In his regular column at Education Week, Marc Tucker cites Anya Kamenetz’s incisive reporting on “A Nation at Risk” and agrees that the report was fake news. The commission agreed in advance that American education was in decline and cherrypicked facts to prove its conclusion. His column is behind a paywall.
Tucker says that achievement was not in decline at the time the report was written. The American people, he says, were lied to. He cites a contemporaneous report by Daniel Koretz, now at Harvard, then at the Congressional Budget Office, which
“showed that there had indeed been a decline, mainly in high school performance, that had begun in the 1960s. But he reported that this decline ended with the cohort of students that entered school in the late 1960s. As that cohort wended its way through the grades, they continued to do better than their predecessors, and those that followed also did better. Further, Koretz reported, the poor and minority students whose test performance was analyzed showed no dip in performance in the period in which the performance of virtually all other students of all ages was falling.
“Put this picture together and you will see that the American people were lied to. Their children had not been falling off an educational cliff right up to the day the report was released. Instead, the performance of American students had been doing better and better beginning with the cohort of students who had entered school in the late 1960s, FIFTEEN OR SO YEARS before the panel sounded its famous false alarm.”
Tucker notes that at least one observer thought that “A Nation at Risk” was beneficial, but he does not agree.
”At the end of her story, Kamenetz quotes Jim Guthrie, now a professor at Lynn University, who has held many prominent positions in the American education establishment. She asked him what he thought about the lack of evidence presented by the authors of the 1983 report. “My view of it, in retrospect,” he says, “is seldom, maybe never, has a public report been so wrong and done so much good.”
“Let us leave aside the question as to whether the end justifies the means to consider, for a moment, whether Guthrie is right. Is it true that A Nation at Risk has done the United States a world of good? What’s the evidence for that?
“Once again, there is none. For as long as there was a long-term version of NAEP (that is the version in which the items in the assessment did not change over time, permitting valid comparisons over the long haul), the scores of high school students changed only very slightly from the 1970s, when the survey was first administered. The 1970s, you recall, was the decade before A Nation at Risk was released, so this data shows no change in high school performance since the report’s release. From the time that PISA, the international comparison of student achievement administered by the OECD, was first given in the year 2000, to the present, the scores of U.S. students have been steady to slightly falling, while students in a growing number of other countries have been doing better. PISA also surveys high school students. So there is good reason to believe that there has been no improvement in the academic performance of high school students since the release of the report. Guthrie might have been referring to the maelstrom of “reforms” instituted in the United States since A Nation at Risk was released in 1983, but reform is not improvement, and there has been precious little improvement.”
He writes that the negative tone of the report
“delegitimized the teachers and school administrators in our public schools and ushered in policies based on a profound distrust of the very professionals on whom the improvement of the system would depend. The subtext of the “reforms” so much admired by Guthrie and his colleagues is the charge that it is the regular public school teachers, their unions and the school administrators who are responsible for the alleged failure of the country’s schools and reform should be about circumventing or at least weakening their control of the system…
“The attitudes toward teachers and teaching, and the actions that flowed from those attitudes, have led to a steep decline in the number of high school students deciding to be teachers, the long slow relative decline in teacher compensation, the early retirement of many capable teachers, the steady decline in the average tenure of school principals and superintendents and the rise in employment of unqualified teachers. William Bennet, President Reagan’s Education Secretary, famously declared school administrators to be “the blob.” While the United States was busy attacking its education professionals, the countries whose students are now outpacing ours were working hard to raise the status of the profession of teaching by improving compensation, raising standards for entering the profession, creating incentives for the most competent professionals to share their expertise with others and instituting myriad other measures, all of which can be characterized as investing in the profession. Not one of these countries chose to improve their education system by implicitly attacking the competence and commitment of their education professionals. A Nation at Risk set the tone and provided the rationale for all of this.”
He adds:
”Kamenetz closed her report with another observation I have made in this space. She wonders whether, rather than painting a picture in which the report produced important gains in American education despite the failures of American educators, it might be more accurate to paint a picture in which we see American educators succeeding despite the attacks on them stimulated by the report. In this view of the world, one that I think has a lot of merit, we need to see the steady scores of American high school students since the 1970s as a victory. Why? Because they held steady in spite of a substantial increase in the proportion of students living in poverty, recent increases in school segregation by socio-economic status and race, a decrease in the equity of school funding within states and an increase in the spread between teacher compensation and the compensation of others with the same amount of education.“
Tucker closes by saying that our education system needs vast improvement to keep up with a changing world, not by looking to the past, but by looking to a different future to meet new challenges, a future in which all must be well educated.
Quoting from myself:
The contemporary manifestation of propaganda began with a 1983 report commissioned by the Reagan administration, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. [13] This report claimed to provide evidence that a deteriorating educational system was undermining America’s vitality. It was a big lie, exposed by more honest work in subsequent years, particularly the Sandia Report commissioned in 1990. [14] This subsequent work received little fanfare and nothing changed. Education reform in 2016 is based on the same big lie in new clothing. It has been a 33-year war on public education, teachers and teachers unions. It seems all of America believes that our schools are bad and that education reform is a critical need.
A Nation at Risk appeared to provide unassailable statistical proof that student achievement had dropped. The average scores the report cited were not fiction. They were lower. But it didn’t mean what the report concluded.
The 1990 Sandia Report found seemingly contradictory facts. The average test scores of all American students had gone down, as A Nation at Risk claimed, but the average test scores of every single sub-group (by class, race, and every other variable) of American students had gone up! How can that be? Enter Simpson’s Paradox, a simple and fascinating statistical phenomenon.
To illustrate:
10 students in subgroup A each scored 80 points.
10 students in subgroup B each scored 60 points.
10 students in subgroup C each scored 40 points.
Average score = 60 (1,800 points divided by 30 students).
Change the subgroup size:
10 students in subgroup A each scored 85.
20 students in subgroup B each scored 65.
30 students in subgroup C each scored 45.
Average score = 58.3 (3,500 divided by 60 students).
The overall average dropped from 60 to 58.3 yet every student group actually improved by 6 to 12%!
This is essentially what happened in America. Population growth and increased student enrollment in less privileged communities changed the relative sizes of groups by race and class. But the achievement of every group, including the poorest kids, went up.
As Pasi Salhberg stated, ” America does not have an education problem. It has a poverty problem.” It’s getting worse, not better. It is not only due to the arrival of immigrants. There are fewer middle class jobs as “gig” jobs replace union jobs. Lots of college graduates cannot get started in a stable career, and they become under-employed.
America does not have a poverty problem.
It has a politician problem.
The kids are OK. It is the adults who are a problem.
If you think that the USA has no poverty problem, you are mistaken. Just come to WashDC, and go up to Montana Avenue NE. We have spent over $20 Trillion dollars, since LBJ declared the “war” on poverty in 1965. Poverty won.
Let them eat cake. Is that the solution?
You missed the point..😉
Very smart and illuminating, Steve, many thanks. Some attacked the official story, the fraud of A Nation at Risk, 30-40 yrs ago, citing that test scores had not collapsed and no national emergency was at hand. I argued then that the rising test scores of black students in the ten-year period of mid-70s to 80s were actually narrowing the racial gap. The book I wrote with these counter-claims was rejected by every American publisher, published in England and swam across the Atlantic. Others put out strong but ignored work, Ernest Boyer, John Goodlad, Ted Sizer, Richard Ohmann, Jeannie Oakes, among others–brilliant folks dismissed in the Reagan-Clinton era.
Ira, sorry I wasn’t one of them at the time. Better late than never, I suppose.
Diane–you have become our Hercules, and it is marvelous, keep going.
I read some very good books by Boyer, Goodlad, and Sizer when they came out. They continue to be ignored. Are they even in print now?
Don’t forget the seminal book by David Berliner & Bruce Biddle, “The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools,” which came out in the mid-90s and is still relevant today:
“Fake News” out of the Ray-Gun administration … Unthinkable! Think for a second (only one second) … Ronald Reagan is a wholly sanctified saint to anyone that follows Fox News.
I mean who would dare to demean President Ray-Gun. Wasn’t he the most popular president in history?
Let’s check.
“During the first two years of Reagan’s presidency, the public was giving President Reagan the lowest level of approval of all modern elected presidents. Reagan’s average first-year approval rating was 58 percent–lower than Dwight Eisenhower’s 69 percent, Jack Kennedy’s 75 percent, Richard Nixon’s 61 percent and Jimmy Carter’s 62 percent.” At the end of his second year, (remember the Reagan recession?) Reagan’s approval rating was 41 percent; after the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed, Reagan’s approval rating stood at 46 percent. His approval rating for his entire presidency was lower than Kennedy’s, Eisenhower’s and even Johnson’s, and at times he was one of the most unpopular presidents in recent history.
Wasn’t President Ray-Gun the most honest president in history?
