Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham think tank in D.C., penned a piece suggesting that Ed Reform was over, that it had reached a stalemate with its enemies, but that whatever it had done was here to stay. He called it “The End of Education Policy,” a very cheering thought. Now it’s time to zero in on practice, he wrote. I was happy to see an admission that Ed Reform had run out of gas, but I had no idea how he imagined that he or any of the other reformers would have a role in improving “practice,” unless he meant doubling down on the Common Core.
Peter Greene made sense of all this, as he always does.
He begins:
From time to time Mike Petrilli (Fordham Institute) grabs himself a big declaration and goes to town. Last week, the declaration was “We have reached the end of education policy.”
He frames this up with references to Francis Fukuyama’s book about the end of history, and I don’t know that he really ever sticks the landing on creating parallels between Fukuyama’s idea (which he acknowledges turned out to be wrong) and his thoughts about ed policy, but it establishes an idea about the scale he’s shooting for– something more sweeping and grandiose than if he’d compared ed policy to video game arcades or no-strings-attached sex.
His thesis?
We are now at the End of Education Policy, in the same way that we were at the End of History back in 1989. Our own Cold War pitted reformers against traditional education groups; we have fought each other to a draw, and reached something approaching homeostasis. Resistance to education reform has not collapsed like the Soviet Union did. Far from it. But there have been major changes that are now institutionalized and won’t be easily undone, at least for the next decade.
Okay. Well, first I’d argue that he has it backwards. It was reformsters who championed centralized top-down planning and the erasure of local governance, often accomplished with raw power and blunt force, so if somebody has to be the Soviet Union in this analogy, I think they fit the bill.
He ticks off the gains of the reformist movement. Charters are now fact of the landscape in many cities. Tax credit scholarships, a form of sideways voucher, are also established. He admits that the growth of these programs has slowed; he does not admit that these reform programs reach a tiny percentage of all US students.
One data point surprised me– one fifth of all new teachers are coming from alternative certification programs, which is really bad news for the teaching profession and for students. We’ll have to talk about this.
Testing, he says, in claiming a dubious victory, is less hated than it used to be, maybe? He makes some specious claims here about the underlying standards being stronger and the tests being more sophisticated and rigorous– none of that is true. He says that teacher evaluation systems have been “mostly defanged,” citing ESSA, but from where most teachers sit, there’s still plenty of fang right where it’s been. “School accountability systems,” he claims, are now less about accountability and more about transparency. No– test centered accountability continues to serve no useful purpose while warping and damaging educational programs across America.
The era of broad policy initiatives out of DC is over, says Petrilli. Hallelujah, says I. Only policy wonks would think it’s a great thing if state and federal bureaucrats crank out new policy initiatives every year. Every one of them eats up time and effort to implement that could be better spent actually educating students. The teaching profession is saturated with initiative fatigue, the exhaustion and cynicism that comes when high-powered educational amateurs stop in every year or two to tell you that they know have a great new way for you to do your job that will totally Fix Everything. One does not have to spend many years in the classroom to weary of the unending waves of bullshit. It would be awesome if those waves actually stopped for a while.
Petrilli’s claim is that they have, and that now is a time for tinkering with actual education practices, but his list sucks. “To implement the higher standards with fidelity” No. No no no no NO no no, and hell no. “With fidelity” is reform talk for “by squashing every ounce of individual initiative, thought, and professional judgment out of classroom teachers. “With fidelity” means “subordinating the professional judgment of trained educators to the unproven amateur-hour baloney of the Common Core writers.” “Improve teacher preparation and development” is a great goal, except that I don’t think that means “train teachers to do better test prep and go through their days with fidelity.” Then we have “To strengthen charter school oversight and quality,” which seems like a great idea, though “strengthen” assumes that there is anything there to strengthen in the first place, which in some states is simply not so (looking at you, train wreck Florida). Charters need to be reigned in– way in– and if that means that many operators will simply leave the charter school business, well, I can live with that. Work on the whole Career and Technical Education thing, a goal that I have a hard time getting excited about because in my corner of the world, we’ve been doing it well for fifty years. If you think CTE is a brand new thing, you are too ill-informed to be allowed anywhere near CTE policy.
