In the early 1980s, our political leaders went into a panic because the economy stalled. Other nations had higher test scores. Thus the schools must be to blame for the industrial growth of Japan and Germany, so said a report called “A Nation at Risk” by President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1983.
By 1988, Susan Ochshorn writes, the academic demands of third grade had drifted down to many kindergartens. History repeats itself.
Was this a rational response to outsourcing of industries to other nations? No, but state and national leaders thought that the best response to international competition was to raise standards for five-year-olds.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This just in…how will he solve this “problem”? More “highly qualified” TFA?http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/5562269
The pressure to make K and 1 into 3rd and 4th grade is tied to the article you shared here. It’s all about turning a blind eye to reality and making teachers scapegoats for society’s and government’s indifference to poverty and its effects on our citizens.
Yet another example of Obama’s stubborn refusal to look at reality and instead, attempt to bend reality to fit his belief system.
Poor kids in poor schools score poorly on standardized tests that are racist, classist, and poorly written.
Better off kids in better funded schools score better on standardized tests that cater to their life experiences even though poorly written.
Therefore the teachers of the better off kids MUST be better teachers!
And don’t forget rigor, grit, and outrageously inappropriate expectations!
This kind of logic is so faulty and stupid it makes the head of any thinking person ache.
I’m all for taking the entire staff of an upper middle class white school and giving them the teaching jobs in a struggling Title I school. It would make for a great reality TV show, sort of a TFA meets the inner city on steroids.
Over my 20 year career in Title I schools I’ve seen lots of do-gooder teachers who think they will come in and show us “bad teachers” how its done, out of the goodness of their noblesse oblige.
Usually within the first week they are in tears and having nightmares every night.
These are just a few of the problems they encounter:
The parents did not bring the big shopping bags of supplies that they were accustomed to getting in the mostly white, middle class schools. They are faced with teaching their well-worn lessons without paper, crayons, scissors, glue sticks, etc.unless they buy them themselves and they are nonplussed.
The children don’t walk in the door reading at an advanced level already. Some, maybe most, walk in the door not knowing the alphabet, how to count to 5 or 10, or even how to write or read their own name. How then to teach the grade-level basal textbook that they are accustomed to using daily when the students can’t read?
Calling parents to ask questions, explain situations, or ask for support is an exercise in frustration because many, if not most, do not have working telephones because they can’t afford them. Kids show up in dirty clothes day after day because families can’t afford to do laundry. Kids show up sick because parents can’t miss work and have no one to care for the kids. Kids don’t have glasses, hearing aids, asthma medication, etc. because families can’t afford them or don’t have transportation to go get them.
No more parent volunteers to come in and do all the paper grading, cutting out, sorting, reading one-on-one with that problem kid. Parents are all working 2 or 3 minimum wage jobs and missing work takes a chunk out of the monthly budget and could risk being fired. Or, some parents are doing things that are harmful to themselves and upsetting their child’s life. Kids come in talking about the police raid in their home, visiting a parent in prison, seeing violent crimes committed in their neighborhood, having nothing to eat and being bitten by insects while sleeping, and, no, they didn’t get that reading log filled out because they spent the whole weekend in the emergency room and then in the car because someone got hurt or sick or died.
The kids don’t just sit quietly when told to do so. They sometimes act out and throw chairs or bite others. Sometimes they withdraw and sleep or cry for hours at a time instead of smiling their way through your lessons. They often need lots and lots of help and can’t remember what they’ve just learned because they have memory problems directly resulting from their poverty lifestyle. Lots of these challenging kids get sent to the office a lot by the new “good” teachers. Just to get them out of the room because they can’t teach with them there, at least not the way they taught in the white middle class school so they determine its the kids that are the problem, not their teaching.
Parents don’t sign homework or help with it, often because they themselves are illiterate, working, or don’t speak English. Kids are on their own and can’t help themselves and don’t have access to any other adults who can help them. They don’t have a car so they don’t go to the library. They don’t go to Michael’s and buy all the materials for the assigned project because they can’t afford it and can’t get there anyway.
These are just a few of the problems these “good” teachers whine and cry about when they come to show Title I teachers “how to teach”. Most end up leaving, some within weeks of starting, other make it to the end of one year but they don’t come back. The most frequent comment I’ve hear is “I don’t know how you do this day after day, year after year. You must be a saint.”
No, I’m not a saint. I’m experienced and committed to my students and I work hard to learn how to be a better teacher every year.
