The reader writes: “One thing I have repeated heard in this
‘Ed Reform’ talk is that American kids need to ‘catch up’ with kids
from other countries because we are behind in those international
tests. I grew up in China, where there is very rigorous curriculum;
where frequent testing and ranking of students is part of a
student’s life the moment the child walks into a school; where
students do perform well in internationally-benchmarked tests. “Is
that what some ed reformers here are going after? If so, I would
suggest that they take a look at how lost and uninspired to learn
college freshman year students are in China; how students, even at
very young ages, cheat on tests so that they can rank higher in
their class and consequently get to better schools; how many
people, like myself, still have nightmares about not being able to
finish all the questions on a test, even in our adulthood. “Go
visit a Chinese airport, or bus stop, or subway station. See if you
can spot people reading while waiting. Likely not – because
people’s desire to read, to explore, to think and keep learning was
killed long ago, inside the schools, by those tests…”
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Diane Ravitch's Blog by Diane Ravitch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
All totalitarian governments have centralized standards, curricula, and approved pedagogical practices. There’s a reason for that.
But here in the U.S. we are witnessing the astonishing spectacle of business organizations like Achieve, the Business Roundtable, and the Chamber of Commerce putting their considerable muscle behind the creation of a distant, authoritarian, centralized, invariant, test-driven system very like those of the People’s Republic of China and the former Soviet Union. Bizarrely, our leading business organizations can’t wait to have in place a U.S. Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth.
Perhaps these organizations have become convinced that centralization of power and authority in the hands of a few bureaucrats is the way to get the sort of innovation in and variety that a complex, diverse, pluralistic society like ours needs.
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The reality is that, instead of a public governent that is theoretically open to citizen feedback, we now exist under private government, owned and managed by those with the biggest checkbooks.
How else to explain how Bill Gates has been able to almost single-handedly shape education policies across the country.
Wars, universal surveillance, schools, prisons and other social functins and institutions, publicly funded, but increasingly privately managed, based on policies that are themselves privately funded and developed.
Public money; private government.
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Mussolini defined fascism as the erasure of the line between government and corporations. It doesn’t matter whether it originates on the right or the left, fascism is fascism. And it doesn’t matter that there are people with good intentions enabling the creation of this unaccountable, invariant, centralized authority. What we will be left with is the system and its inevitable consequences. “I believe in standardizing automobiles, not people,” said Albert Einstein. Pretty smart guy.
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Well said, Michael!
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This is what these parents opposing
Common Core are
up against… told in a parody
of John King talking to his advisors:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKVkitKOgk
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Brilliant.
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Thanks for that Haloween treat! 🙂
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Halloween!!
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This is an extraordinarily moving post. The last line of the post is, I think, the definitive judgment on the current “reforms.” There is a not-so-hidden implicit lesson in every lesson that we teach: with every lesson, we teach kids to love or hate learning. Technocrats have a rage for order. They love checklists. Ask the author of this post what kinds of curricula and pedagogy flow from invariant checklists. Not the sort that inspires passion for learning, that’s for certain.
As Ken Robinson said in an interview recently, there’s not a single kid in America who gets up in the morning and races to school so that she can do her part to improve her state’s test average test scores.
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cx: inspire, not inspires
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Robert D. Shepherd: just consider this—when was you last time you heard education rheephormers wax rhapsodic about “joy of learning” and “lifelong learners” and “critical thinkers”?
On the rare occasions when they allude to the above, it’s an afterthought.
Caveat: in the eyes of the rheephormisas, a narrowed and lifeless education applies to OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN. For themselves and/or THEIR OWN CHILDREN, the leading charterites/privatizers ensure a very different sort of education.
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org [Bill Gates]
Link: http://schools.cranbrook.edu/home [Mitt Romney]
Link: http://www.sidwell.edu [President and Mrs. Obama]
Link: http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu [Mayor Rahm Emanuel]
Link: http://www.harpethhall.org [Michelle Rhee]
Don’t take my word for it. Visit the above websites. Then ask what they have in common with the mandates and public policy positions of those in pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$.