Let’s check:
“Also forgotten (by the Fox News crowd that crowned him a saint) is Reagan’s own embarrassing propensity to just make things up. Reagan was a dunce and a fabricator. One of his most famous assertions was, “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” and he maintained, wrongly, that sulfur dioxide emitted from Mount St. Helens was greater than that emitted by cars over a 10-year period. (In one day, cars emit 40 times what Mount St. Helens released in a day even at its peak activity.) In 1985, Reagan praised the P.W. Botha’s apartheid regime of South Africa for eliminating segregation, a blunder then-Press Secretary Larry Speakes had to correct a few days later.” …
“And let’s not forget the wages of “trickle down” economics and “Reaganomics,” from which we have still not recovered.” …
“So let’s just remember aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, whom Reagan likened to the Founding Fathers, and the revelation that the CIA had produced a manual that taught them, in part, how to kidnap and “neutralize” government officials. Iran-Contra–the secret and illegal selling of weapons to our sworn enemy, Iran, to then fund the Contras–was both a constitutional disaster and a foreign policy blunder about which we were asked to believe Reagan knew nothing. His administration was also thoroughly corrupt: Eight senior officials in his administration were indicted.
“Fabrication, lying, cruel and counterproductive policies at home and abroad, bloating of the deficit, widening the gap between rich and poor: These are the Reagan legacy.”
http://inthesetimes.com/article/3242/the_enduring_lies_of_ronald_reagan
Really, “Fake News” from the transparent, democracy-loving, union loving, teacher loving ALEC supported GOP … Unthinkable!
Wow, I think I just discovered Donald Trump’s role model if Trump knows who Reagon was. If so, Hitler must be in 2nd place for Trump’s list of role models.
Lloyd,
So Reagan had low poll ratings with 58% approval. What is Trump’s approval rating?
The Kremlin’s Agent Orange’s current average for all the polls of his job approval rating is 43.4-percent.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html
But leave it to Bloated Trump to claim that 43.3-percent is the highest rating in history and his hardcore following will swallow that toxic swill because “he” said it.
More about the fake and phony Ray-Gun: As most analysts predicted, Reagan’s massive $749 billion supply-side tax cuts in 1981 quickly produced even more massive annual budget deficits. Combined with his rapid increase in defense spending, Reagan delivered not the balanced budgets he promised, but record-setting debt. Even his OMB alchemist David Stockman could not obscure the disaster with his famous “rosy scenarios.”
Forced to raise taxes eleven times to avert financial catastrophe, the Gipper nonetheless presided over a tripling of the American national debt to nearly $3 trillion. By the time he left office in 1989, Ronald Reagan more than equaled the entire debt burden produced by the previous 200 years of American history.”
He was not a fiscal conservative, he was a fiscal disaster.
https://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/15-things-gop-doesnt-want-you-know-about-taxes-debt#two
So true. I remember .
That $3 trillion is a lot more now if we factor in the interest paid on it since Reagon added that sum to the national debt. That debt changes annually and is based on the interest rate on 10-year treasury notes. For instance, in just 2008, that interest was 3.7%.
How much was the interest paid on that $3 trillion just for one year in 2008 … and that was 19 years after Ray-Gun left office? This is the total I got but I did not compound the interest daily.
3.7% x 3 trillion = $30,000,000,000
THIRTY BILLION !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
for … one … year
https://www.thebalance.com/interest-on-the-national-debt-4119024
What galls me is that the GOP and/or Trump’s supporters blame the increased growth of ALL of the national debt during Obama’s years without mentioning how much of it was from the interest on the debt he inherited when he became president.
“Fake News” is a euphemism for what it really was: fraud.
It was a knowing and quite purposefully deception of the American public.
Amazingly, even some of the people involved in the writing admit it.
SomeDAM Poet: “fraud” is a sober and accurate way to describe ANAR.
I repeat here part of what I posted on a thread of this blog [4-30-2018].
From the late Gerald Bracey, READING EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: HOW TO AVOID GETTING STATISTICALLY SNOOKERED (2006).
On NAEP results in the ANAR, pp. 24-26:
[start]
“There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of U.S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments in 1969, 1973, and 1977.” This is probably true. [Bracey goes on to discuss why this is problematic.]
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 tests 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. (Terrel Bell, the secretary of education who commissioned A Nation at Risk, was quite candid in his memoir The Thirteenth Man about how he had heard many stories about the terrible state of public schools and had convened the commission to document the stories.)
[end]
[brackets mine]
But the corporate reform education crowd, in all its guises then and now, stays true to itself. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, self-serving liars gotta lie…
Consistency is not always a virtue.
Thank you for keeping it real. Not Rheeal.
😎
Tucker closes by saying that our educational system needs to look to the future. Be careful of the future you wish for. Gates and Zuckerberg are waiting in the wings to deliver an even worse dystopian future to our young people, a “personalized” world void of human contact, and many rungs lower than a comprehensive education guided by professionals.
I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Bill Gates has invested in the future profits of sex robots and that Donald Trump has already ordered a half dozen.
Marc Tucker is quite the talker. He was involved in a 2006 report “Tough Choices or Tough Times?” which reiterated much of the fear mongering of A Nation at Risk.
The following is from “A Nation at Risk to Win the Future: The State of Public Education in the U.S.” by Timothy Scott
University Of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
*In 2006 NCEE [Tucker’s organization] released another national report titled Tough Choices or Tough Times: New Commission on Skills in the American Workforce. The report contends that competitors within the global economy, particularly India and China, are out producing the U.S. with their more highly skilled and flexible workforce. It goes on to make a case that the U.S. is unable to maintain its world economic dominance because the U.S. educational system is failing to train American students, as future workers, with the vocational aptitudes that multinational corporations require of the 21st century workforce. The report outlines the “Touch Choices” the U.S. workforce (otherwise known as the American public) must make to compete for jobs with the highly flexible, non-benefitted, low-wage workforces who are positioned as being their global rivals.
As with Reagan’s alarmist report A Nation at Risk; Tough Choices or Tough Times argues that the U.S. faces economic disaster unless our schools are radically restructured to become competitive private enterprises to enable them to fulfill their social engineering task of workforce development. Tough Choices or Tough Times (TCTT) argues “American industry… [is] in favor of high-performance management models designed to produce high-quality products and services with highly educated workers. Some school districts are moving in this direction. That movement needs to be accelerated, formalized, and brought to scale. We share here [ways] to make that work” (National Center on Education and the Economy, 2006, p. 15).*
/// End of quotes
I understand the allure of quoting Deformers when they seem to have come around, but why should anyone believe Tucker has actually come around?
I’M HOME, Tucker sees the writing on the wall and is now trying to reinvent himself before the gravey train leaves the station without him.
IMHO got mangled to I’m home by self correct.
Ha ha ha
SDP,
Google my withering critique of Marc Tucker’s “Tough Choices, Tough Times,” published when I blogged weekly at Edweek.
We now have one of the lowest rates of union membership in the industrialized world at 11.3%. All the other industrialized nations have faced globalization as well so globalization alone is not to blame. In the US, the 1% and ALEC have made a deliberate assault on unions. https://www.vox.com/2014/9/1/6078697/decline-of-unions-united-states-worldwide-oecd
I find myself out of the know in writing bout education. Is this person to be trusted? After all, he did a pretty good job of messing up before. I have a lot of opinions. Why do I not dredge up some stats to make it look like I know what I am talking about?
There is too much talking and not enough listening.
Thank for asking the question about trust in the opining of Marc Tucker. Thanks to SomeDAM poet for surfacing the bad thinking of Tucker and friends with his biggest supporters in business. Here is a link that might work to see Diane’s withering critique of Touch Choices Tough Times. https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2007/01/17/19ravitch.h26.html
See also Tucker’s letter to Hillary Clinton, an audacious effort to shape federal policy shortly after Bill Clinton was elected to office.
Tucker, Marc (1992) National Center for Education and the Economy letter to Hillary Clinton, Congressional Record-Extension of Remarks, E1819. Cited in the “Dollars to the Classroom Act,” Speech of Hon. Bob Schaeffer of Colorado in the House of Representatives, Thursday, September 17, 1998.
Tucker is the epitome of the shameless opportunist..
Deform seems to include a lot of those.
Good one, Lloyd.
We knew it then – catch phrases, headlines and statistics rule the day.
ANAR: ” If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
THAT got business folks’ attention. And, that attention got the Governors’ attention. That begat Goals 2000 which actually (for the most part) set ambitious goals. BUT That begat standardized testing as the only thing that matters.
The problem was and still is educators are not organized, there is not real national public education entity, and every state is different so there is no defense.
We have no way to illustrate success so failure is easy to find and use politically.
Is there a comparison of public hospitals or doctors or judges or human services or police departments? No. And, if so that would measure the work of the adults NOT the outcomes of the patients, citizens, and others.
Education is easy.
It’s the only thing Americans vote on where they get to truly have control over something (until the dark money buys their school boards).
