This is the second part of John Thompson’s review of Andrea Gabor’s book, After the Education Wars.
Gabor analyzes why “Reform” failed and where we go from here.
John Thompson writes:
A first review of Andrea Gabor’s excellent After the Education Wars concentrated on the progressive reforms that should have informed the improvement of New York City schools. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Mike Bloomberg essentially imposed a set of policies that virtually guaranteed “Taylorism,” and turned so many schools into sped-up 21st century versions of Henry Ford’s assembly lines. Gabor then draws on that history to offer advice on how educators can “recover the road not taken.”
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/andrea-gabor/after-the-education-wars/
Each of Gabor’s chapters teaches invaluable lessons, but I learned the most from her account of New York City’s lost opportunities. I still would like to learn more about Eric Nadelstern’s efforts to work within the reformers’ system. It’s often speculated that some billionaires now sense that their experiments failed and they now place their faith in “personalized,” online instruction. But they still seem to misunderstand Nadelstern’s experiences and ignore his warning, “‘Virtual communities don’t raise children, people do.’”
Although the nuances of education reform in Massachusetts are often lost on true believers in high stakes testing, Gabor shows how the policies that actually worked in Boston and Brockton were actually much closer to New York’s progressive reforms than the test and punish mentality which challenges them. First, Massachusetts improved its schools through a well-funded, well-planned, openly deliberated, and patient process. Its accountability test, the MCAS, was transparent and iterative. Its graduation targets were only set at a sophomore level, and schools were allowed time for preparation. Individual teachers weren’t held accountable for test results and charters were not used to scale up a battle between traditional public schools and choice schools, with test scores as the ammunition.
In both Brockton High School and the very different schools in Leander, Tx, critical thinking and literacy were stressed. Both progressive approaches to school improvement were consistent with Edwards Deming’s continuous improvement.
They both believed in group efforts to improve school, and embraced vigorous debate over policy. It wasn’t much of a shock to read about Massachusetts’ efforts to build intrinsic, as opposed to extrinsic, motivation, but it was an especially nice surprise for this Oklahoman to learn about similar efforts in Texas. In my state, we heard plenty about the supposed “Texas Miracle,” where test and punish drove the creation of bogus test score gains. It was a joy, however, to read about Leander’s campaign based on “driving out fear” in order to protect teachers’ autonomy and empower collaborative school improvement.
It was doubly fun to read about a Texas administration which used an I Love Lucy video during its “Culture Day.” Gabor provides this summary of the assembly line where Lucy and her friend Ethel need to pick chocolates, wrap and send them down to the packing room:
A stern supervisor hovers over them. “If one piece of candy gets past you … you’re fired.
… the assembly line gradually speeds up and the two friends start shoving chocolates they can’t wrap fast enough into their mouths, down the front of their uniforms, and under their caps.
The Lucy and Ethel video clip … has become a Leander metaphor for fear and the systemic havoc it unleashes.
Although the chapters on Massachusetts and Leander mostly stress the ways that the progressive school improvement path was taken, both end on cautionary notes. Massachusetts recently defeated Question 2, but corporate reformers who funded the lifting of the charter school cap still threaten the state’s gains, and the new Texas teacher evaluation law could be a mortal threat to collaboration and trust in Texas.
Then Gabor turned to the alleged New Orleans (NOLA) mass charterization success. NOLA has often been proclaimed as the rare victory which is proof that the concept of accountability-driven, competition-driven reform can improve the education outcomes of poor children of color. Gabor shows, however, the New Orleans’ portfolio model provides another example of how reform has most hurt the poorest children of color. Yes, studies by the Education Research Alliance documented impressive gains for a brief time. But, she notes that it didn’t study high school results or control for no-excuses schools’ pedagogies. The gains occurred when NOLA funding was at its peak, and its Darwinian tactic of counseling out traumatized and disabled children inflated test scores. Moreover, by 2012, New Orleans had between 12,195 to 15,781 disconnected youth, who were out of school and not in a job.