But don’t expect Superintendent John Deasy and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and ex-Chancellor of DCPS Michelle Rhee and CEO-for-hire Paul Vallas and the like to come clean. They’re true believers:
“A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true.” [Demosthenes]
Those old dead Greek guys knew a thing or two…
🙂
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Great post, Krazy. Clearly, these people have in mind a kind of training for the proles that differs dramatically from the education that their children get!
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Interesting that you mention China and the Soviet Union. I have been thinking the same thing lately. Fred Koch, the Koch brothers father, made his fortune in oil in the Soviet Union.
I think this documentary trailer looks great. It’s called Standardized and is being done by a Pennsylvania teacher, Daniel Hornberger. It says it’s coming out this fall, but no date is mentioned yet…
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I may be wrong about this, Jennifer, but I believe that the Koch brothers have not joined the billionaire boy’s club that is pushing top-down, totalitarian regulation on our nation’s schools. Those guys are very politically active, but they’ve steered clear of this one. I suspect that they have done so on principle. There are people on all parts of the political spectrum who understand that our strength lies in our diversity, not in uniformity.
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cx: boys’ club
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They are very much against teachers’ unions and collective bargaining. They bankrolled Scott Walker in Wisconsin and I believe they have been active in promoting school board candidates around the nation.
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Thanks for the link, Jennifer!
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Your Welcome! I emailed Daniel Hornberger. He says he hopes to finish the final editing this week, with a goal to show in select cities in late November and the beginning of December. Then it will be available on Vimeo in the new year.
It might be a good ice breaker and talking point to discuss opting out on testing?
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Capitalism is an amoral economic system, it should not be confused with a governmental system or democracy. Capitalism can function very well in totalitarian fascist regimes such as those of Pinochet’s Chile or Franco’s Spain. Obviously predatory crony capitalism is functioning very well (for the top 1%, not the workers so much) in the authoritarian police state of communist China. If there were truth in advertising, then Chinese products would say Made In Communist China.
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Joe, the visions of a nation of competing shopkeepers and of a nation ruled by monopolists’ wind-up toys are, I think, very different from one another.
Technology can be neutral–trains can be used to enable people to move around freely, or they can be used to cart millions of people to death camps. We could be using the Internet to have students do individualized research and study of a kind unprecedented in history. But plans are in place for using it, instead, as a vehicle for pushing canned curricula through a few portals controlled by a few monopolists. And national standards were a necessary first step toward that end.
Orwell’s IngSoc would have LOVED to have the technologies for centralization and surveillance that are now being developed, which far surpass anything that prescient genius ever dreamed of. A free people will resist a) national standards, b) national tests, c) national databases of student responses and scores. We have the existence proofs, from places like Nazi Germany, the former Soviet Union, the Peoples Republic of China, etc., of what happens when one places the power to make standards, curricula, and pedagogical approaches in the hands of the few.
We need alternative visions of standards, curricula, and pedagogy that compete with one another. We need for teachers and administrators and students and parents to choose from among these and to submit them to continuous improvement. The deformers ask, “Well, what’s your alternative?” That’s the alternative. Freedom.
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I hope we aren’t just blowing smoke here but seriously and deeply understand that centralized control in the desperate hands of corporations is not a possibility but a reality. Our public schools are the canary in the coal mine but so are the good parents of NY who are attending those John King meetings in droves and singing out for all they are worth against the imposed tyranny. A brave teacher calling for a city-wide strike to depose their Greasy-Deasy Superintendent is yet another harbinger of things to come. Our ancestors stood up during the Robber Baron era and fought the bosses for all they were worth. We need to quickly re-read that history and absorb the flavor of the ferment as we are now being called upon to respond in similar fashion.
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Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff: “The new standards are about creating national markets for products that can be brought to scale.”
A few big products from a few big-box providers delivered through “push-medium” portals controlled by those providers. And all enabled by the creation of a single set of national standards and by the revision by Duncan of the regulation that prohibited turning over private student data to corporations without parental consent.