That’s where he starts.
Now who will take the lead in changing practice, Greene asks. Not Petrilli. Not Bill Gates. Not Zuckerberg.
Greene writes:
It’s all on you.
That’s okay. As Jose Luis Vilson often says, we got this. Even if nobody is going to help us get it, we will still get it, because we have to, and because that’s why, mostly, we signed up for the gig.
Practice is where the action has always been. Education reformsters have tried to create a title of education reformers for themselves, but the real education reform, the real growth and change and experimentation and analysis of how to make things work better– that work has been going on every single day (including summers, thank you) since public schools opened their doors. Whether bureaucrats and legislators and thinky tank wonks or rich guys with too much time on their hands have been cranking out giant plans or just twiddling idly while waiting for their next brainstorm, teachers have been honing and perfecting their practice, growing and rising and advancing every single day of their career, doing everything they can think of to insure that this year’s students get a better shot than last year’s. Just one more reason that the whole “schools haven’t changed in 100 years” is both insulting and ignorant.
So thinky tanks and reformists and wealthy dilettantes and government bureaucrats can continue fiddling and analyzing their fiddlings as they search for the next great Big New Thing in policy. In the meantime, teachers have work to do.
Reading Petrilli’s article I am again struck by the fact that ed reform offers absolutely nothing to existing public schools other than standardized tests.
No wonder they’re out of steam. 90% of what they offer (charter schools and vouchers) doesn’t apply to public schools at all, and the 10% that DOES apply to public schools, standardized testing, no one wants.
They made themselves irrelevant to 90% of schools, families and students. That was inevitable at the outset- if your “movement” consists of two pieces, choice and accountability, and the accountability piece becomes discredited you’re then left with one- “choice”, aka, charters and vouchers.
28% of people in my state, Ohio, have “some” college”. The public education system loses ground every year in national rankings. You know what my ed reform-dominated state government is working on this session? Regulating online charter schools- fixing the disaster they created. Nothing whatever for the 90% of families, students and schools in this state.
Has anyone in ed reform considered that one of the reasons they are discredited on “accountability” is they created a privatized system of charters and vouchers and then refused to regulate it or hold it accountable?
This is their system! They invented it- created it from the ground up. It’s a chaotic, corrupt mess. And they’re lecturing PUBLIC schools on “accountability”? We can’t even get them to release charter records in Ohio without a lawsuit and this is the system that ed reform DESIGNED.
Ed reformers, by definition, are unaccountable. In Ohio, they made a pact with the politicians so that neither group would be answerable to the people. It’s the way the greedy run an oligarchy.
At the “Saints and Sinners” watering hole, two “experts”,
skipped the light Fandango.
One asked the other: Can you spell dog, like in dog food?
“Sure, d o g ”
Can you spell cat, like in cat food?
“Sure, c a t ”
Can you spell duck, like in truth of top-down conflated as bottom-up?
“NO, there is no duck in truth of top-down conflated as bottom-up”
So, the “gov” tells teachers how to teach.
In turn, the teachers tell the “gov” how to govern.
BOTH say it’s for the kids, as the cash machine keeps ticking…
As in so much else, the “truthful hyperbole” of the corporate education reform crowd substitutes for plain direct language.
So much to say, but I will try to keep this brief…
First of all, it would be both more accurate and refreshing if he had written that he and the other talking heads of “reform” lost the argument. Lost big, plain and simple. Remember how New Orleans, or Chicago, or Washington DC, or Tennessee—the list goes on and on and on—were going to prove that the rheephormsters were right about both theory and practice. Or at least by their own carefully selected metrics and standards. Didn’t happen.
