Teacher and historian John Thompson writes here about the reflection that seems to be occurring among “reformers” as they realize that their test-and-punish reforms produce limited gains and limited outcomes. He wonders how different our federal and state policies would be had reformers strived to implement research-based reforms instead of ideas that had intuitive appeal.
He writes:
Something important is stirring in terms of education research. We’ve always gone through cycles, mostly notably in the aftermath of the Coleman Report, during debates over the so-called “culture of poverty,” and during the contemporary data-driven, market reform era, where scholars have had to think twice when analyzing where the evidence leads. This last month, however, a variety of social scientists have candidly expressed the facts that corporate reformers deride as an “excuse.”
Heather Hill’s review of the Coleman Report recalls the seminal study’s finding, “One implication stands out above all: That schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context.” Hill reviews the subsequent analyses of Coleman, and the findings of Tony Bryk and Stephen Raudenbush, who “show that differences among schools accounted for about one-fifth of the variability in student outcomes.” The bottom line, she reports is that “schools still pack a weaker punch than many imagine.”
Neither did the Chalkbeat editors pull any punches. Its subtitles clearly convey the message that has been condemned as heresy over the last two decades:
Meanwhile, evidence mounted for one central conclusion: schools matter – but not as much as people might think; and
The logical conclusion: You can’t fix schools without trying to fix broader social inequality, too.
Similarly, Stephen Dubner’s begins his recent Freakonomics Radio program with the words, “in our collective zeal to reform schools and close the achievement gap, we may have lost sight of where most learning really happens — at home.” Dubner concludes, “Most of us probably think too much about cognitive skills and not enough about non-cognitive. Most of us probably put way too much faith in the formal education system, when, in fact, the path to learning begins way before then, at home.” In between, we hear from economist John List, “Schools only have kids for a handful of hours per day, but who, really, will mold kids through their lives are the parents.” Also, early education expert Dana Suskind concludes, that we need preventive, not remediative programs. “About the only way” that we can “move the needle,” she says, is through science-based programs which begin the learning process at birth or before.
Even the most steadfast true believers in accountability-driven, competition-driven reform seem to finally be facing reality. The first words of a NBER paper by John List, Roland Fryer and Stephen Levitt are President Barack Obama’s 2009 statement that, “There is no program or policy that can substitute for a mother or father who will attend those parent-teacher conferences … Responsibility for our children’s education must begin at home.”
And, even the TNTP seems to be questioning its blind faith that the answers for poverty can be found inside the four walls of the classroom. Its modest pilot project taught Ariela Rozman, Timothy Daly and David Keeling that, “We have a new appreciation for the annual catastrophe that is summer learning loss—and what a headache summer is for the families we work with in general. The out-of-school opportunity gap has received increased attention in recent years … because it is becoming clearer that it is a substantial driver of long term inequality.” After a year of working with real-life families in actual schools the TNTP acknowledges:
Some people argue the post-Katrina choice-based system has led to large, sustained improvements in performance and should become a model for the rest of the country. Others say it’s still largely a low performing system and the process of creating it profoundly disrupted its workforce and community.
That brings us to the research of Douglas Harris, the Tulane University Education Research Alliance, and their recent conference on early education in New Orleans. Harris has documented major post-Katrina gains in New Orleans test scores, while acknowledging that “critics are concerned that schools under reforms are too focused on test scores.” Moreover, he notes that “disadvantaged groups always see a smaller effect than the advantaged groups early in the reforms.” Especially before 2012 or so, there were “real horror stories about how special education students and others were suspended and expelled at high rates,” and “it remains unclear whether the problems are solved.” Harris sees “signs that high school dropouts are being under-reported,” and he says that NOLA’s decentralization can “negatively impact vulnerable groups.”
I sometimes question Harris’s confidence that oversight and accountability can mitigate such problems, but I trust his judgment in regard to the initial beliefs of NOLA reformers, “The original idea was that charters would create some degree of choice and competition, allow some schools more autonomy, facilitate innovation and diversify options. “Replacing” traditional public schools was almost never part of the conversation.” On the other hand, he doesn’t deny the current threat to traditional public schools, “Yet, this is exactly what is happening in New Orleans, Detroit, and some other cities (albeit to very different effect).”
I also sense that the participants in the ERA conference saw the multiple, often contradictory, outcomes of the radical NOLA reform, and that they are mostly preoccupied with addressing its remaining weaknesses. While they may or may not be fully aware of the national campaigns to impose their charter-driven system on cities across the nation, conference attendees mostly see the NOLA model as a “done deal” in their city. They are more concerned about the need to organize, fund, and implement early education programs than in other districts’ need to beat back corporate reforms.