The results are as instant as the dinner table or a text from their kid 3rd period that the teacher yelled at them.
Everyone is an expert because they went to school.
And, corporate white men complain they can’t find employees.
(Oh and everyone loves to share the reading scores = prison beds urban myth).
Statistics will never never ever work to illustrate success in schools. And a simple test illustrates reading, not 6 days of 4 hours of testing.
The best we can do now is be thankful for Diane and everyone writing and exposing the illicit inequitable profiteering and reverse Robin Hood (take from the poor and benefit the rich) going on.
Reverse Robbin Hood would be “Robbin the Hood”
“Robbin The Hood”
Robbin the hood
Of public schools
Replacin’ with flood
Of charter tools
Over the hedge
With his Merry Men
Robbin The Hood
Has struck again
Ehvurabudy an der brudda shure luv demselfs sum test scores!
Read “The Manufactured Crisis.”
The many ways Reagan used fake news has been underreported because the fake news has been continual, covering his tracks ever since.
We all know Reagan struck down the Fairness Doctrine to open the floodgates for political shlock jocks like Limbaugh and Hannity, making the radio airwaves highly politically charged and imbalanced to favor the right over the left.
But many don’t know how extensively the Reagan administration used taxpayer money for propaganda and disinformation. Documents discovered in 2010 at the Reagan Library showed Reagan “had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.”
His administration seeded money for media campaigns funded by right wing think tanks and billionaires, laying out out plans to report fake news promoting Reagan’s foreign policies, discredit critics and secretly manipulate book sales and distribution.
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/06/04/how-reagans-propaganda-succeeded/
It was illegal to disseminate government-supplied talking points in news without disclosure, but enforcement seems to have gone up in smoke, with both parties engaging in media collusion at the highest levels. The Bush administration was caught making fake news when No Child left Behind was launched, but only the reporter was held accountable, not the White House.
Then press secretary Scott McLellan revealed Karl Rove was feeding fake news to Sean Hannity and “friendly” reporters all throughout the Iraq war, and many other scandals. Obama administration officials were accused of holding weekly meetings with Media matters, and Trump’s administration is no longer even hiding the collusion, openly using Hannity as an advisor and literally tapping right wing media pundits like Steve Bannon and Larry Kudlow to run the government.
This is a nation at risk, at risk of having its public schools swept away. If a foreign country imposed Michelle Rhee’s broom on the U.S., it would be considered an act of war.
Michelle Rhee is our secret weapon.
If North Korea threatens us, we can just send her up on her broomstick to intercept the missile.
Now, now, Poet, Rhee was never a witch; she was on a witch hunt.
Her broom was a trophy. Once upon a time, a teacher was using that broom to sweep her classroom after charters and testing had taken all the money to pay a custodian to do it. Rhee erased the teacher at the stake and took her broom.
It was all documented by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I have no reason to doubt your story about how the broom was acquired.
However, I feel a certain responsibility to point out that just because you are on a witch hunt does not mean you are not a witch.
After all, the Wicked Witch of the West was on a witch hunt when she went looking for her sister’s Ruby slippers.
And Glinda, the Good Witch of the North was also on a witch hunt when she found the slippers first and transferred them to Dorothy.
By the way, did you know that Glinda was actually the Good Witch of the South in the book and that there was actually another Good Witch of the North?
And please note that I never said whether Rhee was a good witch or a bad witch, although the broomstick might be a clue.
What do good witches ride … a vacuum cleaner?
“A Nation at Whisk”
A Nation at Whisk
From Rhee and her kin
From broom of a witch
That’s sweeping us in
What do good witches ride?
A Harley
I feel sorry for those good witches because I’ve read that Harley is going bankrupt. I guess they will have to switch to Hondas or Yamaha Motorcycles.
Alright, Rhee might just be a witch. She basically only had to chant, “Double, double toil and trouble” a few times and her crimes in Erasergate were never investigated.
Is this the same Michelle Rhee who fired a man on freaking television?! Is that a “broom”?
She fired a man on television. Still can’t believe it. She didn’t use the broom with which she infamously appeared on a magazine cover, though. When she fired him, she used her hate. She was made completely from billionaires’ hate.
“She didn’t use the broom with
whichwitch she infamously appeared on a magazine cover, ”Fixed
Lest anyone think calling Rhee a witch is exageration
And I think the broom was probably behind the desk.
Tucker, and most writers on education, assume that test scores reflect the actual academic performance of students. They like the term “how our students are doing,” and often use it when trying to compare students in the USA with students in other countries.
These writers also tend to assume that changes in test scores represent changes in school quality, student learning, and teacher effectiveness.
None of these assumptions is true.
Until these writers stop assuming that test scores and changes in test scores represent something worth basing policy decisions on, I’m not going to take them seriously.
Some proxies for true academic performance, teacher effectiveness, and school quality might possibly exist in the future. For now, even parental income–the best predictor of student test scores–can’t serve as a proxy for any of these hard-to-measure outcomes. Student learning apart from performance is especially tough to pin down.
Ed Week should stop perpetuating these bad assumptions. So should all education writers. Unfortunately, it’s the most popular tool of their trade. And it’s where their bread is buttered.
Randal Hendee
P.S. I’m not against NAEP continuing–just as a political necessity–but it has to be taken with a hugantic chunk of salt. And I’m not against using the metrics of bogus reformers against them, either. Still, I believe that the insufficiency of those metrics should always be pointed out.
Amen!
“None of these assumptions is true.”
Bingo, bango, boingo, give that man a Kewpie doll!
And if I may correct your last thought:
“Still, I believe that the INVALIDITIES of those SUPPOSED AND FALSE metrics should always be pointed out.”
The irony is that Reform really is putting the nation at risk. Common Core test prep is the new national curriculum and it bears rotten fruit.
Common Core is a self fulfailing policy
And the terrible frustration is that after fifteen plus years of NCLB/RttT invasions, the educational system which was NOT broken, is now very clearly falling apart so that more and more of the reformers’ attacks on a “broken” system are seemingly true.
The corporate reformers of public education BROKE public education deliberately so they could profit off of its ruins.
Yes, a chorus of teachers at our school feels that our school is being ruined by the onslaught of mandates from above: Common Core, NGSS, testing, and the virtual elimination of suspensions.
WAS ALL PLANNED and WELL-EXECUTED by the .01%ers with the help of politicians who play for pay.
And the American public has been lied to about education ever since. Would that people would realize how much HARD work and sacrifice we put in every day, instead of listening to the endless diatribes of “failing schools.”
Reading the report, and NPR story. What I find strange is that citing more students in college or high school graduation as metrics of value speaks to the gap in defining “education is working”. At least 1/3 of new college students need major remedial support for at least 1-3 years before starting on grade level work.
Our literacy levels are not first world
https://www.cdc.gov/healthliteracy/learn/understandingliteracy.html
Our Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) scores are horrible.
https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/
I don’t question that teachers, admins, parents, students, community etc.. don’t work hard or try hard. What I question is if a student is in the system for 10-15 years for 2000-3000 days of education the approach to gain basic literacy much less PIAAC scores are not working.
If it can’t be agreed we have a true crisis in literacy & skills then we will just send 10’s of millions thru the system per generation who are not equipped to be functional in society.
Good points. We are bad at teaching literacy because most educators fundamentally misunderstand what literacy is. It’s not a set of muscles in the brain that get strengthened with exercise, as most teachers now believe; rather it’s application of world and word knowledge stored in long term memory. The broader one’s knowledge, the more literate one is.
We also bungle math instruction. Common Core math sleights basic math and aims rather to give “deep understanding” to the masses. Kids end up with neither the basics nor the deep understanding. It’s a fiasco.
Bad ideas –held by both reformers and anti-reformers –are hobbling American schools.
What do you mean by “teaching literacy”?
Lloyd, read E.D. Hirsch on “cultural literacy” and you will know what Ponderosa means. Background knowledge.
Diane, I was curious to discover what Ponderosa thought “cultural literacy” was and how it is acquired.
That curiosity comes from the fact that there are children (most live in poverty) that grow up in home environments with no role models for literacy because there are no books, magazines or newspapers in the home. These children never see their parents and/or guardians read anything.
For instance, my older brother (died in 1999 at age 64) was illiterate and he died illiterate and his seven children all grew up illiterate — even after I tried to teach his children by going to my brother’s house to tutor them after I taught all day. It was a very difficult battle like climbing the slopes of an Everest without any climbing gear, and I was their uncle. Imagine what the teachers had to go through in failed attempts to teach them in overcrowded classrooms.
I know for a fact that my older brother’s teachers fought an endless war with him just to get him to cooperate at all. Because he was illiterate, he hated school and cut as often as possible. When he was seventeen, I was five. How did I learn to read? When I was seven my mother didn’t want me to end up like my brother so she worked hard at home, with advice from my public school teacher, to instill a love of reading in me, but I fought back.
