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
The school reform strategy for the last decade has been built on the belief that if you embarrass administrators, teachers, and students in public they will be motivated to do better on whatever institutional goals a legislature establishes. As yet, I have not come across a research article that concludes that humiliation is an effective motivational technique. In fact, I have read quite a few studies that the normal human response to continual humiliation is the shutting down of emotions and cognition. Judging from the conversations of teachers and students in my community, our governmental bodies are well along in achieving classrooms devoid of emotion, curiosity, and intelligent thinking.
Jonathan Lovell does indeed have a keen sense of “Pattern Recognition”, otherwise
known as INTELLIGENCE.
Numb your knees please, so as to prevent them from jerking…
Public Schooling was established by the Government. Was the “Intent” to share or spread “Power”, or maintain it? Note, it took “Power” to establish Public Schooling.
Was the intent to cultivate a culture, to inhibit disruptive thoughts or actions towards
the Government, by instilling the cherished illusion of a Government for the
people, by the people, and of the people?
Consider a “Fight” between Objectivity (Fair or Unbiased) and Subjectivity
(Influenced by emotion, ideology, or prejudice beliefs).
Does “Schooling” tolerate reflection-objectivity, today?
Schooling DID tolerate objectivity in the 60’s. Widespread “Consent” of Government
Policies (Voting,Civil/Women Rights, WAR) was diminished through Education.
Social changes came about.
Changes to Schooling was the answer to the “Social Unrest” or the rejection of
Government policies.
Now, the changes to Public Schooling, will intensify class stratification.
The Income Inequality of today is not by chance, but rather by design.
It required collective complacency as well as enablers.
Protesting the changes is a start.
What about the “Enable” part?
Why are we spending billions of dollars on a test to determine College Readiness when we already have two accepted national tests for this purpose? I thought the SAT and/or ACT were created for this purpose? If we want to tests students, why not use these established tests that we have been told can be used as a good indicator for future student success at the college level? Research shows these tests are somewhat reliable, so are we wasting huge amounts of tax dollars at a time when we have very limited resources for educating our children!? Maybe the new tests can be used to save students money so they will not get have to take these older tests and colleges will accept these new test scores instead? Otherwise, it seems the tests are excessive or maybe they are not really going to be used for determining college readiness, but for other purposes which we will hear about later after they are well established and it would be politically impossible to tell the public that the tests are a mistake, so now we find out that they can be used to judge how well Administrators, Teachers, and Schools are doing? Just wondering why?
Thanks so much for posting this email that I sent out the 200+ Directors of National Writing Project sites. Some directors are starting a new movement to counter the educational reform narrative. We’re calling ourselves the “Common Sense Movement” and referrring to ourselves as “commoners.” Hah!
I so love that term: common sense. These days it carries no weight because we can’t measure it. For those who are Dr. Who fans, you may remember the fate of Darleks when faced with situations they couldn’t “compute.” Just a bit of “creative destruction” on the part of the Doctor.
Thanks to Tom Paine for “Common Sense”. Perfect.
Thank you for this. It is a reminder that it is these professional conversations about excellent practice that should be commanding our attention and participation, not mindless and fear-driven test preparation. It surely tests the courage and professionalism of school leaders, who are challenged to maintain focus on what is educationally right for their students amid all the distraction.
Passion and practice! You have it exactly right. One way to combat the reformy narrative is to respond to it with passion. I have suggested that the “practice” response means doubling down on professionalism. I discuss it here.
http://russonreading.blogspot.com/2013/10/are-teachers-professionals.html