I can appreciate those feelings, but I may have been alone in seeing one graphic as telling the most important story about New Orleans preschool, at least in terms of the lessons it holds for the rest of the country. Pre-kindergarten is only one part of the early education system that we need, but it is illustrative of the “opportunity costs” of the contemporary school reform movement. The percentage of NOLA’s students who attended pre-k dropped from 60% in 2007 to 40% in 2011. That’s a 33% drop at a time when the city’s schools were being funded at a level beyond the imaginations of most educators. Yes, the percentage of students who attend pre-k has increased since then, but in NOLA and across the U.S., we are now facing budget crises.
It’s bad enough that reformers let pre-school slide but, worse, the money for the gold-plated corporate reforms is gone. I doubt that anyone would claim that these reforms were cost effective, and now we have to tackle the complex early education challenge at a time when all of the participating education and social service providers face enormous budgetary constraints.
And that brings us back to the question of what would have happened if we had followed a science-based path to school improvement, as opposed to the test, sort, reward, and punish experiment, known as corporate reform. Granted, Katrina took New Orleans by surprise. It’s not like the city had the time and the inclination to study education research, debate policy options, and plan and implement the best possible reform policies. Not surprisingly, when offered a test-driven, competition-driven model, as well as enormous amounts of funding, they rushed the Billionaires Boys Club’s preferred approach into place.
On the other hand, if Katrina hadn’t hit during the accountability-driven, choice-driven craze, if edu-philanthropists had been assisting a science-based campaign to provide high-quality early education and to align and coordinate socioemotional supports, think of the great good that could have come from the rebuilding of New Orleans education and social service systems. In such a case, NOLA could have turned to state of the art, evidence-based solutions, not the endless edu-politics of destruction.
Yeah, in addition to the down sides of NOLA reforms, bubble-in scores are up. Those metrics probably reflect some meaningful learning, as well are the learning of the destructive habits that are nurtured by retrograde, teach-to-the-test instruction. Is there any doubt that students and families would have chosen humane, high-quality, aligned and coordinated early education programs over the competitive culture of today’s NOLA? And, had such a nurturing, science-based system been built in New Orleans, wouldn’t educators across the nation be welcoming – not shunning – help in replicating it?
People keep pretending that reformers have the same goals as educators.
Why do they do that?
Schools are not the first line of remediation for social and economic and medical problems that influence learning. There is not much organized activity to support a “science” of parenting/caregiving, even less the political will to address entrenched poverty and the consequences of living in a culture marked by extraordinary violence, and aggrandizement of violence.
As Diane and others have noted, prenatal care is one place to begin. It you have not heard the TED talk at this website, from an MD with uncommon skill in teaching, take a look and listen. Notice also that it is embedded in a inaugural gathering of psychologists interested in “a science of parenting.” The CDC has resources as well. Unfortunately the associations of school counselors and school social workers have become captives of the standards movement and “grit” also propagated as “self-management.”
http://www.usfsp.edu/psychology/science-of-parenting/
Laura H. Chapman
2444 Madison Rd. Unit 1501
Cincinnati, OH 45208
513-861-7118
Sent from my iPad
It’s a good “what if” but never the intention of the billy hedgefundies to use any quality research that would undermine the message of their “permanent campaign”, the PR tactic of just repeating lies and outlandish claims, coupled with their largely made up and cherry-picked “research” that demonizes the rest of the untapped market they want to sap dry and make their own. And they know their message is riddled with holes and lies and they know all the “solutions” they promote have been tried and flopped. It doesn’t matter to them. The goal of the permanent campaign is to STAY ON MESSAGE, keep repeating the lies, the bigger they are the more people will believe it. Plus, with corporate media consolidation, owned by billionaires (one of which said public education is an untapped market with the potential of $500 billion per year), reformers’ wealthy friends would love to help in their propaganda campaign. Thanks to Diane and others for being massive flies in the ointment, monkeys in the wrench, pains in the butts to these slimy lowlifes.
And that is the reality, made worse by the fact that in order to implement it, some true believers who actually do want to improve education have found their way into the echo chamber of deformer propaganda and are kept there to provide a veneer of integrity and good faith to the overall toxicity and ideologically driven crypto-greed of the enterprise, and enterprise it is.
Twelve years in that business, 23 years in public education and I couldn’t agree more.
Deformers have step functions instead of learning curves.
This is why discussing an issue with a deformer is like talking to a pineapple.
Deformers have step functions as learning curves.
That’s why discussing an issue with a deformer is like talking to a pineapple.
it is described as Opportunity Cost; a true conservative might understand that part of it … when we tell doctors to use evidence based practice … it then gets carried away into “death panels” because of the people like Palin etc. We need to use the research based practices as well as the judgments of professionals and practitioners who work in the schools and know the children and who have actually done some teaching themselves.
