Back in 2000, when George W. Bush was running for President, he tales up the (nonexistent) Texas Miracle and said there was a simple answer to solving the problems of Educatuon, raising test scores and graduation rates, and closing achievement gaps. Easy-Peasy. Test every child every years from grades 3-8. Publish the scores. Reward schools that raise scores. Humiliate those that don’t. The secre: High expectations! So No Child Left Behind mandated that every child would be proficient by 2014. An absurd goal, and district or state met it. Probably every school in the nation should have closed.
Peter Greene writes here about appropriate and inappropriate uses of expectations.
Setting impossible goals is actually demotivating.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes, impossible goals are demotivating. And harmful. Dan Willingham, cognitive scientist at UVA, writes about how the key to education is finding the “sweet spot” between too easy and too hard. We’re killing education in this country with absurdly high standards. But few are brave enough to speak out, because it sounds like “the bigotry of low expectations”. We need to speak out. Kids are being harmed.
Kids. Are. Being. Harmed.
Absolutely. An entire generation of kids has now had humane education in literature, the arts, science, music, philosophy, history, and so on stolen from them by devolved, test-preppy curricula and pedagogy. Stop the Common [sic] Coring of our schools now! End the federal testing mandate.
Union leaders–are you hearing this! NOW. IS. THE. TIME. Hit the streets. Demand that the child abuse stop. End the testing now.
Do we ask beginning piano students to play Rachmaninov? Do we ask beginning basketball players to play full games before learning how to dribble? Do we ask beginning German students to read Goethe?
Yet we ask beginning science students to act like expert scientists. We ask beginning math students to think like mature mathematicians. We ask beginning readers to act like comparative lit grad students. This is educational malpractice –mandated by Common Core and NGSS.
Amen to this.
And the problem is that the false narrative is not being challenged despite it being so blatantly false as to be laughable!
And that false narrative is: This charter school with an extraordinarily high out of school suspension rate for 5 and 6 year old children and an extraordinarily high attrition rate when compared to other charters has 99% of its scholars performing well on state tests. Ergo, that proves beyond a doubt to paid researchers who get funding from billionaires who hate public schools that high expectations are good. And that means that the only people who don’t agree are “racists” who have low expectations for students who aren’t white or Asian.
And no mention of the fact that the very same people who supposedly have “high expectations” for students who aren’t white or Asian are also pushing the outrageously racist narrative that young African-American kindergarten students are so disproportionately violent because of their violent natures that our charter has no choice but to severely humiliate and suspend them as many times as necessary. No mention is made of the fact that the charter CEO most responsible for pushing this false narrative also worked very hard to empower Betsy DeVos, demanding that Senators confirm DeVos and attacking any critics of DeVos.
This false narrative – pushed by the most gullible NYT education reporters – is as ridiculous as some for-profit insurance company that dumps every sick patient making claims that giving lots of government funds to this private insurance company that dumps sick patients will solve the problem of all diseases! Because that for-profit insurance company that dumps patients who get sick knows how to keep every patient healthy!
The absurdity of the narrative always shocks me and it is a sign of the terrible failings of education reporters that they dutifully embrace that narrative instead of asking the most obvious questions.
A billionaire bagel maker opens a chain of lavishly funded charters that feed their students a bagel each morning. And his lavishly funded charter networks get 99% passing rates! They have the solution to failing schools – feed every kid a bagel each morning! And the education reporters would dutifully report that instead of noticing that lots and lots of students from groups that traditionally struggle in schools have simply disappeared from that bagel charter network. Instead, those reporters dutifully give legitimacy and respect to the bagel makers’ claims that no one should question why so many students disappeared because all white reporters should simply assume that their (African-American) parents want them in failing schools and it has nothing to do with the fact his charters treated low-performing students like criminals and constantly punished and humiliated them in an effort to make them go away.
not, eh, not now
Love not being able to correct my mistakes
And child abuse it is all the way PreK-12, and beyond.
NYCpsp stated “And the problem is that the false narrative is not being challenged despite it being so blatantly false as to be laughable!”
Exactly! GAGA Good German educators (there are no GAGA Good German teachers) refuse to challenge because they allow fear to rule their lives and jobs. The students pick up on that fear. Sad, very sad!
But, but, I’ve got to keep my job. Horse manure!
Here is what Comte-Sponville has to say about choosing personal expediency over justice:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions]
Rawls’s veil of ignorance argument is, to my mind, powerful and definitive. The most significant addition to ethical theory since the Golden Rule.
Yes, it is. It should be THE determining and overarching guide for anyone involved in the political process. For those that don’t know what the “veil of ignorance” the following is from wiki:
“The “veil of ignorance” is a method of determining the morality of issues. It asks a decision-maker to make a choice about a social or moral issue and assumes that they have enough information to know the consequences of their possible decisions for everyone but would not know, or would not take into account, which person they are. The theory contends that not knowing one’s ultimate position in society would lead to the creation of a just system, as the decision-maker would not want to make decisions which benefit a certain group at the expense of another, because the decision-maker could theoretically end up in either group. The idea has been present in moral philosophy at least since the eighteenth century. The veil of ignorance is part of a long tradition of thinking in terms of a social contract that includes the writings of Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson. Prominent modern names attached to it are John Harsanyi and John Rawls.” For more see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance
The other most important observation, I think, to be made about moral theory is this, a counter to the claims made by Hume that you cannot derive “ought” from “is” and by the verificationists and logical positivists that moral propositions are meaningless because they are not verifiable:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/science-and-ethics/
Yes, read it and all should read what Bob has written to understand a little bit of philosophy.
