Peter Greene read Marc Tucker’s critique of America’s academic standards and found some things to like, others to sharply disagree with.
Tucker’s essay is titled “Why American Education Standards Collapsed.” He speculates that standards have fallen over the past 40-45 years. Greene reviews Tucker’s economic analysis of the same period, with economic pressure on the middle class and pressure to push everyone to go to college.
It is a good read, and I highly recommend it.
Greene concludes:
Tucker has some points. Accountability has pretty much been a disaster for everybody (except disaster profiteers), and the economic shift in our country has been very, very hard on many of our citizens, making it harder for our children to get the best advantages in life, including education.
And we could certainly use leaders who were better, particularly when we consider that much of disruption of the last forty-five years, from the industrial crash of the seventies to the economic disasters of the 2000s, has been human-created. Here’s the thing– I don’t think the leaders of the car and steel industries, nor the banksters of the Great Recession, would have avoided all that mess if they had had better SAT scores or a better GPA in college.
Tucker reminds me of a person who sits fearfully in his house, hears a gurgle from the kitchen sink drain, and worries that it means that a burglar is coming in the second floor window. Or a chicken who gets hit with an acorn and fears the sky is falling. It’s not that there aren’t real and serious issues, problems that need to be addressed. But he is seeing connections between these issues and other factors that have nothing to do with them. The danger with Tucker is that his core belief, stated through much of his work, is that we need to control everything so that we can make all come out as it should. Any time you find somebody who thinks that kind of control is a good thing and that he totally knows how to manage it, you have found somebody who is dangerous. When you find somebody who believes he can control the entire machine but doesn’t really know how the parts fit together, you have found somebody who could make a serious mess. I’m really glad that Marc Tucker is in the world, but I’m even more glad that he’s not in charge.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Don’t forget March Tucker’s “Dear Hillary” letter: http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/marc_tucker/
I would not bet on that being overlooked if Hillary is elected.
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Came across a quote by Ronald Reagan:
“One definition of an economist is somebody who sees something happen in practice and wonders if it will work in theory.”
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I too am wary of people who try to control too much. It is dangerous!
” Any time you find somebody who thinks that kind of control is a good thing and that he totally knows how to manage it, you have found somebody who is dangerous. When you find somebody who believes he can control the entire machine but doesn’t really know how the parts fit together, you have found somebody who could make a serious mess. ”
Wise words Diane.
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“Education Reform”
Control of teachers
Control of schools
Control of features
Control of rules
Control of students
Control of thoughts
Control of money
Lots and lots
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A better title
“Reform out of Control”
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Peter Greene for president! Wouldn’t that be a hoot!
Sure would burst a lot of pompous bubbles and we certainly could use that.
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Perhaps inquiries should be made concerning the decline in standards of integrity, since the so-called reformers lie about everything.
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Michael Fiorillo:
TAGO!
😎
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Greene writes, “But it also seems true that folks Of a Certain Age (say, mine– and Tucker is almost twenty years older) to succumb to the temptation to write screeds on the topic of Kids These Days and Going To Hell in a Handbasket.”
Correct. Moore’s law of laziness, slackitude doubles every two years.
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But Peter, you are perpetrating a deep assumption about “progress” the world has been beaten down to accept, for more than a century.
“and the economic shift in our country has been very, very hard on many of our citizens, making it harder for our children to get the best advantages in life, including education.”
What “economic shift” is that? In the past decade, the degradation of human work and human workers has sunk to levels not seen since slavery. Except now, with globalization, we can extend the slavemasters’ indifference to the quality of workers lives to all workers everywhere, without even his capital investment in keeping them alive or replacing his workforce.
Start with the field of education, but please don’t stop there.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/09/lean-production-whats-really-hurting-public-education/
It isn’t technological progress that has made human dignity obsolete, in our schools, in Bangladesh factories, Walmarts, Amazon Fulfillment Centers, and fast food restaurants. We could also use technology to do the opposite. Elevate human labor again, and defend the minute-by-minute quality of workers lives, and protect their right to use the profits of their labor to sustain their own families. It is obscene to frame this discussion in terms of which human children “get the best advantages in life, including education.”
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Chemtchr, you win the prize! This is exactly what the British land reform bills were about, getting the peasants off of their land and their independent subsistence farming life and into the factories. All the benefits of slavery, not a hint of the liabilities, and built in scapegoats to assuage the conscience. They can blame it all on the glut of market talent and the global competition. Education will become (if it isn’t already) a commodity available to few, and at a high price.
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From the article:
“But all of that only matters if you believe that high-stakes testing is either a driver or reflection of what a school is actually accomplishing. But the Big Standardized Tests don’t measure even a sliver of what a school is actually doing, and they “drive instruction” only to the extent that they drive real instruction out of the classroom to make room for test prep.”
Not only do they not “measure even a sliver” they don’t measure a damn thing as the BS Tests are not measuring devices. They are a rather piss poor attempt (actually COMPLETELY INVALID) to assess the teaching and learning process, nothing more.
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Methinks it would behoove Marc Tucker to meditate on Matthew and the sharply declining standards in journalism before he be spewing Jeremiads on the state of education today.
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A few comments. Don’t let them make you think I’m not a big fan of Greene, however; I am. Just seeing things a little bit differently here and there on this one.