Precious R&D funds have been wasted by A. Duncan and the governors and commissioners chasing this testing model …. what could have been done with the money (Michael Scriven wrote about opportunity cost and , if I’m not mistaken
http://journals.sfu.ca/jmde/index.php/jmde_1/article/viewFile/184/190 this is one of Michael Scriven’s articles; he also mentions Henry Levin…..
quoted from secondary source: In A Perfect School
“Moreover, the worst programs can actually yield effect sizes below zero, meaning that the student achievement was negatively impacted by their implementation. This is due to the opportunity costs of ill-conceived reform efforts, including teachers missing class time to receive training and instructional planning time redirected towards implementing the new program. If this opportunity cost is not recouped by a powerful intervention or instructional method that ultimately increases student achievement, the net impact of the initiative could be negative.”
there are other examples of opportunity costs; this is just the basic description of Negative effects from implementation (as we have been experiencing with RTTP).
This statement combines the concept of “opportunity cost” along with Gene Glass’ use of meta-analysis (where he determines effect size in comparing programs/interventions).
It is far more honest to ask: “What if reformers had not ignored all the evidence and data we already had?” What if they had been able to put their bloated egos and hubris aside like business owner Jaime Volmer did when he was confronted with reality, when he was presented with a fact and evidence based account of the problem? http://www.jamievollmer.com/blueberries.html
What caused these reformers to ignore the single most significant input of the education system, the massively wide variation in its students capabilities of showing up at school ready, willing and able to learn? That is the real opportunity gap. I think they ignored it because by transferring out of their respective areas of expertise, computers (Gates) and real estate (Broad) they could only have a similar level of influence and power in their new found hobbies via Gresham’s Dynamic, where the most unethical and amoral personalities and actions drive ethical and moral actions and people out of the field in question. In the arrogance of their ignorance, they used the power of their wealth and the connections to the political sphere it provided them to burden and outright destroy that which they could not compete with on a level playing field, authentic education as provided by true public schools. They violated the most basic tenet of the “free market” competition they falsely espoused.
They would not have made a dime!
The root cause of the corporate assault on public education is something called “The Billionaires’ Disease.” Many billionaires are delusional: They have accumulated not only great wealth, but also sycophants who tell them they are geniuses. These sycophant-surrounded billionaires come to believe themselves not only to be geniuses, but that they alone are responsible for the wealth they have accumulated; they rationalize away the key and essential roles played by others in the success of their businesses. In their delusional minds they see their “genius” as being applicable to other areas, such as government and public education, notwithstanding the fact that they have no experience or expertise in these areas. So what we have today are billionaires with no governmental experience who think they know best who our elected officials should be, what government should and should not do, and billionaires who never taught a classroom full of children but who think they know exactly what “reforms” are needed in public education. And, of course, what’s needed in public schools is the charter school business model because the business model is the only thing the billionaires know even a bit about. And of course there are plenty of simpering sycophants to tell the billionaires how insightful they are about reforms and charter schools because these sycophants see an opportunity to cash in on unregulated charter schools to bleed tax money away from children and into their own pockets. If only there was a simple cure for The Billionaires’ Disease perhaps the billionaires could turn their resources to combating the true root causes of problems not only in schools but throughout our nation: Poverty and racial discrimination.
It might be of interest to contrast the wealthy of the first Guilded Age to our own. The Vanderbilts got a university named for them here in Tennessee. Carnegie has one with his name. Don’t forget Duke, the tobacco man in Durham, whose product would probably get you removed from Coach Ks team.
These guys were content to give money to educators and wave good by to the money, trusting in their institutions to make good use of it. Their names are on things. I guess this makes people happy. Preston Brooks, who beat up Charles Sumner in Congress before the Civil War, had a building named after him at the U of Georgia.
It must be hard to be told how great you are. It makes you believe it. That is the way I have always looked at awards and the like. Teacher of the year is an inappropriate designation. When I saw the grave of Thomas Merton in Kentucky, it looked exactly like the other Trappists, despite the copious publications from his inspiring pen.
Diane/John,
Invoking the post-Enron movie title, the wealthy men (and they are mostly men) behind education reform are convinced that they are “The Smartest Guys in the Room.” Because things worked for them, they honestly believe they know how things work, or should work, in every other realm. Move the levers; let free markets yield optimal outcomes; develop models, define benchmarks, utilize the right metrics and make efficient use of capital. The recalcitrant, lethargic, failing education system will eventually respond, because that is the way their world works.
This is a very important historical perspective and explains why the factory model of education is prevailing in the 21st century. In short: Business leaders and free market economic principles have gained increasing control over education. Education has become highly dependent on philanthropy, as public funding has declined. Philanthropists didn’t make their fortunes as violinists, so they bring their business perspective to bear on the institutions they support. As the old saying goes, “If your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail.” Today’s economist-driven version of education reform is the hammer that mistakes America’s children, particularly the poorest kids of color, as nails to pound.