I’m so glad I lost that fight, and she won, but to win, she had to become ruthless with me.
These children start kindergarten at zero and often end up hating reading while children from more affluent homes with literate parents often start kindergarten with a love of reading because they were introduced to books, magazines and newspapers years before age 5.
This is what happens in Finland and is probably the major reason Finland’s school do so well. In Finland, most parents feel responsible to teach their children how to read and love it starting as early as age two. By the time those children start school at age seven, they have been exposed to literature for about five years.
Since cultural literacy is a term coined by E. D. Hirsch, referring to the ability to understand and participate fluently in a given culture. Cultural literacy is an analogy to literacy proper (the ability to read and write letters), how can teachers teach “cultural literacy” when too many of the children they work with hate reading/writing and can’t read or don’t read at grade level?
It’s obvious that if a child can’t read, he/she can’t write, and if the child learns to hate reading and writing, they will fight learning it.
It’s much easier when teachers only teach the willing with children that love to read and write. WIth those children, acquiring “cultural literacy” will be easy.
So I should have asked Ponderosa, how do teachers teach “cultural literacy” to an illiterate child living in poverty that also hates going to school because they can’t read or write?
E.D. Hirsch has abandoned the term “cultural literacy” because it obfuscates what he’s really talking about. His thesis is very simple: to read with comprehension, you need to be able to recognize most of the words on the page. Re-cognize. In other words, you must have “cognized” them before, so that you can “re-cognize” them. Thus adults are teaching literacy when they’re exposing kids to new words. There are many ways to do this, but the traditional and best way to do this is to teach content: history, science, civics, health, art, music…By talking about these unfamiliar domains in a topical unit that provides helpful context, teachers expose kids to unfamiliar words and help them acquire these new words. Building up a kid’s mental dictionary is the best way to make her grow as a reader. Unfortunately few teachers understand this. They subscribe to the Common Core approach which is to make kids wrestle with random texts without undertaking any serious effort to build up their world and word knowledge, which is seen as peripheral. This is like training wrestlers on a starvation diet. It simply does not work.
“Few teachers understand this.”
Again, you’re in no position to know what most teachers understand, believe, or do in their classrooms. Maybe you should either stop making these impossible claims, or go get a PhD in the teaching of reading. Maybe you could turn your dissertation into a best seller.
Ponderosa:
“The broader one’s knowledge, the more literate one is.”
That is patently false. Knowledge alone doesn’t make a person literate. In fact, completely illiterate people can and do possess vast knowledge, including knowledge needed to function in their particular environment. At the same time, I’ve never met a teacher who believes knowledge isn’t important for reading with understanding.
I think it’s safe to say that reading and writing are complex processes that can’t be reduced to the sorts of slogans you’re offering. I don’t believe these processes are fully understood, and I’m not sure actual literacy experts and neuroscientists do either.
Be that as it may, the importance of background knowledge in reading comprehension has been widely known among educated teachers since at least the early 1980’s (as evidenced by courses in the teaching of reading available in universities at the time). The idea that knowledge is important for reading has been a part American teaching practice and teacher training at least since then. Even before that research emerged, good reading teachers (and I include self-teachers–kids who read a lot) have known this instinctually.
Research on these topics was conducted in the 70s and 80s at The Center for the Study Reading, and, I’m certain, at other locations, too. That’s how I came to know about schema theory, the importance of student knowledge and cultural influences, and other hot topics–through an extension course offered by the University of Illinois. It would appear to be Hirsch’s fantasy (or yours) that American teachers were never introduced to these topics and today refuse to accept them. That wasn’t true for me and I’ll bet I’m not alone.
As far as I’m concerned, you’re trying to stir a bogus controversy. At the very least, you aren’t in a position to make sweeping claims about literacy teaching nationwide, or even the current professional thinking on literacy. Hirsch may have studied the issues more directly than you have, but he has a conservative axe to grind, which disqualifies him as an objective analyst. Like the people who wrote A Nation at Risk, he seems to have drawn his conclusions first, and then built an emotion-based argument supported by cherry-picked evidence and selective ignoring (of the dissemination of research I mentioned above, for example). This isn’t to say that Hirsch didn’t have a point, it’s that he expanded and distorted it in a way that beyond anything that makes sense (and that includes teaching Hammurabi to six-year-olds), and in the process misrepresented and unfairly attacked American teachers and teaching practice. Now he has followers like you practicing their 21st Century skills, spreading misinformation and misplaced attacks on teachers… online.
Randall, if the majority of teachers ever knew that building background knowledge was the key to literacy, that knowledge seems to have gone out the window with Common Core. It’s all skills practice all the time with Common Core. Zero knowledge building.
Ponderosa:
Again, you are NOT in a position to make broad claims about what teachers knew then or know now. That the importance of background knowledge was widely known before Common Core can partly be discerned by listening to the Common Core sales pitches.
As a matter of fact, one of Coleman’s main attack points against teachers and curricula when he was making his Common Core pitch was that teachers were providing TOO MUCH background knowledge when they introduced a reading selection. Part of Coleman’s answer to this was his wildly distorted version of close reading, which prescribed a ban on teachers offering background information on assigned readings and insisted that the reading and discussion be conducted “within the four corners of the text” (a term derived from contract law, and still controversial within that field). Forget the well accepted idea in literary and critical studies that texts can’t actually be isolated in that way. Forget the research in reading instruction that found (more than thirty years ago) that poor readers don’t routinely activate their background knowledge like good readers do automatically, or automatically make use of text structures and genre familiarity. Coleman was intent on stripping away the reading instruction scaffolding based on these findings that he felt encumbered students. As an acolyte of Hirsch, he had an answer for the challenge of building background knowledge: increase the amount of “instructional text” students were exposed to, and assign fewer reading and writing tasks that drew upon students’ personal knowledge and interests, AND REDUCE the amount of imaginative literature students were exposed to in language arts classes.
Citing Hirsch, he advocated formal instruction in the various subject areas as the best way to do this. (He paid no attention to the importance of informal learning, tacit learning, independent study, free reading, cultural enrichments such as museum and zoo visits, or playgoing–to me, much more valuable than force-feeding knowledge via a course of study). You can read Coleman’s writings during the time period of his Common Core sales pitch to verify all this–the easiest way is to watch some of his old speeches on YouTube. Hopefully they’re still available.
The irony of this is that if teachers had NOT known about the importance of background knowledge, and if they (and textbook publishers) had NOT been providing the scaffolding I mentioned earlier, Coleman would have had less to react against, and less bogus ammunition for his disingenuous pitch. And in fact, he was trying exploit Hirsch’s arguments while promoting his own personal agenda. Coleman was and is wrong about many things, but in touting the Common Core, one thing he wasn’t doing was disagreeing with Hirsch.
Do you actually know how many teachers and school systems nationwide have fully embraced this faulty Common Core thinking in their acthal classrooms? No, you don’t, and neither do I. What I do know is that Coleman still has a powerful, high-paying job, and that you supply precious little evidence for your claims.
Randall, E.D. Hirsch is a liberal Democrat.
The nation may be at risk, but not according to the fake proof offered in a Nation at Risk.
That report was a lie and a fraud on the American public, regardless of whatever else may be true.
Its claims were based on a statistical deception, as pointed out by Steve Nelson above. I don’t know who on the report committee came up with the plan to use that particular deception but there WAS a physicist on the committee who would certainly have known about statistics and hence perhaps “how to lie with statistics” (with Simpson’s Paradox.)
That man has since rather unapologetically and shamelessly admitted that the committee “set out to confirm their existing concerns” ,– ie, drew their “conclusions” at the start and presumably then went hunting for “facts” to support that conclusion.
Before one can “improve” a system, one must first have a true/accurate assessment of that system. That necessarily means dispensing with lies and deceptions like A Nation at Risk and the lies and deceptions that equate standardized testing, VAM and all the rest of the stuff pushed by Deformers with “value”.
Ponderosa:
Stating that Hirsch is a liberal Democratic doesn’t mean that his Core Knowledge project isn’t a conservative project. He is an avowed opponent of progressive education, as are other self-labeled liberals, you included.
Just as a fair number of liberal Democrats support high-stakes testing and other reactionary policies–NCLB wouldn’t have been passed without Senator Kennedy’s support–they may also support fundamentally conservative programs such as Hirsch’s Core Knowledge approach.
Is Hirsch’s agenda conservative? Yes, it is. In his dictionary of cultural literacy Hirsch explicitly endorses the teaching the Parson Weems version of George Washington’s life. His implicit belief in the uncritical transmission of received knowledge–a deeply conservative approach to education–is one of the tenets I disagree with most.
His false argument that American schools are not in favor of helping children build knowledge is another. You appear to have bought this argument, too. That’s one of the reasons I’m taking the time to respond in detail.
icompleat: A wonderful comment! Hirsch is indeed an educational conservative. His Core Knowledge schtick takes the heart out of dynamic learning. His anti-progressive stances over the years are built on a mechanistic view of learning. It is just a more jargon-laden version of the dull traditional approaches that have sucked life out of schools for most of the last century. Such an approach looks good only in comparison with the idiocy of no excuses charter schools or the technology-based nonsense that is not education at all.