Ch 1 – Single parenting doesn’t just have to do w/ birth rates; it’s also related to divorce rates, or household makeup. My kids suffered and had far less parental attention after I got divorced, for example.
Ch 2 – Grade inflation, as well as inability to provide discipline, can also come from schools backing down from the loudest, angriest, most threatening parents as they defend their darlings and threaten lawsuits. Lawsuits are a huge indirect source of education policy.
Ch 3 – Because the best and brightest among women didn’t have options back then, many became teachers. When they began having options, they increasingly went into other fields, such as law, engineering, computer science, medicine, the military, etc. I started out heading toward law, but things went south for health reasons. I sure wish I had managed to get through undergrad younger, and I might not be in this mess now. It has become almost an oxymoron to think of intelligent new teacher candidates, at this point. Who, if truly intelligent, would choose such a thing? Yes, I know there are a few, still, but very few.
Also, I see a stunning lack of literacy among teachers. I see simple mistakes posted, glaringly, on walls, left there for months. I see misspellings on papers handed to kids. I know few teachers who have read many classics beyond their school requirements. Etc.
…and that’s as far as I can get right now –
I do want to make the point that one of the reasons that this movement is succeeding is that there is a grain of truth in it. And if you own the media, a grain is all it takes. The only real blowback seems to be coming from parents who don’t want their kids to be labeled as failures on standardized tests. The whole corporatization of America and the massive corruption of government seems secondary, or unnoticed.
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I have frequently met truly intelligent new young teachers ; two of them are my children both of whom were AP scholars. Also I have met many young teachers who were similarly highly motivated for public service. I suppose it depends where you live and what kind of job you get. In some states teaching is a relatively high paying profession; it others it is not. The biggest change in education today as compared to when I was educated in the 1960’s and 1970’s has been the almost total dependency on scantron or computer multiple choice tests. These may be convenient and quick and “scientific” but several things happen. 1) it is much easier to fake and cheat on these tests. This is not a small issue. 2) the tests themselves tend to favor superficial learning. 3) the teacher detaches himself from the true literacy and competency of his students. I am an AP reader for ETS and it is often commented that few Americans have my command of the nuances of Spanish grammar and orthography. I believe the simple reason is more than 40 years of constant practice of reading and writing. I studied at Heritage Junior HS and Livingston HS exclusively with native Spanish speakers. I studied Spanish for six years. I never once had a multiple choice test in class. The only Spanish multiple choice tests I ever had were my Spanish Achievement Test and my Spanish AP test. Not having “practiced” for these tests was no great problem and I had very high scores. Then I studied at New York University and in Spain for four years. In that entire time I never once had a multiple choice test. We had essay tests, presentations of book reports (entirely in Spanish) , research papers and so forth. I may add that non of my history or English professors gave multiple choice tests either. Not a single one. I daresay I am truly a rara avis in that I never give a multiple choice test if I can avoid it and If I am compelled to give one I supplement it with essays and short answers. I make a point of never having a multiple choice test more than 50% of any grade. Many of my students are English learners and the proof is in the pudding. We have a very high graduation rate (including Hispanic and immigrant students) and this means the students have passed there English proficiencies and Math proficiencies (tests given only in English). There is really no magic bullet. It is just good, old-fashioned diligence and hard work. I correct every tests and very quiz and every essay by my students myself. I require all my students to keep a notebook. I have regular homework checks. If the entire class finishes an assignment in a satisfactory way I give the entire class a bonus quiz grade of A. Students who make interesting points or contributions to class are given a card which is also worth a bonus quiz grade of A. If we see a movie or video the students must complete a series of questions and answer in complete sentences. Critical vocabulary, synonyms and word histories and translations are a constant element in my class. Students often ask me if an English cognate means the same in Spanish or what the history of a word is and what the tone of the word is. I make a point of showing that many German words have a sinister tone because of their connection to Nazism and so forth. I make it a point to note that many of these words have entered all the western languages and that any educated French, Spanish or English speaker would know these words. And essays and book reports are valued the most of all. All this contributes to a higher level of literacy and enthusiasm for the students. Most are relieved -highly relieved that they don’t have “do or die” multiple choice tests and I allow space for “extra credit” commentary of topics that especially interested the students. I find for example that the students are fascinated with the history of animals in space -they learn their names and histories, holocaust survival stories, child labor stories, survival stories, as well as the stories of great heroes and reformers. The Berlin Air Lift never fails to captivate as it joins the suffering of WWII with the suffering of ordinary people in the beginning of the Cold War. Of course, my destiny has been that I no longer chiefly teach AP Spanish but I work closely with our AP Spanish teacher and our bilingual students -we have authors in common and of course literacy devices (chiefly derived from Latin, Greek and French) are virtually identical in English as well as Spanish. I could be wrong but I think Spanish speakers intuitively understand many literary terms more readily because they are not entirely exotic words but words close to their native tongue. In any case, the way to a higher literacy in the students is for the teacher to be highly literate and for the student to read and study a lot of quality fiction, non-fiction, oratory, poetry, drama, biography, autobiography etc. Unamuno said it best: the way to wisdom and knowledge is and I quote LEER, LEER, LEER (READ! READ READ). And the way to be a good writer is to write, write, write after having read many fine authors who then serve as models. And of course, it should go without saying that the classroom teacher should be a role model of literacy and culture as well.
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