John Thompson, historian and teacher in Oklahoma, Reviews John Merrow’s ADDICTED TO REFORM:
In “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education”, John Merrow lets it all out. Merrow, the winner of the George Polk Award and two George Foster Peabody Awards, leads us down “Memory Lane,” republishing his astonishing journalism that predates “A Nation at Risk,” and its warning against “a rising tide of mediocrity.” He also recalls successful innovators such as James Comer, E.D. Hirsch, Deborah Meier, and Henry Levin.
ADDICTED TO REFORM by John Merrow | Kirkus Reviews
But Merrow shows how high stakes testing dramatically increased our output of mediocre and even worse lessons for our kids. He tells us how the bubble-in reform “mania” got to a point where a principal told his teachers to “motor down,” to stop teaching 11th grade material to high-performing freshmen in order to prepare for the 9th grade test. Even more despicable was cancelling an annual kindergarten play so five-year-olds could spend more time becoming “college and career ready.”
The veteran reporter, with four decades of experience at NPR and PBS, reviews the way that test and punish “went into high gear during [the] Bush and Obama” administrations, when “‘regurgitation education’ became the order of the day.” Accountability-driven, competition-driven reformers turned schools into dreary places for “parroting back answers, while devaluing intellectual curiosity, cooperative learning, projects, field trips, the arts, physical education and citizenship.”
Merrow recalls the legacies of “blindly worshipping test scores.” Under Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, and Michelle Rhee, et. al and with funding by the “Billionaires Boys Club,” test scores became more than “the holy grail.” Merrow concludes, “Test scores are their addiction, the equivalent of crack cocaine, oxycodone, or crystal meth.”
Given Merrow’s influential coverage of corporate reform abuse in Washington D.C., it is no surprise that his discussion of Rhee is especially important. High stakes testing like the DC-CAS is always a bad idea, Merrow concludes, but in D.C. “it was an open invitation to disaster.” It was a part of a mentality where, for instance, D.C.’s director of professional development said that 80% of the district’s teachers lacked the skills or motivation to be successful in the classroom.
This narrow viewpoint, which was brought nationwide by “Waiting for Superman,” “The 74,” and other corporate-funded public relations assaults on public education, has “poisoned learning by turning it into a ‘gotcha game.’” But, Merrow concludes that our schools won’t “be out of the woods” until we “stop belittling and sometimes humiliating” teachers.
Merrow dissects the “heroic teacher” meme that set educators up to fail in their single-handed fight against the legacies of poverty. He cites teachers’ accounts of how “the testing mania has caused people to lose their minds.” Teachers explain how they “are becoming more like McDonald’s workers.” And, as another teacher explains, “I’m still in the classroom, but I miss teaching. It’s all about testing.”
The result of the lavishly-funded, data-driven mandates to transform “teacher quality” is that only prison guards, child care workers, and secretaries have higher attrition rates. A seemingly conservative estimate is that 81% of teachers believe that schools have too much testing and, that helps explain why about 60% of teachers say they are losing enthusiasm for the job, with nearly half saying they would quit if they could find a higher-paying job.
Merrow offers a 12-Step plan to reverse the harm inflicted by corporate school reform. In doing so, he often reminds us that it wasn’t just a misguided ideology and hubris that led sincere reformers astray. He notes the profit motives that undoubtedly influenced edu-philanthropists and charter providers, motivating them to ignore the overwhelming evidence of the unintended harm they were dumping on children.
For instance, Merrow speculates that if Jesse James would come back, today he’d become a charter operator in North Carolina. Similarly, huge administrative costs richly reward charter operators. The New York City Schools Chancellor is compensated at a rate of 40 cents per student, but charter leader Eva Moskowitz earns $51.35 per student, and Deborah Kenny is compensated at a rate of $375 per student.
The part of Addicted to Reform that taught me the most was Merrow’s account of Big Pharma’s influence on special education practices. I had no idea that it was once claimed that some ADD treatments were “safer than aspirin.” But the lessons that I most needed to learn are included in Merrow’s account of the “Buy Now, Pay Later” economics of Ed Tech. His bottom line isn’t surprising, “harnessing technology, … to raise test scores, makes education worse, not better.”
On one hand, the solutions in the 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education are modest. However, their strengths are rooted in what our democracy already knows how to do. We don’t need a new Common Core, Merrow says, to teach us how to respect the science that calls for high-quality early education, or to bring exploratory learning back into classrooms. By now, there is a widely held understanding that due to reform, “Students have been the losers, sentenced to mind-numbing schooling. Teachers who care about their craft have also lost out.”
The big winners have been the testing companies. But the grassroots Opt Out movement has led the counterattack. The refusal to take these punitive tests has empowered students and patrons, while revealing some of the darkest sides of the reform addiction. For instance, when 90% of students opted out in a Connecticut school, the administration forced opt outers to attend classes where there would be “no new learning” allowed.
