Robert Shepherd has long experience writing and editing textbooks and assessments. I appreciate his kind comments about my book, written in the 1990s, but also his recognition that “reforms” come and go with regularity. My comment: The current wave of phony reforms is the most destructive in the history of American education.
He writes:
“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?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
They will move on after they realize the failings? I wish I could believe it. The Big$CorpEdReformers are raking in the dough and will not let go anytime soon. We are assuming they care about kids, teachers and educational outcome. I don’t think that in a minute. This machine will be fine-tuned and the kids’ failure & teachers’ failure will fuel their financial pockets to the brim.
The past was made up of differences of ideas, now it is ALL ABOUT MONEY, AND LOTS OF IT! They hit the MotherLoad!
Gates sounds like the biggest Dummy, but what does he care? He is surrounded by legislative & educational Dummies and they think they are brilliant because the financial accounts tell them so.
I honestly do not think of a way out, except total boycott by teachers and parents. Not going to happen. So sad about our future in education!
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Where have all the flowers gone? As they steal the joy from education, a whole generation of children will experience a barren dust bowl, where the sun is blackened. The data oppresion on children must cease.
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I worry a lot whether public schools will continue to exist in some states. Our organization, Texas Kids Cant Wait, has felt overwhelmed at times this legislative session about the sheer number of privatization bills, all either sponsored by Sen. Dan Patrick or by someone close to him. We have been battling a big charter (what is in reality the gateway drug to privatization) expansion bill, a parent-trigger bill, opportunity scholarships, taxpayer savings grants, achievement district, “FamiliesFirstSchools”, home-rule districts, vouchers for kids with disabilities, online course expansion, numerous bills to close public schools and turn them over to private charter companies, and on and on. A friend said it is as if they threw a whole bowl full of spaghetti at the wall, believing something would stick.
Every one of the ALEC bills we have seen introduced in other states has been introduced in Texas this year.
The privatizers have also held hostage the very popular bills such as HB 5 to reduce testing significantly unless their privatization bills advanced, and advance they have. So lots of folks are playing poker with kids’s lives and futures.
What keeps many of us fighting 20 hours a day and digging into our own pockets to fund the work is our understanding that these bills are not the end game. We’ve read the web sites, beginning with Milton Freidman’s epistle on the Cato Institute’s website, that lay out the insidious plan we are seeing played out. We have also read Naomi Klein’s brilliant book, Shock Doctrine.
First, impose ridiculous standards and assessments on every school.
Second, create cut points on the assessments to guarantee high rates of failure. (I was in the room when it was done in the State of Delaware, protesting all the way, but losing).
Third, implement draconian accountability systems designed to close as many schools as possible. Then W took the plan national with NCLB.
Fourth, use the accountability system to undermine the credibility and trust that almost everyone gave to public schools. increase the difficulty of reaching goals annually.
Fifth, de-professionalize educators with alternative certification, merit pay, evaluations tied to test scores, scripted curriculum, attacks on professional organizations, phony research that tries to make the case that credentials and experience don’t matter, etc.
Sixth, start privatization with public funded charters with a promise that they will be laboratories of innovation. Many of us fell for that falsehood. Apply pressure each legislative session to implement more and more of them. Then Arne Duncan did so on steroids.
Seventh, use Madison Avenue messaging to name bills to further trick people into acceptance, if not support, of every conceivable voucher scheme. The big push now as states implement Freidman austerity budgets to create a crisis is to portray vouchers as a cheaper way to “save” schools. The bills that would force local boards to sell off publicly owned facilities for $1 each is also part of the overall scheme not only to destroy our schools, but also to make it fiscally impossible for us to recover them if we ever again elect a sane government. Too, districts had to make cuts in their budgets in precisely the areas that research says matter most: quality teachers, preschool, small classes, interventions for struggling students, and rigorous expectations and curriculum. See our report: http://www.equitycenter.org. Click on book, Money STILL Matters in bottom right corner.
Eighth, totally destroy public education with so-called universal vouchers. They have literally already published the handbook. You can find it numerous places on the web.
Ninth, start eliminating the vouchers and charters, little by little.
And, tenth, totally eliminate the costs of education from local, state, and national budgets, thereby providing another huge transfer of wealth through huge tax cuts to the already-billionaire class.
And then only the wealthy will have schools for their kids.