😳
Second, it would be more accurate and refreshing if he had simply admitted—in what he and his fellow think tankers might regard as a moment of weakness and despair—that they have run out of snappy feel-good slogans and distracting ad libs. For example, the unethical and misleading use of numbers & stats aka “mathematical intimidation” just doesn’t have the same cachet as it used to. Not to forget such staples as “it’s all about the kids” and “disruptive innovation” and “choice” blahblahbah…
🙄
Third, it doesn’t appear to be so much the “end of history” as the end of the $tudent $ucce$$ gravy train for some. Apparently the Betsy DeVos “reform” crowd isn’t giving so many opportunities to the tried-and-true spinmeisters as they are accustomed to getting.
Tough.
😱
To sum up, his accounting of where “reform” is obviously doesn’t add up because—
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” [Albert Einstein]
“D’oh!” [Homer Simpson]
😎
it has been a truth for so long: take away the money, and so many who ‘care about kids’ suddenly fade away
Petrilli’s persistence just might, yet, land him a spot on the Mt. Rushmore of Ed Reform villains.
The origin of Petrilli and Chester Finn’s influence, if described accurately by NonPartisan Education Review, undercuts their reputations in perpetuity.
Given thst it began with GWBs No Child left Behind, i think Mt Bushmore would be apt.
The billionaires lost a whole bunch of elections. They lost in the most populous places, New York and California. They lost in the less populous places, #RedForEd places. They did not lose everything and are still very dangerous as they now begin a new phase of rebranding. I’m not ready to celebrate anything yet. Maybe just briefly, I’ll celebrate a little. Hooray. That’s enough. Peter’s right, I need to keep teaching, ignoring calls to use online curriculum, online practice tests, and fake 100% graduation/admission rates. The billionaires will not stop until they are forced to stop.
One looming threat is the prospective candidate of tech tyrants, hedge funders and corporate-funded CAP, Corey Booker.
Do not count your chickens until they are all hatched and even after they hatch, do not count them until they grow up because the fox (the corporate education reformers) is in the hen house waiting to eat as many chicks as he can before he is stopped.
Agreed! Trying to call us off? Nope–we’re not fools/easily fooled, & we WILL continue to monitor, watchdog, open our mouths & fight all that harms our nation’s public education!
there have been major changes that are now institutionalized and won’t be easily undone, at least for the next decade.
Deform is definitely the So-be-it Union
Speaking of the “end of education malpractice history” I’m sure that the same things were said about old Soviet institutionalized practices.
And yes, it took a little over a decade for the privatizing oligarchical plutocrats and thieves to steal much of Russia’s wealth.
Parallel universe?
We have to still prevent the edudeformers from becoming the equivalent of Russian oligarchs and stealing our public education heritage and value. It ain’t over yet, Mr. Petrilli. Far from it!
I looked for the research that would support Petrelli’s claim that “alternative certification programs now produce at least a fifth of all new teachers. We are not going back to a time when traditional, university-based teacher preparation programs had the exclusive right to train teachers.” Peter Greene was concerned about that and the “20 percent” did not sound plausible to me.
This is what I found, starting with Petrelli’s link to his claim. The link opens to a report from the Education Commission of the States: “Mitigating Teacher Shortages: Alternative Teacher Certification,” by Julie Rowland Woods (2016). This ECS report is not peer reviewed. Woods commentary includes one reference to Teach for America, dubious claims from the National Council on Teacher Quality, and various reports promoting “teacher residencies.” Woods’ citation for the “20 percent” of candidates entering teaching from alternative preparation programs (p. 2) is another report, in this case from AIR…American Institutes for Research.