But Obama is going to replace me with a “good” teacher from an upper middle class white school because her kids get better test scores than mine. Not only can one justify grifting and stealing tax money if the test scores are high, one can also destroy the careers of committed, excellent Title I teachers as well.
Chiara,
Your comment was so true. I grew up in a big city and decided to teach in the public schools after graduating and working a few years in private schools. I was told by the news media and listening to parents that teachers were not good in the public schools. So I didn’t expect much in the way of support or teamwork or excellence. It was quite the opposite. I found extremely committed and creative teachers, a welcoming team but no materials, no money for materials and lots of behavior problems. I teach special education, and there were only 2 teachers including myself for a school with enrollment over 800 from grades K through 4. Crime was rampant in the neighborhood. Fatal shootings were common. Many families were transient…all the problems of the inner city. But still the teachers kept plugging away, trying their best. I believe that the school problems extend far beyond the school building. There is no superman. There are no saints. But it is very disheartening that teachers are always the scapegoats. After committing to the education of urban children, putting time, effort and money on my own, as most teachers in these settings do, it is cruel for politicians to put the blame for every ill on the teachers. I always felt that one of the lawmakers should come and spend a year living my life and then see what needs to be fixed. We are are the only profession where we are ignored in decision making. It’s like building a house and asking a store manager who knows nothing about houses except he’s lived in one, to draw the plans for the house’s construction. It’s ludicrous. I believe those who make the laws know this, but they want votes. It looks good on paper. The uncommitted ones are them. It’s so easy to point a finger and talk in circles instead of making very long range plans that require thought and collaborating with those in the trenches.
Kudos to all those inner city teachers who wake up each day and return to schools to do their best despite everything else.
You won’t get a law maker to spend a year being a teacher…he/she would have to WORK!
Today Obama is starting an “equity” initiative to put “effective” teachers in schools where all of the problems you have so masterfully detailed persist. I have encountered some of these myself as an art teacher working in a classroom with blue plexiglas replacements for bullet-crushed windows, and a culture of intimidation–threats to kith, kin, and home for reporting on violence within and beyond the school.
Of course, Obama will probably take it for granted that Bill Gates and Arne Duncan know exactly how to identify an “effective” teacher–with a teacher’s production of gains in student test scores, especially in math and reading the single most important indicators of being “highly effective.” In fact, the official federal definition in RttT for a highly effective teacher is a teacher who produces more than a year’s worth of growth–meaning gains in test scores pretest to posttest, and/or year-to-year.
Obama and his econometric advisors on education will probably cite the ratings of teacher education programs in U.S. News and World Report as another indicator of “high quality” teachers, and perhaps Teach for America as a program in need of much more federal support because the applicants must have high SAT scores.
You can be certain that Obama, who will be meeting with teachers on the issue of equity, will not hear anything like the narrative that you have given us here, or other stats now familiar on the imprints of poverty on children, especially in our nation, higher than any other among “developed countries.” I think unlikely he will hear or think critically about the fact that 55% of families are held together, if at all, by single-mothers; that many are also working in fast food environments where the average compensation of CEOs has increased by a factor of 7 since since 2000–unlike the minimum wage.
On the basis of his continued support for Arne Duncan’s teacher-bashing rhetoric and failed policies, I think this meeting is being held in a last minute effort to gain political support his party in forthcoming elections, especially in the light of the National Education Association’s call for Duncan’s resignation.
I’d guess I am not alone in having a very hard time escaping cynicism about this meeting and any follow on.
@chris
Yup, you understand those “bad teachers” lol.
My new thing is that I correct people when they use the term” good schools”. I say “oh, you are sending your kid to a high socio-economic school with educated parents?”
The blank looks are funny;)
But parents love it. They speak glowingly and proud of their K kid who is learning so much! I can’t tell you how many times a parent says things to me at a birthday party like “I can’t believe how much they are learning! Boy, when we were kids all we did was make macaroni necklaces, now look at these kids!” No one is questioning why kids are being steered this way or if it is appropriate.
THIS post should go viral. I am copying and pasting to my community board. Thank you for your heart-felt total disclosure of where this country’s focus NEEDS to be. If I could hug you, I would.
Well, that article is amusing. I guess with the money following the kid, and being able to choose wherever you want your kid educated, teachers are going to be assigned to school districts they don’t want to work in, like TFA assigns its temps/scabs who must take the first offer made, so it can fill its charter schools with a never ending flow of “teachers.” I find it hilarious that Obama/Duncan are still blowing their horns that there is a shortage of certified teachers – well they must be talking about charters and parochial schools, where certification isn’t required, meanwhile, my kid, a qualified/certified teacher had to jump through every frigging hoop to even be considered employable. Amazing. Up is down, Down is up.
