Jonathan Lovell, who teaches writing at San Jose State, believes that it is time to stop the punitive reform train that seeks to crush public education and brand it a failure with phony metrics.

The Krytonite of our cause: Passion and Practice.

Lovell writes:

Please bear with me for a moment as I place our five years of work in producing Passion and Practice within a larger picture. It’s one I find both compelling and disturbing.

As Diane Ravitch, along with several others, have begun to say with greater and greater clarity and force(see https://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/24/the-biggest-fallacy-of-the-common-core-standards-no-evidence/), the “roll out” of the Common Core Standards represents the culmination of a 13 year “educational reform narrative” that has labeled K-12 schools as failing and teachers, and teachers’ unions, as the primary cause of this failure.

In an essay I wrote earlier this fall on income inequality and student achievement (see http://jonathanlovell.blogspot.com) I address the question of who is most likely to gain, and who to suffer, from the spring 2015 implementation of the CCS assessments. I’ve received slightly over 2700 “page visits” to this essay over the past two months, using the simple but apparently effective technique of sending it out to friends and colleagues and asking them to so the same, if on reading the essay they find it thought provoking.

I wonder if I might ask you as well to do the same: take the 15 minutes I’m told it takes to read this essay, and then send it along to friends and colleagues, asking them to do the same?

My hope is that, acting together,we might bring a modicum of common sense to the seeming juggernaut of the national accountability movement. It’s also my hope that we might be able to do so before this quite small group of high level “educational reformers” takes the entire system of public education over a cliff in the spring of 2015–when the “results” of the nationwide testing of K-12 students in relation to their CCS proficiency levels are quite likely to be used to demonstrate that public education, “just as we’ve been told,” is indeed going to hell in a hand-basket.

I believe that there are two potentially effective ways to counter this narrative. One is to become as familiar as possible with the counter arguments that Diane Ravitch makes so eloquently in the opening chapters of Reign of Error (see https://dianeravitch.net/2013/10/12/jonathan-lovell-channels-john-keats-while-reading-reign-of-error/ for my own “review” of this book), and to write and talk about these “facts” vs the “hoaxes” we’ve been subjected to with as many different audiences as possible over the next year and a half. The other is to demonstrate as clearly as we can that the “teachers are failures” part of this argument is demonstrably false.

I hope that Passion and Practice will be seen, in years to come, as the opening salvo of this larger national “counter-narrative.”

My very best,
Jonathan Lovell, Director, San Jose Area Writing Project