It is now clear that NOLA is another example of reformers’ “self-congratulatory” public relations spin, and another illustration of, “Noisy transformations [that] are often more mirage than miracle.” As in other schools where venture philanthropists claimed transformative gains, its charter schools competed “by skimming off the most engaged parents, [which] it turns nearby public schools into dumping grounds for the most troubled kids.” Once again, reformers produced gains for some by “essentially writing off the bottom 20 to 30 percent of poor children.”
We in Oklahoma City witnessed the same dynamics that Gabor documented. As Gates and other edu-philanthropists were deciding that they needed to “teacher proof” the classroom, a bipartisan Oklahoma City coalition led a collaborative, openly-debated effort to build trusting relationships, and our district began to improve. Then came No Child Left Behind, and as in the systems described by Gabor, our humane, holistic efforts were eventually abandoned. After a superintendent from the Broad Academy doubled down on micromanaging a sped-up assembly line, my once-improving school dropped to the lowest-performing mid-high on Oklahoma. I studied the paper records of my high school students and discovered the reality reformers ignored, but that should inform the next era of school improvement.
Almost without exception, my struggling students had been doing well in school until tragedies hit their families. Cancer and heart disease dwarfed all other causes of failures, and many teachers saw what was happening. When family illnesses caused kids to fall off the instruction assembly line, school didn’t have the resources to help them get on track. Rather than tackle those problems in a collaborative manner, doomed market-driven solutions were forced on us, increasing segregation.
As school choices proliferated, the students who survived multiple traumas (ACEs) were left behind in schools serving neighborhoods with extreme concentrations of generational poverty. Those schools suffered the most from high stakes testing conducted in an aligned and paced, worksheet-driven curriculum. My students were acutely aware that powerful adults had fought an intense battle over their schools, and that they were lab rats in an experiment that turned them into drill-and-kill factories.
So, what should guide the next reform era? First, we can build on points where most people agree, such as the hard-won conclusion that “standardized tests have no place in kindergarten.” And we may be getting to the point where nearly all sides agree that schools need better funding.
Gabor ends with praise of David Kirp and the early education reforms, and the team effort to improve New Jersey’s Union City. Rather than seek better, quantitative clubs and socio-engineer the building of “a better teacher,” we should return to the promising path of peer review teacher evaluations. And as Gabor repeatedly explains, the next era’s school should be founded on trusting, collaborative, and respectful relationships.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The brilliant Professor Gabor hits the nail on the head. There’s terrible irony to the Common Core in ELA. The material incidental to David Coleman’s puerile bullet list of skills (laughably referred to by Ed Deformers as “higher standards”) calls for a great return to the text–for students to read whole works of substance, like “foundational works” in American history and literature, plays by Shakespeare, and (one of the few actual works mentioned in Coleman’s “standards”) Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, from the Republic. But exactly the opposite has happened. Let me explain.
The “standards” themselves are an almost entirely content-free, vague list of abstract skills. They completely ignore descriptive knowledge in ELA, or knowledge of what, and so leave out half the subject. And what is left in–that list of skills–is fraught with problems. It would behoove people working in ELA to stop using the term “skills” altogether and replace this term with “procedural knowledge,” for that would lead them to create lessons that are more concrete and operational from which something useful can actually be learned.
The call in the material incidental to Lord Coleman’s list for reading substantive works from the canon so excited E. D. Hirsch, Jr., that the great champion of knowledge-based curricula initially got on board with the Common Core initiative. However, he soon learned his mistake and what a big one it was when he saw the list’s actual consequences for ELA curricula and pedagogy.
Ed Deformers love to say that “you get what you measure.” In so doing, they say an unintentional mouthful. Because the Common Core in ELA is a list of vague skills, and because the items in the bullet list are what is actually measured on the tests, and because students are promoted or held back or refused degrees based on the test results, schools are graded on those results, and teacher and administrator bonuses are often tied to those, the tests really matter. The stakes for these high-stakes tests are really high.
As a teacher and curriculum developer, I am uniquely positioned to see what the Coleman list has done to ELA instruction. I see, all the time, the calls for new online and print ELA educational materials being prepared by publishers, and the publishers are giving people what they are demanding–stuff to prepare the kids to take the Common Core tests. So what’s happening? Well, instead of reading whole works of literature, concentrating on the ideas being communicated in those works, and teaching specific descriptive and procedural knowledge incidentally–that is, instead of having kids engage authentically with works of literature–the new Common Core ELA curricula have replaced reading whole works with reading random snippets of text and doing activities and exercises, modeled on the state test questions, that involve applying a Common Core skill–some item from Coleman’s list–to a random snippet of text taken out of context–a couple paragraphs about Harriet Tubman here, a paragraph about invasive species there. Curricular coherence is completely out the window.