And that brings us back to why Merrow was right to use the word “addiction” to diagnose the failure of reform. Merrow shows how corporate reform began as a fundamentally anti-intellectual movement (by admittedly smart people who knew little of the institution they sought to transform) and ended up defending policies that are sometimes irrational and/or cruel. Somehow, they couldn’t see the damage done by shaming poor children of color into increasing their “outputs.” These social engineers imposed the stress of testing to overcome the stress of poverty, and consciously contributed to increased segregation in order to reverse the legacies of segregation.
And many reformers are still convincing themselves that they haven’t created a disaster. It would be hard to explain such a continuing debacle without using Merrow’s language of addiction, as well has his guide to following their money.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Somewhat related, will the reformster vultures be able to feed on all the “opportunities” Mother Nature’s vengeances had given them? https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/feds-texas-offer-choices-students-homeless-harvey-131019328.html
has given them
Well, Heaven’s to Betsy was in Houston with Trump last week and we already know that “rephorm’ is alive and well in Florida, thanks to Jeb. Texas keeps fighting vouchers, but the biggest vulture of all swooped in to pick the meat from the carcass of public education. It will be interesting to watch the outcome, considering what happened after Katrina.
You mean as happened in New Orleans after Katrina?
As usual both Johns, Merrow and Thompson are right on target. The time has come to put our words into actions. Back in the 70’s we put our jobs at risk to go on strike for better wages and working conditions. Now is the time to take risks and infiltrate the system through cross curriculum projects that bring real, hands on education back to students. Those in the trenches must subvert the system to stop the humiliation of students by the “who’s first and who’s last” mentality. It is time to take students from “where they are” to their future.
It is not only unethical to follow the guide of the artificial reformers, it is immoral. The testing police can’t be everywhere. Ignore the big test and teach from your heart, like you were prepared to do.
Soon Thompson will have to revise his book or add a chapter about the pending cyber assault. We will have to wail for depersonalized learning to fail in order to read that chapter.
Diane The addiction has another dimension: addiction to the demands of small-mindedness.
Woven through the narrative is (as reported) a strain of anti-intellectualism. But that is rooted in some other “issues,” one being the very real problem of integrating completely different fields of study. In our case, it’s education and technology. TWO SIDES of the problem:
ONE: the reality is that these ARE two completely different fields that REALLY need to find a way to work together–for both the furtherance of both fields AS distinct fields; for a PROPER integration of technology into the field of education (especially where children are directly involved), AND for a fuller education for those who are specialists in the technical fields.
TWO: Politicians and techno-oligarchs are apparently NOT INTERESTED in either understanding the field of education or giving it and the people who work in it the credence it deserves. The irony here is that it speaks to their own LACK OF EDUCATION in the fuller sense of that term. With that in mind, my guess is that the testing mania afoot in the land of reform is based on three serious problems rooted in the demands of small-mindedness:
SMALL-MINDED PROBLEM (1): They mistake testing results and algorithmic ends for FULL KNOWLEDGE of the field of education and the people in it. From this two-pronged mistake flows the idea that teachers are superfluous to education–teachers are there just to make money, to leave early, to have their summers off, and to create problems–at best, to monitor testing; and SOME children are not worth the effort anyway, or the money–they’ll never contribute to the economy. (After all, it’s all about making money anyway.) (Neo-liberalism, BTW, and this idea comes from the biggest mean-spirited money hoarders EVER.)
SMALL-MINDED PROBLEM (2): Educational theory and education itself don’t act like the natural and physical sciences. Hence, they are not authentic scientific fields and so can be dispensed with. (This is basically the positivist problem, BTW.)
SMALL-MINDED PROBLEM (3): Leads to closed mindedness: “My horizon is the only and best horizon.” The further problem is the migration of their “I think best” power to the field of politics; and it’s a version of intellectual totalitarianism where using the term “intellectual” is giving it some undeserved rope.
Thanks, Catherine.
Good one.
Yvonne Siu-Runyan You’re welcome. We do have to give devils their due.
I don’t know if “Test scores are their addiction, the equivalent of crack cocaine, oxycodone, or crystal meth” is quite the right metaphor. I don’t think they are users, but rather pushers – pushing what on the surface seems to be a somewhat reasonable policy – monitoring kids to see if they are learning – and using this as the wedge to crack open public education and reform it in such a way as to play in the hands of testing companies and the like, and answering the needs of those who want to see teachers hired on the model of sub-contractors and temp workers.
So, rather than users, we should draw the analogy to suppliers and compare the data-driven test pushers to tobacco companies and sugar producers. Big test and Big Data deserve their place alongside Big Tobacco and Big Sugar, but they are more insidious in that they not only say what they are doing is harmless, but claim that is actually beneficial. Moreover, they claim that those who do not accept their solution are detrimental to the welfare of students.