Now remember, teachers all, you will be ASSIGNED your position. Perhaps next, you’ll be assigned your position, and told you must live in town, so get ready to move. Unreal.
@donna
I misread “amazing” as “arneazing” like Arne Duncan.
A new term “Arneazing” adj def: using false stats, combined with the term “game changer” to describe failing charter schools . “Another arneazing graduation rate at XYZ Acheivement Academy where 100% of the 3 seniors of the original 500 freshmen class got into 4 year colleges! Gamechangy!”
Achievement
I find it puzzling that it is a known fact that, while educational delivery often lags behind technology, there has been this sudden ramping up of effort to catch up with technology and “lead” the way … Only, this cannot take place in real time!
Technology is always changing, and all changes are not for “the better”. While schools can implement technology, they can’t keep up and lead. Platforms change. Programs and hardware and software and terminology change. Look at phones, computers, wireless, and upgrades. Without constant change, millions of people would not have jobs. But the expense of upgrades drains local school budgets.
For that matter, look at many businesses and government offices. Their tech is always in need of upgrading. Without the infusion of cash from someplace, we are all like hamsters in a wheel. Even then, we might think we are catching up, but along comes the newest innovation, and the chase continues.
It has been interesting to observe the progression of technology in my district. As teachers feel more pressure to use it, human error is more unacceptable while the computer program’s poor applicability or the clarity of questions posed to students via learning modules is taken in stride calmly or even shrugged off.
Yet, knowing the short shelf life of a computer and technology program, we are forcing human innovation and outreach to take a back seat to what I view as experimental usage of computer tech. The students are part of the experiment. No wonder they want to collect data!
The truth is that the data evaluates the effectiveness of the tech, not of the teacher-student connection.
There is a lot of money that will change hands in this decision to transform the need for human activity into the need for faster and faster tech activity.
It is a shallow world that views a photoshopped rose with more awe and appreciation than smelling, touching, seeing the roses along the path.
Agree. Last night I caught part of a half-hour presentation to our local school board on the virtues of on-line education, Rocketship’s approach to schooling, and other virtues of high tech.
The typical allocation of time for any school board presentation is three minutes max.
This was a soft sell powerpoint presentation from a local PR person pushing for “partnerships” and “collaborations” with experts in the tech industry as the singular “best practice” in next generation education. Bottom message to the (very polite) school board: If you don’t want to be left behind, join the movement.
Since then, I have been hinking about demanding equal time to advocate for sand boxes and water play tables and gardening projects and steel drums and violins and field trips for more than a walk and gawk interval of time and every kid having a passion-driven project under the auspices of the school and, and, and…
The best recent innovation in our school district is the roof-top garden in a restored 1920’s school with the original Rookwood ceramic drinking fountains now in working order. This is the result of leadership from one visionary citizen with lot’s of savvy about how to make things happen, and enormous trust that this inner city community wanted far more than minimally acceptable facilities and programs. The roof top garden is being planned as a site of learning for all subjects, in addition to offering a spectacular view of the city. May his tribe increase.
Ed reformers are displeased with our “school governance”:
http://national.deseretnews.com/article/1350/The-secret-to-good-schools-might-surprise-you.html
The hubris is just amazing. The Fordham Institute helped design Ohio’s charter school “governance” which is completely undemocratic, lacks any transparency, and doesn’t work.
Looking at their awesome record “governing” charter schools, I think we should let them run public schools too, don’t you? Preferably from the state capitol or DC. That’s where the “highly qualified” people are, as everyone knows.
There’s no nasty “politics” in DC or a state capitol. No sir. Just lobbyists and their lawmakers.
The Deseret News is incredibly anti-public education.
Couldn’t one use the ed reformer argument against elected school boards to advocate for getting rid of city councils, county commissioners and state legislators?
“They’re very political, local and also sometimes very stupid. Let’s just appoint experts”
Clearly our entire “governance” system is “archaic” and needs “reform”.
Isn’t propaganda wonderful?
They’re “local”, they’re often parochial, they’re definitely political and many of them aren’t experts in, say, transportation infrastructure or any of the other 5000 things they govern.
Judges may also be a problem, deb. I hate to mention it but many trial judges are not experts in all the factual issues that come before them, as I think we all discovered in the California tenure case.