The high-stakes tests measure the ability of the student to apply a skill from Coleman’s list to a random snippet of text, typically in a multiple-choice format in which several of the possible answers (the distractors) are plausible answers but only one, supposedly, is the best answer. Whereas before, a 12th-grade ELA student in the United States would get a British literature survey class and learn about the history of thought and the development of literary genres and styles through the ages, whereas before that student would be introduced in a coherent way to the best of what people in that country did and thought through the ages, now they get random snippets of random text and apply to these some skill from Coleman’s list and the focus is no longer primarily on what the author was communicating but on the “skill.”
Let me give you a concrete example. Consider ideas about love and how these changed through the centuries. As C.S. Lewis points out in his study The Allegory of Love, one can look in vain through Greek and Roman classical literature for examples of what we would call Romantic love. You will find lust (Zeus and Europa) and familial loyalty (Odysseus and Penelope), but nothing like our modern notion of Romantic attachment to a partner. In the past, students would read, in that Brit Lit survey course, works of courtly love, like “I Sing of a Maiden” and a selection from The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus and learn that in the past marriage was conceived of not as a love match but as basically a business arrangement. Then, based on Platonic ideals and worship of the Virgin Mary, there emerged this medieval courtly love literature that idealized the “perfect woman”–the object of desire to whom the knight was to show uncommon courtesy. Flash forward a few hundred years, and we got the Romantic revolution in European and British literature, typified by writers like Blake and Keats and Byron and Shelley, which involved a revolution in how people thought about love–coming together with a partner was no longer to be a sort of business arrangement but, rather, was to be based upon strong emotional attachment–an attachment often referred to as being “fated” for one another. And so, out of these two streams–courtly love and its notions about lovers’ courtesies and Romantic literature and its notions about the primacy of emotional attachment–and we get the modern conception of love that one sees in, say, the kinds of Romance movies commonly derided as “chic flicks.”
So, we read the past in order to learn why we think the way we do, so that we can become thoughtful, reflective people. That’s why people read and write. But under the Common Core regime, we’ve lost sight of that entirely.
But none of that happens now that Coleman’s bullet list has led to the dumbing down of ELA materials and the concentration not on ideas but on inane skills exercises based on random texts taken out of any conceivable context.
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., when he learned how Coleman’s bullet list had caused ELA instruction to devolve into all-skills-instruction-all-the-time based on random snippets of text, saw the error of his ways and ended up denouncing the whole business.
The latest batch of print and online ELA materials has devolved under the standards-and-testing regime into dumbed-down study of isolated skills, something that I call “new Criticism Ultra Lite.” The consequences have been profound.
My high-school juniors had to take 26 separate high-stakes tests. My high school was basically closed for testing for two months of every year. Teachers were encouraged to spend the bulk of their time an test prep–having students practice answering test-style questions on Common Core skills. Any notion of a coherent curriculum–a survey of American literature and thought, a unit on the short story and how it works, a unit on poetry and prosody, a unit on figurative language, a couple weeks devoted to the study of a single author like Vonnegut or Frost–was out the window.
Coleman’s list has lead to a vast dumbing down of ELA curricula and pedagogy, to placing the focus on incidental trivialities, and to the removal of whole, complete works and of authentic response to those works from the curriculum.
Basically, an entire generation, now, has been robbed of real English language arts instruction. And to what end? The standards-and-testing regime has not only dumbed down curricula and pedagogy, but it has also been an utter failure by its own preferred measure–scores on high-stakes tests. There has been, since NCLB in 2001, no statistically significant increase in student scores on those tests and no closing of achievement gaps. So, we’ve Cored the curriculum to no end.