@icompleat: Could you, please, define “progressive education” as you understand it? Just to be on the same page.
back again: I wrote a book that defines it rather well, if you’d like to have a comprehensive sense. https://www.amazon.com/First-Harm-Progressive-Education-Existential/dp/1942146477/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
You know, a broken clock is still right twice a day. That doesn’t mean that one should depend on it for accurate time-keeping, or that one should periodically consult it to find out what time it is.
March Tucker is education’s broken clock.
Tucker has been wrong about most things in education for nearly three decades. Where Tucker is most egregiously off base, perhaps, is (1) his belief that public education’s purpose is to serve as a “kind of national human resources development system ,” and (2) his incessant yapping that high standards and skills are the keys to “economic competitiveness” when the facts do not support him.
The chief purpose of public schooling was citizenship education. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson sought a publicly-funded system of schools, believing that an educated citizenry was critical to the well-being of a democratic society. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1794), Jefferson wrote “The influence over government must be shared among all.” Many early advocates for public schools –– Jefferson, George Washington, Horace Mann –– agreed that democratic citizenship was a primary function of education. We have
strayed far from that original intent.
We’ve been trying to tie “economic competitiveness” and public school reform for quite some time. If only schools are forced to teach to high standards and be held accountable for their performance, we are told, then American competitiveness will soar. Meanwhile, American manufacturing jobs are increasingly off-shored and the middle class eviscerated. As some here have noted, much of this began with Ronald Reagan. When Reagan took office, the total national debt, accumulated over 200 years, was less than a trillion dollars. After 12 years of Reagan-Bush1, the national debt had more than quadrupled. The massive borrowing not only saddled future taxpayers with debt, but also it led to a spike in interest rates (to attract money), an increase in the value of the dollar versus other currencies, and incredibly large trade deficits and foreign goods became cheaper. As dollars flowed out of the U.S. to bank accounts in other countries, American jobs soon followed.
Tucker and people like him touted the early 1990s SCANS report (Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, which tied public schooling to American economic competitiveness and warned direly that “if your children cannot learn these skills by the time they leave high school, they face bleak prospects & dead-end work, interrupted only by periods of unemployment, with little chance to climb a career ladder.”
The SCANS report didn’t say anything about how stupid supply-side economic policies were eroding American fiscal health and off-shoring jobs.
As the late Gerald Bracey noted, in reference to this economic dichotomy, “…over in Wal-Mart nation, the number of retail sales clerks totals more than the number of slots available in the ten fastest growing jobs combined. We have 9 cashiers, 6 waiters and 5+ janitors for every computer programmer.”
Marc Tucker, and people like him, keep reciting the mantra that we have to prepare kids for college and careers, presumably because we have to remain “competitive” economically.
Tucker has supported the Common Core. Probably because he’s been well-funded over the years by the Gates Foundation – which funded the Common Core – and by the Broad and Walton Foundations, and by corporations like Walmart and Boeing. The Broad and Walton Foundations are certainly no friends of public education. We know how Walmart makes its money, and though it recently distanced itself from ALEC, Walmart has long benefited from “ALEC campaigns involving taxes, commerce and technology.” Boeing has made tens of billions in profit over the last dozen years (close to $45 billion), is heavily subsidized by the taxpayer, and has received federal tex refunds of “more than $1.6 billion.”
As I’ve noted on this blog numerous times, the World Economic Forum evaluates and ranks countries on economic competitiveness each year. The U.S. dropped from 2nd to 4th in 2010-11. The WEF cited four factors for that decline: (1) weak corporate auditing and reporting standards, (2) weak (poor) corporate ethics, (3) big deficits (brought on by Wall Street’s financial implosion) and (4) unsustainable levels of debt.
Guess which groups are in favor of those weak auditing standards? Guess who supported the policies that brought on those big deficits and debt? And guess who wants to make public schools “accountable” for it?
The WEF dropped the U.S. to 7th place, in 2012-13, citing problems like “increasing inequality and youth unemployment” and U.S. ratification of “the fewest environmental treaties.“ The WEF noted that in the U.S. “trust in politicians is not strong.” Political dysfunction has led to “a lack of macroeconomic stability” that “continues to be the country’s greatest area of weakness.”
Any idea who funds the political obfuscation and dysfunction?
In 2013-14, the U.S. moved back to fifth place, with the WEF noting that “the deficit is narrowing for the first time since the onset of the financial crisis.”
Currently, the U.S.is ranked #2 in economic competitiveness. And the World Economic Forum warns that,
“In the United States, where the crisis originated, a new wave of deregulation appears to be underway: the government is considering reducing provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act and reviewing rules on financial advisers’ conflicts of interest. This may lead to the re-emergence of fragilities that post-crisis regulation aimed to tackle.”
Seriously, are public schools and educators responsible for these “fragilities?” Trump and Republicans just imposed a new, big tax cut that will add – according to the Tax Policy Center – another $2.5 trillion to the national debt . It will not promote economic growth. Environmental and financial regulations are being gutted. Are lousy teachers responsible for this?
And yet, those who’ve most supported the Common Core – the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable – are also those who (1) opposed the policies that led to a decrease in the deficit, and who (2) continue to advocate economic policies that exacerbate big budget deficits. And (3) who say schools have to “reform” to make the U.S. “competitive.”
Tucker and others have long parroted the “economic competitiveness” mantra. You know, the U.S. can either be a low-wage, low-skill country or a high-wage, high-skill one. But it just doesn’t add up. The new mantra is “21st century skills.” But really, it’s the same old game.
The 1992 report. ‘Testing in American Schools.’ pointed out that “tests have too often been used to serve functions for which they were not designed or adequately validated.” Even Henry Goddard, who pushed intelligence testing relentlessly, later admitted that testing “could be perceived as justifying the richness of the rich and the poverty of the poor; they legitimized the existing social order.”
Marc Tucker and people like him helped to create this reality.
It’d be a bad idea to think that the broken clock is now accurate.
A far better idea would be to return the focus of public education to democratic citizenship.
“The chief purpose of public schooling was citizenship education. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson sought a publicly-funded system of schools, believing that an educated citizenry was critical to the well-being of a democratic society. In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1794), Jefferson wrote “The influence over government must be shared among all.” Many early advocates for public schools –– Jefferson, George Washington, Horace Mann –– agreed that democratic citizenship was a primary function of education.
If there was that agreement, and I’m not so sure that the agreement is as you state it, democracy. Virginia’s constitution does not give that democratic citizenship as a reason. As it is the function of democratic citizenship did not come through in each state’s, (those that give a reason) constitution. As I have discussed prior twenty constitutions give “the benefit of the individual” as the reason, and five give the benefit of preserving the state. The other twenty five give no reason, just that the state must provide its children a free (and usually) appropriate, efficient education.
As such, in combining those twenty reasons of benefit of public schooling for the individual I came up with this summary which should be THE starting point for any discussions dealing with public education:
“The purpose of public education is to promote the welfare of the individual so that each person may savor the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry.”
Now, I would contend that the schools in performing that function would teach the children that one of the ways of being able to “savor” those things is guaranteeing that all can. In doing so I can easily imagine instruction in/of “democratic citizenship” being a part of that education.
Duane,
You are pretty doggone literal in your interpretation of education’s role in promoting democratic citizenship. According to your viewpoint, Americans don’t have the “right to privacy” because it is not explicitly stated in the Constitution. Nor is the “separation” of church and state.
Worse, I think, is that your definition of what ought to be the focus of public schooling is something a “libertarian” would glom onto with glee.
As best I can figure it, libertarians are really all about themselves.
Aristotle explained why this is kind of all-about-MEism is bad for democracy:
“education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private- not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.”
Education historian R. Freeman Butts notes that the American Revolution was focused on certain political goals, which included self-rule, equality, and the public good.
As Freeman put it:
“Pleas for devotion to the public good echoed throughout the Revolutionary period…Indeed, the ideal of a commonwealth, a democratic corporate society in which the common good was the chief end of government, could be build solidly only upon the public commitments of and the sense of community achieved by the citizens of the commonwealth, the people.”
John Locke – a major influence of the Founders – referred to this as the social contract.
Back to Freeman, echoing Aristotle:
“The development of self-sacrifice, loyalty, patriotism, and moral regeneration on the part of the people was therefore one of the most important requirements for achieving the Revolution and building a secure republic. Nothing less than creating new persons would do…a republic must be founded upon the willingness of individuals to put the public good above private desires. And how better to promote the common weal than through a common education?”
There’s a reason that common schools were called common schools.
As to Virginia’s Constitution, it states, at the outset:
“all power is vested in, and consequently derived from, the people…government is, or ought to be, instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security of the people.”