Aw, you may say. They can’t do that! My response is that yes, they most certainly will unless you and I stop it!
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One of the reasons why the takeover of education by “reformy” leaders who are neither qualified nor experienced in education, occurs so easily in America, is that too many academics in the graduate schools of education and too many schools of education have essentially removed themselves and their research programs from schools and schooling. I was guilty of this myself, moving farther and farther away from the stuff of schooling and teaching, because of my narrow academic interest area, which was only remotely related to the teaching and schooling, Although I did eventually leave academia for the much more challenging work of founding, running and turning around schools, the vast chasm between the world of academic education and the practical work of teaching and running schools, never ceases to shock me. In this last decade of involvement as a school leader its mindboggling how few of my peers were academics (or even Phd’s in education) of any kind. MBAs, Ivy league undergrads, etc abound.I couldn’t even speak the language of reformers because it really wasn’t educational academic language. Many of the “entrepreneurial” ideas being bantered around had no basis in educational research. I remember a talk by the former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine as he was moving on, about the pressing need for schools of education, to return to the roots of educational research – how to best run and teach in schools. Too much of educational research has little or no relevance to schooling. Too many applied areas that we need critical answers to, the research is poor or nonexistence. In a vacuum of research based answers, its easy for the reformy crowd to come in, with their fancy marketing, and their revolutionary talk, and their impatience with the status quo (and the somewhat dissatisfied public) and loads and loads of $ and takeover the whole system. Mind you I think most reformers are well meaning (and in the front lines there isn’t a conspiracy) and do care for children (even if they do not know enough to actually fix it and may actually end up doing more harm). Part of this is our own (academics) fault.
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It is not infrequent on ed blogs to read comments that treat high-stakes standardized tests as almost-completed masterpieces, soon-to-be-perfected models of assessment and even instruction, sparkling elixirs of educational alchemy that need only a little more time—just a little more!—and ¡voilá! we will have created that silver bullet that will slay the werewolf of ignorance.
Slightly more modest is the “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good” argument that while we may never create the ideal standardized test, we’re making loads and loads of progress and should be awfully proud of all the wonderful tweaks and fixes and improvements that characterize twenty first century innovaty high-stakes standardized tests.
Seems that $tudent $ucce$$ is just around the corner.
Here on Planet Reality we like to apply what we call a ‘reality check’ to these outlandish claims. Read Banesh Hoffman’s THE TYRANNY OF TESTING (1962). Then read Todd Farley’s MAKING THE GRADES: MY MISADVENTURES IN THE STANDARDIZED TESTING INDUSTRY (2009). Then google “pineapple” and “hare” and “Daniel Pinkwater.”
Then I would like someone to explain to the rest of us—with a straight face and with her/his real name and reputation on the line—how after the 50 years encompassed by the three items I have listed,
THEY STILL HAVEN’T GOTTEN IT RIGHT???
The silence is deafening.
Keepin’ it real.
Not Rheeal.
🙂
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I hasten to add to my comments above that there are extremely valuable roles for assessments but for ones very different from those we are now giving. The problems with the current testing regimen are these:
that the tests are high stakes,
that they are uniform (or nearly so) for all students,
that they are entirely summative, and
that they are very, general, very blunt instruments that do not probe the enormous range of possible directions in which students can and should develop in a complex, pluralistic society in which innovation and uniqueness are essential.
I wish that this were the proper forum to go into each of these. But these are complex matters.
This much is clear: one-size-fits-all high-stakes standardized testing is voodoo. It’s magic medicine. Like most easy answers to complex questions, it’s no answer at all.
When I consider the current high-stakes standardized testing mania, I often think of the tongue-in-cheek title that Robert Graves once gave to a collection of his essays: Difficult Questions, Easy Answers.
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It has seemed to me for a very long time that once some silly, ineffective process, product or procedure has been discarded by our “betters” in business, law or finance it finds a home in public education. It is not welcomed by teachers, but imposed from on high. About 30 years ago, I attended a presentation in which the prescient speaker sketched out a teacher’s world. Up above were the gods of Mt. Olympus, hurling thunderbolts of policy and “new” ideas at the mere mortal classroom teachers below. Too busy teaching their classes, the mortals were always taken unawares and could not protect themselves – they could only react to avoid being struck down and killed.
True then, even truer now.
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