken from the “About” section of my blog:
“Discourse on public education is stuck in a rut because the public thinks of public schools as factories. When I shared this observation with some colleagues a few years ago, their response was “So what? Everyone knows that! What difference does it make”. Their rejoinder was partially true. First, NOT everyone knows that schools are modeled after factories. Secondly, the notion that school-is-a-factory is so ingrained that we cannot conceive of a different method for organizing education. Finally, it DOES make a difference because when we unwittingly accept the notion that schools can only be organized like they are today we avoid asking questions like:
Why do we group students in grade levels based on their age?
Why do we group students within a particular grade level based on their rate of learning?
Why do we group students at all?
Why does school take place in a limited time frame?
Why do we believe there is “one best way” to educate ALL children?
All of these practices are in place because they result in “efficiency” in the factory school… and until we change our minds about how schools are organized, until we replace our conception of schools as a factory with a new mental model, we will continue measuring “quality” by giving standardized tests to students grouped in “grade levels” and recycling “new ideas” and “reforms” based on ways to run the factory more efficiently.”
My belief: the parents who are opting out of testing are rebelling not against testing, but against the factory model of schooling that treats their child like a widget instead of an individual. Those parents are talking among themselves and may soon find themselves attending home-school collaboratives that emphasize caring and cooperation instead of the for profit factory schools the privatizers are opening that emphasize competition.
Thanks Diane! How little the situation has changed since I posted that.
Jeff,
The situation HAS changed in that more and more parents, students, teachers, principals, and school boards are loudly protesting the abuse heaped on the schools by federal and state policymakers. There is a growing protest movement and it can’t be ignored.
Diane
If Diane Ravitch is correct that removing the bottom 10% of students in poverty from international comparisons places U.S. student achievement at the top, why are we even having a debate about education???? Seems to me the debate should be about the incredibly high rates of poverty in the U.S. as compared to other industrialized nations.
@ Michael. Exactly.
Diane is right that the situation has changed insofar as an opposition is consolidating from the bottom up to oppose the plunder of our public schools from the top down. Michael Brocoun just above is also right that the prime issue here is poverty–economic ineq complicated by racism–three times as many black/hispanic kids grow up in poverty as do white kids–NO advanced nation has so many kids in poverty as does the US while our billionaires add more and more to their vast wealth(corps. now have $4.75TRILLION in cash on hand, refusing to spend it). Diane has often said that we need to solve poverty as a foundation for equalizing school achievement, amen. Pub schl advocates can win when we support a strong equality program in society to a school renewal based in small classes for ALL kids, rich arts and humanities studies for ALL kids–dance, music, drawing, painting, history projects, media experiments in community research, scientific study of the food, water, air, noise, animals, and architecture in the locales where kids live, lots of story-telling and reading with libraries in each classroom as well as full-time librarians, nurses, and counselors in each school not only those charters with hedge-fund backers, with parent educators and family organizers on staff. In sum, we already know what is needed and have known for a while how to make public schools vibrant sites of critical learning and developmental fun for all our kids. Making billionaires richer and edu-shysters like Rhee rich and famous spells the graveyard of our pub schls, for which we already have the professional knowledge needed to make them the best and must insist on the resources and the authority to do so.
The profit motive is wrong for education because there’s more than one way to make a profit.
The ones Wall Street would like us to believe is making a profit by provide the best product for the best price in the most efficient way possible and betting on which businesses will succeed and investing in them.
But there are a couple of other ways to turn a profit they would like us to not notice so much:
You can make an inferior product and sell it for the same or slightly less than your competitors (until people realize what you’re doing).
You can make a profit by cheating your workers out of fair wages.
You can make a profit through developing a monopoly or collusion and price fixing with competitors.
You can make a profit by betting on a business to fail.
You can make an even bigger profit by betting on a business to fail while convincing others it will succeed.
Worst for our purposes and probably in reality, you can make a profit by getting a contract to provide government services, so you are paid with our taxes, and the only “customer” you have to please are the same politicians who gave you the contract and judge your performance more on your ongoing campaign contributions and future job offers than how well you are doing the job you’re paid to do.
The reformers—and what a joke that is—-need to take their snake oil and move on. If the Public Schools go, Democracy won’t be far behind.