In this post, Jim Arnold and Peter Smagorinsky dissect the myths and baloney of the reformers. The “reformers” love to talk about the good old days and about how schools were so much better back then. As the authors demonstrate, those “good old days” weren’t good for everyone–especially when there were grown men running around in white gowns and pointy hats. And they demonstrate with solid facts that by every objective measure, the public schools of Georgia are doing a better job now than they were over the past six or seven decades. The “reformers” aren’t solving any real problems by their constant carping about the public schools.
It’s Time to Reform the Reformers
Jim Arnold & Peter Smagorinsky
Jim Arnold recently retired from the superintendent’s position of the Pelham City, GA Schools and blogs at http://www.drjamesarnold.com/. Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor of English Education at The University of Georgia whose public essays are archived at http://smago.coe.uga.edu/vita/vitaweb.htm#OpEd
“The failure of public education” has become a de rigueur assumption in the public forum on public education, particularly among those who claim to possess the silver bullet for “reform.” The definition of reform signals the need to improve something for the better by removing faults, abuses, and evil ways. For there to be a need for reformers, then, those they wish to reform must be found to be as defective as possible. When the target of reform lacks sufficient dereliction, and a reformer still needs to advance his or her agenda, ideally with consulting fees, then the flaws must be manufactured and propagated as if they are real.
Arne Duncan, for instance, often cites such statistics as the need for 40% of college students to require remedial coursework. Carol Burris has shown, however, this canard has no basis in fact, but is a manufactured statistic coming from a think tank, repeated by other think tanks until it became accepted in public opinion. As part of this process of fabricating a crisis, our Secretary of Education has repeatedly promulgated this bogus claim to advance his reforms, even if the evil of shoddy education in public schools requiring remediation by colleges at the taxpayers’ expense does not exist.
As part of this perceived need for reform, many people hearken back to the good old days, back before schools began circling the drain. For instance, a Rasmussen poll found that 69% of respondents doubted whether today’s public schools provide our kids with the world class education that the rest of the world is getting. At the same time that market-based reforms are offered as our only means of salvation, the schools of socialistic Finland are provided as a model of excellence.
Perhaps this irony is not the only one at work in the public debate about our purportedly failing schools.
We went to Southern schools back in those halcyon days. Nostalgia buffs might recall scenes such as this one from those misty times of yore on the occasion of efforts to integrate The Varsity restaurant in Athens, Georgia:
Given that opposition to school integration often was more violent and virulent than were such responses to allowing Black people to each a hot dog at The Varsity, perhaps those great old schools from those good old days might benefit from a closer look. Let’s consider the public perception of US public education over time.
In 1996 E. D. Hirsch called for a return to a traditional approach to public education in “The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them.” In 1983 “A Nation at Risk” told us of the apparent failure of our system of public education. The Educational Testing Service discovered in 1976 that college freshmen could correctly answer only half of forty or so multiple choice questions. In 1969 the Chancellor of NY schools, Harvey Scribner, said that for every student schools educated there was another that was “scarred as a result of his school experience.”
Admiral Rickover published “American Education, a National Failure” in 1963, and in 1959 LIFE magazine published “Crisis in Education” that noted the Russians beat us into space with Sputnik because “the standards of education are shockingly low.” In 1955 Why Johnny Can’t Read became a best seller, and in 1942 the NY Times noted only 6% of college freshmen could name the 13 original colonies and 75% did not know who was President during the Civil War. The US Navy in 1940 tested new pilots on their mastery of 4th grade math and found that 60% of the HS graduates failed. In 1889 the top 3% of US high school students went to college, and 84% of all American colleges reported remedial courses in core subjects were required for incoming freshmen.
And in the years before the American Revolution, “Undereducated, overworked, short-tempered male schoolmasters often presided over the schools. Corporal punishment was a euphemism for outright brutality against children.” Women were not allowed an education until the Industrial Revolution took hold, a century before they could vote.
So much for the good old days.
And so much for the perception that education is perpetually in decline, if actual statistics inform the conversation. The National Center for Educational Statistics reports that educational attainment is continually on the rise. Here’s their table providing decade-by-decade figures for high school graduate rates.
HS Graduates (total %) Whites Blacks
1940 38.1 41.2 12.3
1950 52.8 56.3 23.6
1960 60.7 63.7 38.6
1970 75.4 77.8 58.4
1980 85.4 89.2 76.7
1990 85.7 90.1 81.7
2000 88.1 94 86.8
2010 88.8 94.5 89.6
2013 89.9 94.1 90.3
Georgia lags behind these national averages, as the following table shows, yet still continually graduates increasing numbers of people at the high school and college levels:
HS grad Bachelor’s Advanced degree
or more or more or more
1990 70.9 19.3 6.4
2000 78.6 24.3 8.3
2006 82.2 26.6 9.2
2009 83.9 27.5 9.9
Going back a bit farther in time, in 1940 17% of adults in Georgia had completed high school; in 1946 5% of Georgians attended college. We’re doing quite a bit better these days, even as public rhetoric and perception suggest the opposite.
But you can’t frame our current situation as a crisis in need of reform if all trends are positive. So, the Georgia Department of Education claims that state graduation rates are below 70%, in spite of statistical evidence to the contrary. We cannot ascertain their motives, but they do seem to feel that charter schools and Teach for American are the answers, even if the question remains opaque. Like Arne Duncan, they appear to require a manufactured crisis of the sort revealed by David Berliner, Gene Glass and colleagues in order to come to our rescue.