Read Arne Duncan’s technology blueprint, issued at the beginning of his tenure. It was basically the recipe for this fascist centralization of U.S. education.
The national standards (as opposed to voluntary, competing standards) are the engine that is running the totalitarian juggernaut. And bizarrely, the teacher’s unions can’t stop singing its praises. “There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.”
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cx: their praises, not its praises. I do wish that this blog allowed one to edit posts!
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Thank you Robert for all the good analysis. Again, Stalin’s bullet list is not a throwaway comment. I knew someone on that list and from the list she landed in one of his prisons and after that she survived to educate imaginations about the pathological possible. We are way beyond the point of Eternal Vigilance. Mr. Duncan wants us to sacrifice our educational liberty on the altar of yet another corporate bailout built upon the backs of children. We’ve been here before, in 1903 to be precise, when Mother Jones marched with children from PA to NY carrying banners that read, “We Want To Play” and “We Want To Go To School” Today we would mean a real school where children learn deeply, creatively and in the company of competent, courageous teachers.
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THANK YOU, Robert. Most don’t know the torrid details of all this totalitarian repression in schools. Follow the money and fnd out whose palms are being greased at the expense of the rest of us…who the rich think are suckers.
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Well said, Ms. Irwin! “[S]he survived to educate imaginations about the pathological possible.” We need that sort of education right now. We need it badly.
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“…people’s desire to read, to explore, to think and keep learning was
killed long ago, inside the schools, by those tests.”
Oh, so it’s a win-win for the corporate reformers, then.
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good point, Ron!
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Given the substantial differences between East Asians and other populations in average cognitive levels and other personality traits there is probably little point in comparing them. No matter what pedagogical model is adopted the academic performance of the Han Chinese will probably be consideraly higher than most other populations. No doubt this has been true since the time of the Shang dynasty.
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Diane, you need a flag button. In any case, consider this guy flagged.
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YIKES.
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“Average cognitive levels” of racial/ethnic groups?
Wow, just wow.
Sir, please stop with that sort of talk. It is unsubstantiated and offensive.
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Jim, what utter nonsense!!! Really, you must be reading a lot of skinhead comic books purporting to be studies of the genetics of intelligence.
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You really need to learn a little something about epigenetics, buddy. You are stuck in the 1920s. That heritability of IQ!
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“That heritability of IQ!”
Or the notion that IQ testing measures anything at all…
Calling Duane!
😉
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Ang,
Precise and to the point your comment!! Thanks!! Hard to inherit something that doesn’t exist, i.e., IQ, and that lacks an agreed upon definition.
However that is not to discount the fact that all people are inherently different and that it is wrong for the public schools to discriminate as they currently do through rewards and sanctions against those who don’t have the inherent capabilities to complete standardardized multiple guess bubble in tests. To me there is no difference whatsoever in discrimination and its harms whether it is racial, gender, age and/or mental capabilities. And no, it doesn’t matter if there are “rewards” to counteract the sanctions.
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Jim does not mention inheritability of IQ. He specifically mentions that Chinese have excelled in academics since the time of the Shang dynasty. I believe he is referencing the cultural importance that Chinese place on education since that time, though I would date it more from the Tang dynasty.
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Abby, he spoke of “substantial differences between East Asians and other populations in average cognitive levels.” And we’ve had an ongoing discussion, Jim and I, about this heritability issue. Those who think that general cognitive levels are inherent attributes of entire populations tend to be those a) who believe that there is something called general intelligence, b) believe that race is a scientific concept, c) believe that general intelligence is measured by IQ tests, and d) believe that general intelligence is highly heritable. From previous interactions with Jim on this blog, I believe that these are his positions. Jim can correct me if I am wrong here. I also think that each item on that list is demonstrably false.
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As a teacher who learns about and teaches the Holocaust, the kind of comments Jim makes smack of eugenics and the “superiority” of “races.” Makes my skin crawl…
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Krazy, I read Ordinary Men on your recommendation. I’m still recovering from that. Wow. Have you read this?
It’s a breathtaking book about the eugenics movement in the U.S. in the first part of the last century and its connections to the Nazis. It’s a great read.