So, I looked at the AIR report (2015) by Jenny DeMonte, titled: “A Million New Teachers Are Coming: Will They Be Ready to Teach?” http://educationpolicy.air. org/sites/default/files/Brief-MillionNewTeachers.pdf
The AIR report by DeMonte is not peer reviewed either but it also refers to the “twenty percent’ entering teaching by way of alternative certification. Demonte’s citation (p. 4) for the twenty percent is this report: U.S. Department of Education..Preparing and credentialing the nation’s teachers: The Secretary’s ninth report on teacher quality. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from https://title2.ed.gov/TitleIIReport13.pdf
So I looked at the USDE report. The statistics and commentary on alternative certification are for 2009-10. The state surveys about teacher preparation programs are outdated. They refer to NCLB’s definition of “highly qualified teacher” and “low performing teacher education programs.”
Unlike the claim of Petrelli (and the ECS and AIR reports) the USDE report includes a distinction between traditional teacher education programs located in institutions of higher education (IHEs) and alternative teacher education programs, some of these offered in IHEs and some not. Petrelli drops those distinctions, as do the other two reports.
The USDE report, says: If an IHE offered a traditional and alternative program this report counted them as separate programs. The USDE report also makes a distinction between enrollments in teacher education and completers of these programs. During AY 2009–10, a total of 728,310 students were enrolled in teacher preparation programs. Of those:
− 88 percent were enrolled in traditional teacher preparation programs based in institutions of higher education (IHEs);
− 6 percent were enrolled in alternative route teacher preparation programs based at IHEs; and
− 6 percent were enrolled in alternative route teacher preparation programs not based at IHEs. (See page 5, Figure 1.3 a pie chart).
If we look at program completers, presumably entering teaching (although we have no data in this report on actual hires, the stats still show “traditional” higher education programs preparing about 80 percent of completers and 8 percent more in alternative programs based at IHEs. Only 12 percent of “completers” came from alternative programs not based at IHEs (see figure 1.13, p.14).
I conclude that Petrelli wants to push the idea that higher education is and should lose credibility as the context in which teachers are prepared. The ECS report he refers depends on the AIR report and both of these reports push forward the failed and questionable ideas that teachers do not benefit from any education beyond the purely practical—whatever makes them “classroom ready on day one” is best, according to the report from AIR.
The AIR report relies on dubious proclamations from the National Council for Teacher Quality (e.g., solve teacher shortages via pay-for-performance, bonus signings for hard to fill subjects). The AIR report also takes the research of economists (e.g., Thomas Kane and Eric Hanushek) as authoritative about teacher preparation and teacher effectiveness.
In yet another stretch, the AIR report cites one study featuring Angela Duckworth’s concept of “grit,” then implies grit scores should become a feature for screening teacher candidates. “This measure of the ability to persist may be as important as academic achievement in predicting which candidates may be excellent teachers, and this is an area in which teacher preparation programs may be able to improve their candidate pools. In addition, it may be possible to teach the ability to persist to prospective teachers as part of their preparation or help them become “grittier” before they enter the teacher workforce. (p.11).“
I started with Peter Greene and Petrelli and pulled some threads to get at the source of Petrelli’s claims about one in five teachers entering from alternative preparation program, with a clear implication that university-based programs were or should be over the hill. Not yet.
Mike Petrilli likes to claim that “the train has left the station,” Resistance is futile. He and his allies would like to see University-based teacher prep disappear. Fact-checking is necessary.
True grit is defined, however, by fighting CBE and segregation, not by going along to get along.
In other words, Petrilli is repeating lies and falsehoods to obfuscate what is actually occurring. As with the rest of his article. God it is so hard to read the stink tank promoters, Petrilli, Hess and many others. If I want to wade in pig manure, I’ll go down to the neighboring fields after they spray that crap on them.
Petrilli the edudeformer liar!
As usual great analysis, Laura!
Sounds like a spinner spinning. Rumplestilskin 5.1. Gold from straw. Suggestions for reform come from everywhere, not just a few mouths. Teachers always look for a better way.
and teachers are so adamantly NOT invited to participate in the “policy decisions” game
LIke (both comments)!