Long ago Darrell Huff exposed how people lie with statistics, helping to explain the sort of smoke-and-mirrors statistical manipulation at work in much of the educational policy world. For example, in determining graduation rates, states are allowed to count only those HS graduates each year who are awarded a diploma within a 4-year course of study. GED’s don’t count, but special education students do, and count against graduation rates, as do students who graduate by persisting through difficulties such that they take more than four years to complete their degrees.
Schools, like any complex social institutions, require continual maintenance and rethinking; we hope that in our careers as teachers and school administrators we contributed to that challenging project. But the current “reform” movement, we believe, is not solving actual problems, and in contrast is manufacturing new ones with each dedication of funds to corporations instead of schools. Reforming the ways of the reformers would make better sense to us.
My experience has been that posters here like to talk about the good old days as well. Perhaps it is an innate quality of humans that they remember the past more fondly than is warrented.
If there were no good old days, then what would make someone think that the state of education today is better? Logically, it does not follow and there is little hope for a better future.
Tort,
I don’t understand your post. Can you elaborate a bit?
There were “good old days” for some, for many. But not for all. Look at my book “Reign of Error” and check out high school grad rates. Back in those good old days, most kids didn’t finish high school. Kids with disabilities had no right to public education. Racial segregation was enforced in at least 17 states. Some had it good; many didn’t.
TE,
I was using some basic logic. The premise, as I understood here, is that there was never a halcyon era or good old days. If that is true, then what is the evidence that education today is better? It serves more people? It takes up more of the budget? Teachers are doing a better job? Administrators foster morale and help teachers like Esquith? Just read one of his books: he’s successful in spite of the system.
If public education today is better, why are so many teachers dismayed? Why are we spending our time on blogs? My evidence is what I see as kids come up through the ranks, and it hasn’t improved, and school district policies are perpetuating the mediocrity. I don’t blame myself for the mediocrity in the system. The SYSTEM is bloated and mediocre, especially when you work in a dysfunctional, anti-creative, morale killing bureaucratic district. They actually do more harm to students, and I’ve read the comments from many on this blog that say the same thing. But in the end, nobody wants to lay the blame on the system because it pays our bills.
Have I clarified it for you?
This seems more like an argument based on evidence than an argument based on logic. If we accept the premise that there were no “good old days” for education, it doesn’t necessarily follow as a matter of logic that there’s no reason to think that today is better. You pick your standard of what’s good and how it’s measured. Then there either is or isn’t evidence that things have improved since the “bad old days.”
I agree with FLERP! here. That is why I found the original post confusing.
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2014 15:03:15 +0000 To: cdudd44@hotmail.com
There are other indices we could look at. For instance GNP and other growth indicators compared with the countries who are doing so much better. Maybe we could look at the number of patents applied for and granted? I suspect, just as I do with our literacy achievement that poverty, socio-cultural and political have much more to do with ourschools than reformers care to admit.
“The good old days. I was there. Where was they?” [Moms Mabley]
Why are comedians so much better at data analysis than the numbers/stats folks in the employ of the leading charterites/privatizers?
Let’s do some critical thinking and ask ourselves: “What about the ‘good old days’ of ‘education rheephorm’ research?”
Let’s take the classic in the field. A NATION AT RISK (1983). From Gerald Bracey, READING EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: HOW TO AVOID GETTING STATISTICALLY SNOOKERED (2006, pp. 24-26, under a section entitled “Selective Use of Statistics”):
[start quote]
… The standard setter for selectivity in choosing data is the 1983 publication A Nation At Risk. …
“There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of U.S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments in 1969, 19763, and 1977.” This is probably true. We can’t say more than “probably” because the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) was not initially designed to provide longitudinal data, in spite of the presence of the word progress in its name. …
Beyond that, and more important, we should ask why the commissioners selected only science and why they selected only seventeen-year-olds to make their point. NAEP also test nine- and thirteen-year-olds. NAEP also tests reading and mathematics at those three ages. So if the decline is widespread and awful, why weren’t the other ages and other subjects included?
If we look at all nine trend lines (three subjects tested at three different ages), as shown in Figure 2, we quickly see that the science trend for seventeen-year-olds is the only one that shows a “steady decline.” It is the only one that will support the report’s crisis rhetoric and it was the only one mentioned. …
[end quote]
{a footnote number and special formatting omitted; please consult original for full context}
So 100% charter graduation rates aren’t new? Is it rheeally true that taking one’s students from the 13th to the 90th percentile is old hat? That Bill Gates is right that 98% of all teachers get a perfunctory “satisfactory” on their evals?
Maybe the figures are just an updated version of a very very old practice:
“In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies.” [Stephen Leacock]
Just my dos centavitos worth…
Within a 5% margin of error, more or less. Go figure…
😎
I love this!
Reblogged this on The Art of Teaching Science and commented:
This is another key article from Georgia educators providing evidence that questions the assumptions and actions of so called Ed reformers including Duncan, Gates, the Walton’s and Broad.
Wow! What an impressive CV Peter Smagorinsky has!!!!!!!!! A second John Dewey- almost. If Common Core was anchored in a fraction of Peter Smagorinsky’s knowledge we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today. Common Core ignored all the years of research by learning theorists that guided our teaching prior to CC adoption.
“Reform the reformers” is a great line that I use in my upcoming book. It’s time. The powder is still dry and ready to go. Expect the book around October and it will give a ton of systemic change ideas moving forward. Brainstorming Common Core gets to the nitty gritty of systemic change. Without that change, nothing will work.
http://www.wholechildreform.com
It’s time to reform the reformers but to accomplish that we must go where others have never gone before. See you in the future