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Sorry, I meant to direct that post to Louisiana Purchase. You were, I think, the one who recommended that book to me, correct?
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Dienne, werebat73, Ang & Robert D. Shepherd: your reactions point to why I recommend people read Stephen Jay Gould’s THE MISMEASURE OF MAN (the 1996 revised and expanded paperback edition). There is also the more recent INTELLIGENCE AND HOW TO GET IT (2010 paperback edition) by Richard E. Nisbett [thank you for the recommendation, Robert D. Shepherd], with the caveat that readers should be wary of the author’s seemingly naive reliance on the soundness of claims made by both Dr. Eric Hanushek and the KIPP charter chain.
werebat73: “Yikes” hardly begins to cover it. But thank you for keeping Diane’s ‘Rules of the Road’ in mind.
Ang: You are a lot more polite than I am. But I thank you for your directness and civility.
Y’all keep posting, I’ll keep reading.
🙂
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One thing on which I agree with Arne Duncan. He asked how many Nobel prizes, how many patents have Chinese educated students produced? Contrast that with how many American students have produced?
Too, years ago Bill Moyers had a program: “A World of Ideas” in which he talked with people about important ideas. One high ranking Chinese teacher on science commented that Chinese students did not question what the professor said, only accepted as fact that which was presented. American students were asked to think more in depth about scientific “facts” and to question the validity of accepted perceived knowledge at the time. Thus Americans were far ahead in scientific inquiry., in critical thinking, in creative endeavors
Our school system at one time had science coordinators, both of whom received doctorates and eventually taught at the college level. As our science coordinators they implemented the “Science a process approach” in which students performed experiments and then were asked to express what THEY saw happening, developing the scientific mind set but also critical thinking skills. In other words, they were developing that scientific inquiry of looking beyond the printed page.
It is interesting that our school board did not approve. They wished children to learn the “facts”, to use prepared text books and no longer does our school system have science coordinators – nor may I add, music and art coordinators.
That kind of mind set is what is destroying “education” in our public schools today. Those who know not that they know not are absolutely certain that they know, they fall for the propaganda promoted by those who see our children as widgets, gadgets into which they acquire enough perceived “knowledge” to work in their corporations but not enough “wisdom” to think for themselves. Thinking becomes dangerous. Do as you are told. Do as I say and perform your job.
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Gordon – Whites have often been favorably compared with East Asians in regard to creativity. It is possible that whites may have an advantage in creativity but the importance of this may not be as great as one might be inclined to think. Cultural innovations by one group are often quickly copied by other groups and so may confer little long-term advantage.
For example Indo-Europeans were among the first peoples to use spoked wheels. But not so long after the initial appearance of spoked wheels north of the Black Sea, spoked wheels quickly spread throughout almost all of Eurasia.
In contrast to the cultural advantage of spoked wheels, Cochran has suggested that lactose tolerance on the part of Indo-Europeans may have been a more important factor in their startling expansion. Lactose tolerance was an advantage that could not be copied.
In modern times American whites developed transistor technology but East Asians were quick to take advantage of this technology. So the invention of transistors was of little aid to whites in competition with East Asians. It may be that there is little evolutionary selection for high creativity.
In older times Europeans quickly adopted East Asian innovations such as the cross bow, gunpowder, rockets and cannons.
Perhaps creativity is not as advantageous as sometimes thought.
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Flagged!
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Holy cow! Jim’s comment is incredibly offensive. In theory, I know such racism still exists, but it’s hard to see it in living color, as it were.
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Jim, you really need to learn a little something about epigenetics. You are stuck in the 1920s. That heritability of IQ stuff has been entirely discredited. It’s based on antiquated models that just happened to confirm the racist prejudices of the model makers.
Is there some sort of automatic switch in your head, Jim, that causes you to spew racist nonsense every time cross-cultural comparisons are made? You can doubtless get some treatment for that.