And, it is for this purpose, that “The General Assembly shall provide for a system of free public elementary and secondary schools for all children of school age throughout the Commonwealth, and shall seek to ensure that an educational program of high quality is established and continually maintained.”
Citizenship education should be the primary purpose of public schooling.
As Bard College President Leo Botstein put it, “A child needs to learn things that allow him or her to function in a democratic context, to learn to consciously ignore personal self-interest and contemplate the public good.”
Certainly students should learn “the tools of interrogation and criticism.” But learning how to think critically should be developed within the context of a commitment to democratic values like popular sovereignty, equality, justice, freedom and responsibility, tolerance, and promoting the general welfare. As Aristotle noted, “the character of democracy creates democracy…”
‘A Nation at Risk,’ the original point of Diane’s post and this discussion, focused on economic competitiveness. So does the Common Core.
We promote all kinds of things in the name of “equality” or “opportunity” –– from ACT and SAT tests to Advanced Placement courses, from “ability grouping” and tracking, to charters schools and vouchers –– that create the exact opposite result.
I suspect your “individualism” would do the same. In fact, it already has.
The real reform in American public education is still waiting to happen.
A long and detailed response. I like it. Thanks, democracy. As far as I’m concerned this type of discussion makes up the best of the blog.
I will address your charges-LOL-as they are listed as much as I can, obviously some intertwine.
I concur with the quotes you give from Aristotle, Butts, and Botstein declare. The fundamental purpose as gleaned from the state constitutions in no way contradict or contravene those thoughts. The desires expressed in the thoughts can, should, ought to be part of the public school curriculum. Do not assume that I would think otherwise.
As far as the fundamental purpose of government, I also agree. I tie that in with the fundamental purpose of public education in Ch. 1 of my book “The Purpose of Public Education” concluding:
“Any educational practice that is shown to hinder, block and/or otherwise cause an individual to not be able to indulge in any of aspect of his/her rights as stated has to be considered as harmful and unjust not only to the individual but also to society and therefore must rightly be condemned as educational malpractice and ought to be immediately discontinued. Trampled rights are rights that are non-existent and the educational malpractice that tramples any right is unjust and as noted in Alabama’s constitution “is usurpation and oppression” and as Missouri’s declares “. . . when government does not confer this security, it fails in its chief design.”
I contend that many of today’s federal and state mandates and even long standing educational practices are, indeed, malpractices that trample the rights of the most innocent in society, the children, the students of all ages attending public schools, in essence “it [public education] fails in its chief design.” Should the government through the public schools be sorting, separating, ranking, and/or grading students through logically bankrupt invalid practices discriminating against some while rewarding others? I contend it should not! Where is the justice in discriminatory practices? By evaluating those malpractices against the aforementioned purpose we will be able to ascertain whether or not they are just.” (pg. 14)
I also understand your concerns when people misuse and abuse the language in using terms like “equality, opportunity or civil rights” to further their own dollar driven agenda all the while talking out the side of their mouths about the glories of those things. It seems to me that you, democracy, need to focus on those who do so, not those of us who challenge those things.
And I understand your concern of “Libertarianism” as practiced by the disciples of Rand and the Koch Bros (who fund the vast majority of this regressive right wing bullshit). The Me, me, me, turn in society of the last 40 years is quite distasteful in my mind.
At the same time, the fact remains that the vast majority of Americans value that personal liberty. If we frame the debate in terms of the public schools teaching “collectivism” we will surely lose the battle. The fact that the individual should be the proper focus of public education and not the continuance of the state serves everyone’s purpose, especially ours by acknowledging that all government is, in the end meant to help the individual self fulfill through various means. Focusing on the the boogieman of Randism Libertarianism, is a cover for a lack of confidence in individual capacities to understand the community aspect of life, living and being. “No man is an island unto himself”, eh! That sense of community can easily be instilled through the public schooling teaching and learning process. While at the same time leaving the nexus/locus of control with those most interested the local populace in which the school is a part-that truly democratic notion of self-governance.
A final note “your ‘individualism'” hasn’t done a damn thing. My ideas have never been given a chance to work. I wish they would because I know you’d find out real fast just how opposite those ideas are from your imagined thoughts of my supposed “individualism”. You have read/interpreted what I have written here and in other venues through a set of lenses that have certainly clouded you comprehending what I have been espousing.
What a silly, albeit comprehensive, rebuttal to Duane’s comment. I like Duane’s “purpose” statement and don’t find it at odds with the notion of education as preparation for democratic citizenship. His is not a libertarian idea. I would argue that promoting the “welfare of the individual so that each person might savor the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is a mighty democratic idea. I might amend Duane’s definition: ” . . . the right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the fruits of their own industry and to insure such rights, pursuits and fruits to all others through an understanding of our dependence and interdependence on one another.”
Thanks, Steve, for the “vote of confidence”!
And I do like your addition although were I too add anything it might be something to the effect of “. . .of their own industry so long as those pursuits don not infringe on any one else’s rights”.
I purposely left the statement as it is because I felt it to be the most representative of the 25 constitutions in which a reason/rationale for public education was specifically given. I used the language of the constitutions and did not attempt to “modernize” it as my desire was to get at the essence of what those rationales were as they were stated at the time.
I certainly concur with the thought(s) of your addendum as those who believe themselves to be an “island unto themselves” certainly have deluded themselves into giving short shrift to the social aspect of living as a human.
I’ve worked with Anya. She is incredibly through in her research and won’t move forward with a story unless it’s been checked many times over.
It must be very lonely at NPR for Anya Kamanetz..😉
This is very lively discussion, back to literacy (i have been working with our local organizations for the last 20 years).
We don’t seem to benchmark or build toolkits at scale to work with something so fundamental as literacy. “The Reform Wars” sounds like a PBS English Empire series:) has focused so much energy on education pedagogical approaches, models, funding, etc..we have tried or are trying every model possible, spend $100’s of billions a year in K-12 but our student population (not just in poverty is getting less literate).
I have experienced a real lack of comfort to have these literacy discussions, organize local integrated benchmarked systems with (adding schools libraries & extending them into the community with town libraries).
http://begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html
Most don’t like or won’t agree with the data/facts etc.. “My child/teachers/school/parents/town etc.. is different, special, not so bad, you make me feel bad by even bringing this up” Also, most don’t want to directly connect literacy to everything else everybody want’s to solve.
Click to access 2009481.pdf
The work to make reading, doing basic math, functional education is not focused and connected to the experience of students, parents, teachers, admins, libraries, community resources its just one part of 50 things everyone is trying to solve.
Without the whole industry really making this a top priority and willing to benchmark, integrate into literacy, adjust focus. I don’t see how anything improves.
Aaron
Duh. After the first wave of reform – New Math – of which NCTM was a big part, has been reverted, the schools went to more traditional math programs. Then ANAR in 1983. Then NCTM Standards in 1989. They were crappy, California created its own standards in 1997. Then Common Core, of which NCTM is big part again, and integrated math and all the crap that NCTM came up with in 1989. Try to find a math curriculum which is not defined by NSF/NCTM blueprints – there are some, like Holt or Saxon, but pretty much all integrated math programs follow NCTM standards.
All in all, NCTM sabotaged U.S. math education at least three times starting from the late 1950s. Oh, oh, I know the answer – they are all Putin’s agents. He was just a boy, still he managed to infiltrate agents into the highest ranks of the American education system to destroy it from within.
I think you need some help….
I’m using the term “progressive education” in the context of Hirsch’s opposition to such writers as John Dewey, many of whose ideas I believe in. From what I gather, Dewey’s philosophical definition of knowledge was entwined with the idea of what one can DO with knowledge. This would appear to tie in with his belief in learning by doing, which requires active participation. He definitely believed that students should be treated as active participants in the society they were born into. This is the sort of thing that was mocked by Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird–wrongly, I believe–as the Dewey Decimal System. Ironically, in the novel Scout ends up being saved by progressive education (while dressed in a chicken-wire-based ham costume), and by two characters who were present at the time. That’s my understanding, anyway.
Beyond that I don’t want to say a lot, except that present-day constructivism, in educational theory terms, has a connection to progressive education. There really isn’t enough room in a blog comment to define either, and I’m not qualified to do so anyway. Also, the idea of progressivism is complicated by the beliefs of some of the so-called progressive reformers of the era who were actually up to no good. (See the eugenics movement.)
Orson Wells attended the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois, a noted progressive boarding school. Wells thrived there, took full advantage of its offerings, and afterwards referred to Woodstock as his hometown. Hirsch is reported to have attended the same school. I have no idea what he thought of it, or why.
My personal prescription for good education, from a teacher’s point of view: learn all you can about learning, your subject, and your students. Try your best to do what works–correcting past mistakes, building on successes, and continually trying new things. Pragmatism guided by a few basic moral principles will stand your students in good stead.
The above was in reply to Back Again. He asked me to define progressive education.