One last point. Gabor wrote an intellectual biography of the great quality control pioneer William Edwards Deming. What Deming saw clearly is that if you want continuous improvement and the innovation necessary to make that happen, you have to empower folks at the bottom, who are closest to the work. Top-down mandates won’t do it. why? Because millions of teacher practitioners, researchers, curriculum designers, and professors of English, rhetoric, linguistics, reading, theatre, media, and so on have better ideas than those imposed from the top by Gates and by the man whom Gates appointed (by divine fiat?) to be the decider for the rest of us, Coleman the tyro, the novice.
Here’s how to get continuous improvement in ELA. Scrap Coleman’s stupid list. In its place, promulgate a very broad framework (perhaps six or seven general principles) specifying very broad goals (e.g., “The student will be broadly familiar with great works in American,British Literature, and World Literature reflecting a variety of voices and perspectives. The student will develop intrinsic motivation to read and learn. The student will be able to recognize and to reproduce in his or her own work standard literary and rhetorical genres, techniques, styles, and structures.” That kind of thing.) These should provide the degrees of freedom within which real curricular and pedagogical innovation can occur
AND
Do open-source crowd sourcing of alternative, innovative ideas by creating an open source national ELA portal or wiki to which scholars, researchers, curriculum developers, and classroom practitioners can post
–Competing, VOLUNTARY standards, frameworks, learning progressions, curriculum outlines, reading lists, pedagogical approaches, lesson templates, etc.,
–for particular domains,
–subjected to ongoing, vigorous, public debate and refinement
–based on results in the classroom and ongoing research and development,
–freely adopted by autonomous local schools and districts
–and subjected to continual critique by teacher-led schools–teachers who are given the time in their schedules to subject those, and their own practice, to ongoing critique via something like Japanese Lesson Study.
I am now retired. The puerile Coleman bullet list has become the default, de facto national ELA curriculum has basically destroyed the field of English language arts to which I have devoted my life. I could no longer be a part of what Ed Deform is doing to my beloved subject.
cx: ELA curriculum AND has*
Update to the Massachusetts landscape:
Though we successfully defeated the elimination of our cap on charters on Question 2 in November of 2016, the efforts to torpedo public education are on-going. The current governor, Charlie Baker, is the former executive of the Pioneer Institute, a part of the ALEC network and funded by the Waltons and the Kochs. His reformy folks have seats on the state board of education and are constantly looking for pretexts and means to subvert the voters’ will.
The reforms Gabor cites included investments of money sufficient that each school district received enough funding, through a combination of state and local money, such that a foundational budget, assuring each child had enough funds to receive an education that met the constitutional requirement to “cherish” public education.The so-called Grand Bargain was a response to a lawsuit begun in 1978 wending its way through the courts. Since its first few years, it has never been fully funded. The law also allowed the first charters and included a reimbursement to districts when state funding went to charters. That reimbursement has also never been fully funded.
A Foundation Budget Review Committee found in 2015 there were four factors which have influenced education spending such that the state funds are no longer adequate: health care, special education, ELL’s and kids living in poverty. The state is a deadbeat to the tune of $1-2 billion annually.
Last year, when FBRC came up for a vote, Baker and his allies in the legislature reneged on funding for ELL’s and poverty. This year, Baker has been making noise about needing more “accountability” from poor districts with low test scores – you know, those with all the ELL’s. The Pioneers have floated the idea that localities which receive state funding for schools should lose a number of proportionate seats on their school boards to the percentage of dollars it receives from the state. So, if 70% of the schools’ money comes from the state, 70% of the school board would be appointed by the state as well. This is what they call “accountablity”.
As to the MCAS, it has undergone several metamorphoses since its introduction, most notably when the late Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester was also Chairman of PARCC. We now have MCAS 2.0, some agglomeration of MCAS and PARCC, which was in the news recently for a racist question on the 10th grade exam, which students must pass to receive a diploma. Massachusetts is one of only 12 states to retain a high stakes exit exam.
Poor cities and towns have threatened to sue once again. Stay tuned to see if Massachusetts will honor its responsibility to “cherish” our schools or not.
I meant to give this example of how debilitating the charter segment is to the public schools:
125 Boston Public schools receive 22% of state aid, while 78% of state aid goes to 24 charter schools. State Chapter 70 funding goes to charter schools first. BPS gets the left over. This is how the law is written and it has gotten worse with charter school expansion.