We may have to reform this whole system, and who better to do that the Fordham Institute or the Center for American Progress? They’re experts on hiring experts!
That too is on the Ayn Rand list of things to do….after all, such enterprises might actually share resources and that is a no no in their bizarre world.
Having read several histories of US education reform, Ochshorn’s observation is indeed true. Education reform has been a carousel with a 20-year or so cycle; just enough time for one generation to forget the failure of the last set of reforms. I’ve come to wonder if the very basic premises of our public schools, which are the creatures of the Progressive reforms at the turn of the last century, are really to blame.
The Progressives, broadly speaking, were our first technocrats. They followed the notion that society could be organized in some vaguely optimal way. But this required turning education away from the traditional liberal education ideals of individual intellectual development towards making children “fit” a social vision. They believed that goal could be achieved as education became a deterministic, and therefore prescriptive, science through testing and pedagogical technique. Coupling a scientific education along with the social sciences, which they also believed would be quantitative and prescriptive, the schools would then function to turn out the children that society needed.
Along with the idea of a schooling as scientific means for meeting social needs came the scientific management of the same era. Now, schools not only served the needs of business through their mission to produce children who were meeting social needs, but they would do it according to the efficiency-maximizing strictures of “scientific management”.
Our academics, administrators, politicians, and business leaders championed these ideas, which created a very lucrative industry. The teachers rolled over, and the public fell for the idea. Now, when the economy isn’t doing well the schools are a prime target for failing to perform their function. Since we now follows a technocratic view of education, the solutions must be technical in nature: testing, measuring, planning, etc.
Of course, this approach distracts us from the failings of our business and political leaders, who find it easier to play on the fears of parents for their childrens’ economic futures. Since our educational leaders never bother to pay attention to history, lest they be exposed as failures and charlatans, we just repeat the same failed ideas again and again.
This is the very definition of insanity.
“No, but state and national leaders thought that the best response to international competition was to raise standards for five-year-olds.”
Language matters, so we need to be careful to reject the language of deformists. The standards have not been raised. A set of developmentally inappropriate tasks have been set for children by people without credentials to set tasks for anyone. Hurdles have been raised, perhaps, but standards certainly have not.
With our academic push I often have second-graders coming in at the beginning of the year reading beyond grade level. The difficulty for me is finding text for them to read that is both at their reading and developmental levels. Material written for older children is not always appropriate for younger ones. While I have seen a rise in children’s reading levels over the past several years, I have also seen an increase in the number of children who cannot tie their shoes, cut with scissors, or work cooperatively with classmates. Pushing academics at the expense of other experiences is not beneficial for children.
The standards can be changed over and over and over to suit political and policy wonks to list “ed reformer” on their CV. However, there has been no fundamental change in the social, emotional, motor & cognitive capabilities of the typical kindergarten child for thousands, or millions of years.
Children are not “bots”. When computer geeks and obsessed people try to turn out a world in their image, they are met with resistance. I am truly fed up with the ridiculously rapid changes that offer up profits for those who want to remold the end system to lack human contact and input. Thus sterile, emotionless world of the money grabbers is very disconcerting.
There are so many (or rather nothing but) deeply held and unchallenged assumptions in today’s propaganda-sphere. For instance, I don’t recall ever signing up for an international grade competition, nor did I know that international exam score competitions were the goal of our education system. Yet the “we are falling behind” meme is so monolithic. I don’t know how we can begin to get people to question these things…
This post truly resonated with me and is especially poignant. I have been increasingly aware and increasingly angry about this development. I was an educator for 8 years before I chose to stay home with my first child. We have since added two more children to our family and they are all now in school. I was in my 4th year of teaching when no child left behind came along and I prayed that the pendulum would have swung back towards the middle by the time they started school… but it has only seemed to have gotten WORSE. My oldest child is now going into sixth grade and my youngest just finished Kindergarten. In the short time since my oldest was in Kindergarten until now I have come to not even recognize Kindergarten. Even in the 2 short years between my soon to be third grader and his sister Kindergarten has become a place that is short on fun, exploration and learning through play… that is almost non-existent. The thing that has spurred me to action however is that my bright, confident, literate six year old started crying this summer while we were on our way to sign up for the summer reading program at our local library! Crying because she didn’t want to sign up because she isn’t a good reader! I couldn’t believe it. I told her she is six and that she isn’t supposed to be! She is supposed to be enjoying stories and having fun with words and loving to be read to… she will be a good reader after many more years of practice like her brothers. I do not blame her classroom teacher at all for this… but I do blame the singular focus and explicit reading instruction that has pervaded our entire district. There is no more science or social studies or health instruction. Math (a little bit) and reading are all that is taught in our elementary (although to be honest we are SO lucky they still have art, music and PE in my district). We must save our kids from these reformers that may misguidedly believe they are helping but know nothing about child development and the real issues that stand in the way of helping kids learn (and learn at their own pace and in their own space!) Let’s let people be who they are!