Dewey – progressive – participation – doing – good.
Hirsch – not so progressive – bad
Constructivism has connection to progressive – good?
“Learning by doing” does not give me much to chew on, at least in terms of math education. Modern group-work investigation-based standards that go back to NCTM 1989 Standards seem to espouse “learning by doing” so supposedly are good. Maybe they CAN be good, but the curricula I know of and the teaching methods that I witness do not instill confidence. Basic skills are not taught, group work and investigation cannot help with this.
Sorry, BackAgain, I don’t pretend to know anything about Math education. Maybe somebody else can help you.
@ icompleat
BackAgain doesn’t like the NCTM standards. The NCTM standards contained both content and process. But as one analysis of the standards noted, “mathematical literacy is not only dependent on one’s ontological beliefs about what mathematics is but also the epistemological beliefs regarding how it should be taught.”
It seems clear where BackAgain’s beliefs are.
Much of the decades-long debate is semantic and absurd. Yes, “learning by doing” was a Dewey notion, but it had more to do with education as a democratic exercise that as pedagogy. In more recent times, progressive educators (I am one) also embrace “learning by doing” for neurobiological reasons. Real “things” are different than the symbolic representation of “things,” and their sums, products and remainders can be apprehended with vision and touch, for example.
People who opine more than they teach, love to create a false choice between “constructivist’ learning and teaching of skills. Constructivist learning is teaching skills by allowing students to discover relationships between and among physical objects and, thereby, also learning their mathematical importance. There is no reason this can’t be accompanied by multiplication tables and specific algorithms. Having assembled 2 apples and 3 oranges into a sum of 5 pieces of fruit, gives a child a different experience of 2+3=5 than merely having memorized the “skill.” I’ve seen 3rd graders “discover” elementary algebra through guided discovery.
In all of progressive pedagogy, learning through discovery is employed as a means of sharpening curiosity and engagement. I headed a progressive school for 19 years and frequently asked visitors on tours if they could identify a single child who was not energetically engaged. They invariably could not. But,the fact that children make up glorious stories and dress in costumes doesn’t mean they don’t and shouldn’t learn grammar.
Perhaps the most glaring deficiency in traditional approaches is the utter disregard for the reality of children. Most curricula, especially in the ed reform era, is predicated on the notion that all children develop in the same way at the same time. They do not. Standardized tests are horrid because children are not standard. The idea that all 6 year olds should read is as stupid as expecting all 12 month olds to walk. Yet we test and drill and harangue and shame for no reason at all.
Whether or not one embraces Gardner’s very specific notion of multiple intelligences, neuroscience makes it very clear that there are different ways in each brain that a child processes and expresses sensory information. Teaching of “rote” skills and particularly the constant misuse of technology, misses a great many important ways that neural connections are facilitated through the use of multiple teaching modalities. Most “brain-based” proclamations are the kind of crap that distills something real and important into oversimplified jargon that wide-eyed novices misemploy. But the basis for construction of learning through an understanding of brain science is really, really important and has been the foundation of progressive education since the 18th century. The line of evolution is long and illustrious, beginning far before Dewey. Theorists like Pestalozzi and Froebel were right all along, and contemporary neurobiology has finally affirmed their work.
A long way of saying, Hirsch is indeed conservative. And mostly wrong.
Steve Nelson:
Thanks for the comment. There’s no substitute for experience–in both the theory and practice of progressive education. I hope readers will pay more attention to what you’re saying than the anyi-progressive, anti-teacher rants of one or two frequent commenters.
I wonder if you’ve ever run across Bronson Alcott’s education writings. He was a disciple of Pestalozzi and ran a short-lived school in Concord, Mass. At least one of his students went on to greatness and ended up supporting him financially. (Well, she was also his daughter.)
Indeed I have! Although I could do without some of the quasi-theological pieces, he would roll over in his grave at the mindless and punitive approaches to education today.
Years ago, I did some research on the way elementary schools were using Hirsch’s ideas. They were all turning his ideas into constructivist projects! Building things, making things, doing things, to learn the ideas.
Building things, making things is good for kindergarten. Learning by yourself that 2 + 3 = 3 + 2 is good for the first grade. Sadly, this approach does not work in high school. The whole point other scientists studied things and came up with succinct explanations and solutions is so that others did not have to. We cannot have 7 billion nuclear physicists, likewise we cannot have 7 billion people rediscovering the associative rule. All this self-discovery group-work inquiry-style junk leads to is extremely watered down and intensely boring – if boredom can be intense – curriculum.
Sadly, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It works in high school. It just takes really thoughtful teachers designing remarkable experiences. I’ve watched a Princeton Ph.D. teach advanced physics in a progressive, constructivist way. Similarly. I’ve watched advanced statistics taught through developing and conducting epidemiological studies on contemporary medical and social issues.
@Steve Nelson: sadly, I do know what I am talking about. You cannot build a mass education system based on a few brilliant teachers just for the reason there will be only a few of them. I know that good teachers hate when they are compared to cogs in the machine, but most teachers are not good enough to come up with their own teaching methods, and even if they were, nowadays they have to comply with goalposts for all the different tests imposed on them. The pre-defined order and the frequency of these goalposts have greatly diminished the freedom that a teacher used to have in building a teaching plan. With this being the fact on the ground, the system must be self-resilient and must be good enough even for less than bright teachers to deliver good instructions – but it is not. The textbooks are lousy, and in some schools they don’t even use textbooks at all, even in middle school. The textbooks cannot be used for self-prep. The group-work is supposed to work because all the group members are interested in making discoveries, but usually they are not. The stuff being “discoveried” is banal, simplistic, incomplete and several years behind other countries.
Here you have it: not enough bright teachers, and even those that are bright are confined with the Procrustes bed of the “standards”. And lots of middling teachers, who make the pathetic curriculum even worse, because they either do not understand even the minimal topics in the curricula, or stopped caring because the curricula is so terrible.
Either way, the ANAR became a self-fulfiling prophecy, and in the field of math education this is all thanks in large part to NCTM and its “standards”.
“I know that good teachers hate when they are compared to cogs in the machine, but most teachers are not good enough to come up with their own teaching methods …”
Ha … repeated a dozen times!
Do you hear me laughing?
Please explain how the teachers in Finland make it work without guidance from the want-to-be experts from the top (who mostly don’t know anything) … because those teachers do … the good teachers of Finland have been allowed to work together for decades to come up with their own teaching methods that work for the students they teach and those methods change when the students they teach change.
What a sad commentary about teachers. “Not bright enough?” You do at least acknowledge that the standards game has handcuffed teachers, but the broad insult you deliver to teachers is unfortunate. Teachers are quite capable of responding to children’s needs in a flexible, progressive way if we properly fund schools, have small class sizes and provide ongoing development time for faculty. Your pessimistic view is not helpful, but it is particularly unfair to characterize teachers in this way. Teachers, nearly all of them, are dedicated and caring.
Back Again probably watches Hannity and Fox News for his fake news. Can we blame Back Again for his choice of who h/she selects to program his thinking? Yes, we can, because confirmation bias is a choice
Back Again is a sad but accurate sock-puppet name for someone that probably wants to bring back the segregation that existed in the public schools before the Civil Rights movement.
@Lloyd Lofthouse,
Are you comparing Finland to the U.S.? 45 thousand teachers with about 3 million teachers? The country that values education and literacy with the country where at least 20% of high school students are illiterate, and where saying “I hate math” gives you bonus points? A country that has a system, which, while being flexible enough, is comprehensive in its caring and guiding and helping a citizen from birth to death with a country where individual interests and private property trumps all (search for “freedom to roam”)? This can go on endlessly, but it is I who is laughing on the comparison you brought. Finland could as well be located on Mars, it is so far away from anything happening in the U.S. And by the way, they do have national curriculum, which is broad enough to allow teachers to build their lessons as they see fit, but which has yearly goalposts. And no dreaded yearly tests. You cannot import great Finnish teachers on American soil without changing the system.
Yes, I am because if we use the same methods used by teachers in Finland with teacher training programs similar to those in Finland it works here too. In fact, it was working here until the misleading “A Nation at Risk” report and NCLB.
It was working so well, in fact, that a report out of Stanford in 2013 discovered the facts behind that success proving that the same bottom-up methods work even in the United States with all of its diversity and child poverty that doesn’t exist in Finland.
“The report also found:
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/january/test-scores-ranking-011513.html
The U.S. also had Head Start, had literacy programs in public libraries, had great teacher prep programs such as urban residences that should have been the model instead of TFA, had free and reduced breakfast and lunch programs so children would not be hungy in school.
The NAEP also provides evidence that the system was working before NCLB and all the rest of the top down crap.
Ignore the rest and just look at the first chart to discover the comparison of gains from 1971 on the NAEP compared to the changes since 2004.
N/C indicates NO Significant Change in the Score. You will not see N/C appear on the charts before 2004.