My favorite quote showing the narrowness of this comes from Robert E Knowling, once the CEO of the Leadership Academy, an institution created under Mr. Bloomberg to train principals:
“I know that at the end of the day there’s only one metric that counts. That is, did we move student achievement? And when I say move, not incrementally move, but did we substantially improve over a period of time, student achievement.”
This single metric has weight as the common currency of educational discourse and the direction of institutional change. Increases in test scores are the sine qua non for education reform in the current political climate. It thus pushes asides many other functions of the schooling system: providing for socialization and public health, instilling democratic values, aiding a child’s emotional and social as well as cognitive development and somehow creating a better society. Thus, by articulating the problem in such a narrow fashion it predetermines a narrow set of solutions and a narrow set of policy options.
The idea of a narrow or bounded rationality helps to explain the nature of the debate. For one thing, it sets aside the notion that we already know the right questions to ask, understand the causality of educational institutions as social agents and can rely on a single method to provide definitive answers. Instead, rationality is directed by a set of narratives that are pervasive and have huge impacts on collective decision-making. They affect what information to which we pay attention.
But while the mind-set may be narrow, the effects are broad and far reaching. Art classes are done away with because there are no high stakes tests for schools or students focusing on art. English, which was broadly understood as centered on fiction, becomes ‘English Language Arts’ with its emphasis on reading and writing skills and its shift from fiction to non-fiction. The third ‘r’ is tested for, so it gets a lot of attention, Science less so (Science tests wer supposed to be part of NCLB, but it was never done) and Social Studies much less so. As we get farther away from the core – to music, art and physical education – administrators looking for a good school ranking look to these areas as places they might cut.
This is narrow, yes, but it is also counterproductive. Going back to the 1980s the idea that our school system was hurting us economically has been a mainstay of justifications for school reform. In fact, the paradoxical outcome of 30 years of test-driven school reform is that it may have made the US less competitive in terms of international education. One aspect this, directly related to the cut backs on art and music and the narrowing of teaching in other subjects, is a drop in creativity. According to Kyung-Hee Kim, presently at William and Mary and formerly a high school and middle school English teacher in her native Korea, IQ scores in the US continue to rise, but creativity, as measured by the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, have been in decline since 1990. The irony is that, while fostered by US culture, “creativity is not emphasized by the U.S. educational system.”
So the seeming result of the single metric is not only that schooling is more boring, it is also that Big Test and Big Data advance their profit making strategies while the imagination of our students is constrained.
[Interview with Robert E Knowling, Jr., 5 Nov. 2003, conducted by Rafael Pi Roman, “A Year of Change: Leadership in the Principal’s Office,” New York Voices, Channel 13, New York, January 2004.]
Brian,
Knowling came from the tech world. He was never a teacher, never worked in a school.
Your distinction is an important one. Teachers and Educators forced to “use” the drugs the testing companies are pushing get no joy from them; they aren’t the addicts.
Only outsiders who can count their profit far away from the consequences could continue to push their one-size-fits all “solutions” so cheerfully. Ignoring the end of “Art…., English, … centered on fiction, ….Science …. and Social Studies”; ignoring the decline in creativity; the growing ignorance of civics and democratic norms; the relentless growth of total-screen time, colonizing more and more of students’ waking hours– something schools can either help fight, or add to.
Are they addicts or pushers?
For those of you who don’t have much time, that was really the main point of
my overly long posting above.
I have followed and appreciated Diane R. f.or years. Please don’t stop using your voice. My Facebook note with the link posted for John Merrow on C-SPAN Oct.7:
Teachers are required by states to teach district curriculum; however, I am proud of always having taught kids, not just some subject and always meeting and starting where each student was regardless of efforts to lockstep kids or follow poorly conceived programs. I’m so glad I taped and just watched this on C-SPAN BookTV. He makes a lot of sense and good points on education’s addiction to reforms that don’t work but do serious harm yet are declared successes. He has a good 12- step program to fix schools. He says we need to go back to trust and verify teachers work. He lamented exactly what we were told my last year, that my district’s new policy was “no longer room for teacher judgment.” The priority was teaching kids to take tests, and endless meetings to analyze the practice tests.after hand grading the worthless new tests which the district did not pay to have computer scored: rather, we did it, then inputted the data for comparison graphs, after they dumped the useful MAP Test taken and scored by computer,
Jan Taylor Also, BookTV.org did an interview with John Merrow about his book today. It should be available.
One of the most upsetting recent events in education has been completely ignored in the media – NASA Education, under Obama, Clinton, and Bush – but especially under Obama – has now been packed with administrators who have no education or science backgrounds. The new Ed Chief has a degree in legislative affairs; one of his key assistants has a degree in Business Administration. Their major accomplishment so far seems to have been the abolition of at least one highly-successful NASA education program. Someone might want to study and report about this.