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The fact is that there is more variability within putative racial groups than there is, on average, across them. The concept of race lacks scientific validity. And, epigenetic studies have shown that tests involving identical twins generally do NOT control for environmental factors, as people once thought they did. The environment of the mother affects the environment of the DNA in her eggs, and that environment in turn has dramatic consequences for gene expression.
There’s a moral to all that–you can address disparities of attainment by addressing environmental circumstances. Give me a pauper and the necessary resources, and I’ll make you a prince.
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The glory of our schools has long been that they have produced a lot of independent thinkers. More of that!
I suspect that the desires both for autonomy and for social acceptance both run deeply in everyone and that cultures differ, considerably, in their traditional emphases on one or the other–in the extent to which they allow these propensities to flourish. There is a traditional Japanese expression that “The nail that sticks up will be pounded down.” But there is also a strong reaction against that view among young people in Japan today, as there should be. Many Japanese, today, are extremely troubled by ijime, or bullying directed toward those who differ. That’s a positive thing, I think, and I suspect that this reaction is a sign that something valuable and innate in all people–the need for a reasonable degree of autonomy and self-direction–has been too long suppressed.
I am deeply troubled by the suggestion that such differences are innate. I recall, for example, that in Mein Kampf, Hitler made the insane claim that there were “culture-creating” and “parasitic, culture-stealing and culture-destroying” races, and there never was any substantiation for such a wild and dangerous claim. However, that claim was his basis, his justification, for his unspeakable crimes.
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cx: that should be iijime
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Returning to the subject at hand, if you want to drive people, over time, to move their children to private schools, a really good way to do that is to institute national standards for the public schools because those will inevitably lead to mediocrity in curricula and in pedagogy. The kids will be bored to tears, and they won’t learn much, and they will cry and complain, and parents, not being stupid, will want to get their kids the hell away from the schools controlled by the Common Core Curriculum Commissariat. So, if the goal is to destroy public schooling, then national standards are just the means to do that. It will take a few years, but it will be quite effective.
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I worked for a short time in a Chinese public middle school, and it was distressing to me to see the stress the children go through every day. Their teachers are truly like dictators, the students like tiny soldiers. My class was a chance for them to relax a little bit, and the students often complained to me about how much homework they had to do. They didn’t have free time during holidays because they had too much to do. I thought my own time in American public schools was difficult, but I can’t imagine growing up in a Chinese one.
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Thank you for this, Ms. Dallmann! It’s great to hear from someone with actual experience in such a school.
Why on earth would we want to emulate such a system? And why on earth would the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, and Achieve want us to do so? It’s really frightening that they would be both so forceful in pushing forward that agenda and so clueless about what it means.
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Alternately, it might be really frightening that they are not at all clueless about what it means.
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Exactly. They aren’t clueless at all.
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Reply to Robert Shephard at 9:41 AM–if you have not done so yet, you must see Robert Greenwald’s excellent documentary, “Koch Brothers Exposed.” Indeed, they interfered in the Wake County, NC school board elections whereby there were attempts to re-segregate the Wake County Schools. The documentary is available on You Tube in its entirety–it is a must-see.
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Interestingly, there has been a conservative backlash against the CC, and it’s growing, as it should. There are people on both the left and the right who oppose the creation of a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth because, whatever their other differences, they don’t like fascist, top-down mandates. Politico reported that the Koch brothers have funded groups opposing the CC, but the statement it made about this is nebulous. I don’t trust it. Rumor has it that the Koch brothers are not crazy about the idea of creating a distant, centralized, totalitarian authority to dictate educational policy to local teachers, administrators, and school boards. If that’s true, then good for them. I also read, recently, that when physicist Richard Muller, funded by the Kochs, did his metastudy of anthropogenic climate change and issued his report saying that it was real, the Koch brothers did nothing to try to suppress the report, despite having funded it and despite its contradicting their strongly hold position on the issue. That shows some real integrity.
It’s good to see that there are some issues on which people on the left and the right can find common ground–opposition to the standards-and-testing juggernaut being a fine example of this.
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I would like to see mental health research related to education in China. I would imagine there are a lot of people that might need support in this area.
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What are the suicide rates for students?
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I love this post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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