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2009/0429/p02s01-usgn.html
The public education ystem was working showing steady but slow improvements until after NCLB.
@Lloyd Lofthouse, I think one idea we can agree with is that the achievement in the 21st century is nowhere better than in the 1970s, whether it is because of NCLB (your assertion) or because of 1989 NCTM Standards (my belief) or both. Also, your statistics supports my position that whatever new-fangled teaching methods they came up with, they seem to have worked in elementary and middle school, and did not work in high school. Combining that to the preachings of NCTM about inquiry-based, project-oriented, group-work teaching of math throughout elementary, middle and high school one can deduce that these ideas may work successfully for lower grades, but fall apart in higher grades.
BackAgain said, ” Also, your statistics supports my position that whatever new-fangled teaching methods they came up with, they seem to have worked in elementary and middle school, and did not work in high school.”
New-fangled teaching methods?????? Really!!!!!!! Do you have any idea what you are talking about … no matter what you think, I seriously doubt it?
The only “crap” that is new is what is being forced on teachers from the top down and most of that is linked to a technology called personalized learning where students sit in front of computer screens all day with a program that has an algorithm that determines from their answers when they are ready to move up to the next level.
In addition, all those rank and punish high stakes tests that are making profits for the corporations that churn that crap out is turning public school classrooms into test prep factories and the “best methods” don’t fit in test prep. Test prep is rote learning. Test prep abandons the teaching of problem-solving and critical thinking skills.
Well trained teachers know what methods work best and many still use them when they can get away with real teaching.
In the 1980s and 1990s, China sent teams of teachers to the U.S. to learn what we were doing in our public schools. When they returned to China, those teams taught others what they had learned in the United States and they implemented those teaching methods first in Shanghai and later to Beijing and other 1st tier cities in China.
The results of using those “best methods” learned from the United States before NCLB and all the crap that followed was revealed when Shanghai’s 15-year-olds placed 1st in every academic category in the PISA test and the gap between 1st and 2nd place was a canyon.
“When Finnish Teachers Work in America’s Public Schools”
This is what those teachers learned when the came to teach in a country where all the decisions are being made from the top and real teachers are excluded.
“There are more restrictions to professional freedom in the United States, and the educators find the school day overly rigid.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/11/when-finnish-teachers-work-in-americas-public-schools/508685/
@Lloyd Lofthouse,
“New-fangled teaching methods?????? Really!!!!!!! Do you have any idea what you are talking about … no matter what you think, I seriously doubt it?” – Yes, I do have some idea what I am talking about, do YOU have any idea what I AM talking about? I am talking about project-based, inquiry-oriented, group-work, calculator-heavy mathematics, mostly in high school, but in middle school too. If you want to have a taste of it just grab a math textbook that follows integrated style of teaching, which will be something like Core-Plus or Discovery or CMP or junk like this. Read it. No, really, read it. Try to learn by it. This is sixth grade stuff at best, and it is boooooring. This is what kills math education. Just in case, by “new” I mean something that is newer than 50 years old, basically starting from New Math.
“Well trained teachers know what methods work best and many still use them when they can get away with real teaching.” – I don’t want to hear about well-trained individual cowboy teachers. You think individuals can fix the system? No, they cannot unless they are completely free from the system, in which case they won’t be public school employees. Hence, it is the system must be changed. Also, I have no use for a bright teacher if I am sick and out of school for a month, I want a textbook that can be used as a reliable teaching material.
“There are more restrictions to professional freedom in the United States, and the educators find the school day overly rigid.” – Hmm, does not contradict to what I was saying.
The system you talk about is the one that has been built since “A Nation at Risk” was released by President Ray-Gun — that’s when TOP down was launched on teachers with a vengeance stripping teachers of the autonomy necessary to actually teach.
The system you talk about was built by autocratic billionaires led by Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, and the Wal-Mart Waston family.
The system you refer to was not build by the teachers and because teachers and elected school boards have been resisting the Rheeform movement, community-based, democratic, transparent, non-profit, traditional public education is being systematically dismantled by the lying, manipulating, misleading, segregationist, hate-filled Rheeformers funded by those billionaires.
Like I said in an earlier comment, for the U.S. to get rid of the Top Down System you are referring to, we must look at how Finland lets its teachers work and learn from them.
Well, I guess we are in agreement regarding the dismantling of the current system, that was imposed after ANAR.
Not a dismantling of the current public school system (what still exists) but an end to leadership from the top and also an end to the rank-and-punish high stakes testing and an end to the Common Core crap too.
Instead of dismantling the schools that exist and attempting to reinvent the wheel like Bill Gates had already repeatedly failed to do, just turn the teaching in the community based, democratic, transparent, non-profit public schools back to the teachers and implement high-quality teacher prep programs equal to urban residencies, the same programs that Dana Goldstein wrote about in her “Teacher Wars” book when she learned they were the best teacher training programs in the country, programs similar to how teachers are trained in Finland.
The book manufactured crisis ( seems in the 90s, cannot recall the exact year) already discussed it.
If the past worked better than the current or the future then I must disagree. We need to reflect on what worked pre-1965 and get back to basic classical education and stop all this sex crap and time wasted on things not academic. Leave the SEL and sex to the parents and get back to basic education. Personally I believe the only way we will ever have well educated, free thinking, individuals is to get them out of the system and teach then at the kitchen table. Home school instruction gave us some of the greatest minds in the history of America and we can do it again. It is factually accurate that kids coming from home school are much more mature and more academically proficient than most kids in public school today. Sorry but the truth is the truth. It is time to STARVE THE BEAST and put people like David Coleman and Marc Tucker out of business.
I agree with putting Coleman and Tucker out of business, but disagree with everything else. Social development and basic understanding of sexuality are more important than ever. The education pre-1965 was horrible. I know. I experienced it. It seemed to work, but life was more secure and poverty was less ubiquitous. Middle class kids in the 50’s and early 60’s did just fine, mostly because of privilege and rich life experiences, not because of enlightened pedagogy or miraculous teachers. Ask the poor children of color in the rural south, or folks of color in Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago and New York how the education was in the pre-1965 era.
“It seemed to work, but life was more secure and poverty was less ubiquitous.”
“Seemed to work” is a good choice of words because it was all an illusion in the 50s and 60s for the mostly white middle class living in their segregated all-white communities insulated from the poverty and from minorities.
I can’t remember any minorities living in the community I grew up in. I don’t remember seeing any minorities at the schools I attended K-12.
Out of high school, I joined the U.S. Marines and it was in the military where I was integrated with all races and we were all wearing the same color, green.
In World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, all wars fought by all Americans no matter what color, and in combat, we all depend on each other for survival.
Truman integrated the military years before the Civil Rights movement. I wonder if Trump wants to reverse that too.
Thanks, Lloyd. My high school enrolled the first boy of color in my senior year. My graduating class was 1,100 students. 14 years later, my little brother graduated the same school. It had become about 40% students of color – and was a better school as a result. A progressive community resisted white flight and became a model for integration.
Several years later I was drafted and had the same experience you describe. Majority men of color in my basic training company. While race was not irrelevant, we were mostly olive drab. It changed my life for the better. It’s about the only positive thing about the military, but important nonetheless.
I also went to college on the GI Bill after Vietnam and the Marines, and the colleges I attended (five or six in total, I think) in California to earn my AS, BA, teaching credential, and MFA was not segregated.
The military experience helped, but my college experience was a much larger influence and I never wanted to stop being a college student … but, alas, I had to earn money to pay the bills.
Correction….they are not teaching sex. They are teaching perversion and they are teaching it to kids that are way too young. Teaching about the intimate details of the sex act is not the responsibility of teachers or the school. Especially when most of our kids are illiterate and cannot even make change. Sorry but I was a product of the education system way back when. I graduated High School in 1967 and was very successful because my education was not filled with a bunch of worthless material. We also learned about the Constitution and our rights as Americans every year from K through to grade 12. When you do not know your rights as citizens of this country you are bound to allow them to be stolen and abused and that is exactly what we see in this country today. My 4 grand children graduated HS and haven’t a clue about the Constitution except for what I have told them. When your grand child asks you “what is Socialism” “what is the electoral college” we know the education system has failed our kids. Education is not about getting a job. It is not about teaching 5 year olds about anal sex or alternative lifestyles.
How on Earth did you find this blog, brackenkaren? Homophobic much? Perversion? Anal sex? “Alternative” lifestyles? You must have a somewhat cloistered and bitter life.
Please provide links to the evidence that “They are teaching perversion and they are teaching it to kids that are way too young.”
I want to know who is doing this.
I want to know where this is happening.
I want to know when it happened.
I want to know the source of these allegations with links so I can determine if it was generated by a conspiracy theory factory run by a total greedy, nut-case, lying wack job like Alex Jones.
@brackenkaren, they did not teach you anal sex at school, so you had to learn it the hard way? Was it better than Socialism?
Back Again: I think I love you.