There is another absolutely critical element in why some children do poorly on state tests and in school in general. When an entering kindergartner does not speak English, but is only taught and tested in English, why is anyone surprised that they do not do so well? Most research tells us that it takes 5-7 years to become proficient in a 2nd language. That’s an entire elementary school career. Some research says 12-14 years. That a K-12 career. Until US schools can see the reasonableness of teaching children in a comprehensible language, continued failure is predictable. Dual and multi-language programs are a proven success. We must ask ourselves why they are not more universally promoted.
History is again repeating itself. This is what we were dealing with as kindergarten teachers in the early 1980’s. In my city there was published “Kindergarten:What Should Be”. Several Midwest affiliates brought the issue to the national organization, the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). “Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs” was the result, published in 1986.. It is commonly called DAP. And it has been used as the document on which standards were based for state funded preschool.
Those who wrote the Common Core State Standards were not educators and did not know that the National Association of State Boards of Education in the late 1980’s redefined Early Childhood to be birth to grade 3. It was kindergarten teachers and their professors in colleges and universities who spoke out loud and clear about what good practice was. All of us need to be getting out the message that kindergarten and primary children do not learn this way.
Obama, Duncan, and Gates have a lot in common with Nero playing his violin while Rome burned. It’s called “Dissociation”! It’s when ” adult sons if ” smother mothers” and absent or bullying fathers learn early in childhood to use “Avoidance & Denial” as coping. They impulsively continue to use the same coping in adulthood. They did not identify or have attachment to fathers, but continued to be “Mama’s Boys.” In adulthood they are emotionally detached, have faux feelings of entitlement and superiority, and do not have skills of empathic listening. They have regressed social and emotional development. In spite of their high cognitive functioning, their social emotional development is still that of a child. They are codependent to their wives ( surrogate mothers )who have dominance over them. ( Their wives are usually “Daddy’s Girls”- who had lack of attachment to Narcissistic mothers).
These are the adult children running this country, and they are creating more like them in the CCSS ” smothering” environment.
I remember “A Nation at Risk” WELL and have commented about this in previous blogs. This was the beginning of the downward spiral of education in the U. S. I saw first hand the results of this. Our school board ate it up, destroyed our school system, as they “rushed in where angels would have feared to tread”. When I asked them just to read the Gerald Bracey reports – I would loan them my copy of the book – only one even took the book and I doubt if he ever read it. Don’t confuse me with the facts, I have already made up my mind.
The media shouted out these fallacies put forth in “A Nation …”. Our newspaper published a cartoon of American education being flushed down the toilet. When the superintendents in our area sought to push back, a small column taking us considerably less space than that cartoon, it was published back on one of the inner pages.
It has been down hill since then.
I think it’s all because of the push for accountability. Even 15 years ago we had objectives for using different kinds of media in art, participating in movement activities, practicing small motor skills, ability to cut-now those standards are non-existent in our district pacing calendars and report cards. Our students are expected to be reading 1st Grade level high frequency words coming out of Pre-K! and reading 40 words per minute with fluency at the end of Kinder. In Kinder their report card asks how well they use punctuation and capitalization (they are supposed to be using inventive spelling techiniques, many don’t even write in complete sentences-and that’s what the experts say is developmentally appropriate). They are adding and subtracting using regrouping in 1st Grade.We do afterschool and Saturday tutorials for Kinder students. If these politicos could see the face of a 5-year old who tries to read the same passage for the umpteenth time unsuccessfully, I don’t think those standards would be so high. It used to be just chalked up to still being an emergent reader-now it seems they just expect them to skip that stage completely. We have a candidate for governor who is actually for increasing access to Pre-K, with the stipulation off accountability in assessments–for 4 year olds! It’s just crazy!
It is just crazy! ! ! And It is not developmentally appropriate! The Common Core Standards were written by no one from Early Childhood – neither classroom nor from the university.
Kindergarten: children’s garden. Froebel. Enough said…notice nothing here has to do with testing/academics.