Going up the Common Core stair,
I met some knowledge that wasn’t there.
It wasn’t there again today.
How can I possibly learn this way?
and it leads to cheating!
And then there was the cloaked expectation that if demands were made high enough, schools would look like they were failing. Then, public schools could be blamed paving the way for what heretofore was unacceptable to the public– privatization. The financial crisis of 2008, rising inequality, and cutting social supports for children and their families gave that agenda a big boost. That was combined with the bipartisan ideology of personal responsibility in opposition to social responsibility. Hence, the persistence of the zombie ideas of fattening the pig by weighing it and rewards as a motivator.
I have seen the soul crushing look of defeat on the faces of my ELLs that were required to take standardized tests in English long before they were prepared to make an honest attempt at the test. Some states are ignoring research on testing ELLs in order to collect failure data. They have no regard for how demoralizing this unfair practice is. ESL and bilingual teachers design instruction to be coherent and incremental. Then, the state drops the ELLs into the ocean of defeat without a raft. This practice is educational malfeasance.
But wouldn’t you know–surprise, surprise!–Gamblin’ Bill Bennett, former Secretary of Education, was there waiting with an on-line school, K-12, to accommodate all those students (and students from schools) deemed unsatisfactory for failing the tests or failing to meet the law’s annual yearly progress (AYP) requirements!
Isn’t it just AMAZING how these coincidences occur! Such serendipity!
What we need is some legislation to ensure that the United States will be 100 percent death free by 2028.
As our dear leader, Donald Trump has shown us, if you say that’s something’s true it becomes true. For example, yesterday, in a phone call with reporters, he said that people with COVID-19 should go to work because the “corona flu” isn’t that serious.
So, there you have it. You can alter reality simply by speaking. I call this the “Fiat Trumpii.”
Alabama is a coastal state in the path of hurricanes. Belgium is a city. Coronavirus is not a problem. It’s like The Secret writ large!
Magic as legislation and policy! It’s a new era, folks.
Dear President Trump: Please get Congress to pass the 100 percent death free legislation soon. I’m not getting any younger.
Ask Mike and Mother to pray about it.
This has been done. Some Christian viewpoints turn the religion into a belief system that suggests that checking a belief box on their list of beliefs assures everlasting life. For those with a different belief system, this is problematic. Evidence of the problems associated with the everlasting life checkoff can be seen in the widespread support for our president from the folks who accept this idea.
Greene writes an excellent analysis of this problem. Among the things he discusses is the phenomenon associated with studies showing that teachers who grade tougher get more work out of students. While this is true, there is a caveat.
A problem with the idea that teachers who grade tougher get more out of a student than those who do not lies in the put up or get out process. Often students who do not wish to challenge themselves are taken out of classes that are more challenging for various reasons, some good and some bad. Teachers learn that they can save themselves the headache of dealing with some students by being demanding.
While I completely see where students need to be working hard, I am not entirely sure how this is to applied to classes where students are of wildly variant abilities. I think this is Greene’s main point: teachers are the ones who need to be trusted to know when to say what needs to be done, preferably in concert with one another.
Yes, that is an excellent point.
Piling on work is not “high expectations”. But if you eliminate students who don’t want to do that hard work from your class, the “average” student will perform much better.
But those same students would also perform better if they are in a class that doesn’t pile on the homework but gives a reasonable amount.
“High expectations” is a lazy reformer’s simplistic and shallow solution to a complex problem. As if teachers would lower expectations out of laziness or bad faith! We teachers do need to raise our expectations … for the reformers. How about making them teach for at least five years in a challenging school? How about making them actually master the literature of their field? How about having them read Dan Willingham and other cognitive scientists who actually have deep knowledge of this domain? If they can’t meet these expectations, they should be fired.
Well said, as always, Ponderosa!
There is no country in the world where every child is proficient, and it will never happen unless that country has only one child and every adult is involved in that child’s education.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – the only national assessment in the United States since 1990, used as a barometer of student achievement – defines proficiency as ‘demonstrated competency over challenging subject matter,’ which experts interpret as high achievement.”
Saying that every child will be proficient is like saying every horse running in The Grand National will win the race and cross the line at exactly the same time. Such a bogus claim says we are all equal in every way. It says no one lives in poverty. It says every child is born with the same mental and physical abilities. It infers that we are all wealthy, too.
Correction to my last paragraph in my last comment.
Saying that every child will be proficient is like saying every horse in the world will run in The Grand National and cross the finish line at exactly the same time.
Such a bogus claim says we are all equal in every way. It says no one lives in poverty. It says every child is born with the same mental and physical abilities. It infers that we are all wealthy, too.
Lloyd, the metaphor I have used is that mandating that every child will score “proficient” on standardized test is like expecting every child to run a mile in 5 minutes. It can be done, by not by everyone.
Furthermore, the nature of the standardized test ranks and rates test-takers from best to worst. No standardized test permits “every child” to be proficient. It is a statistical impossibility.
In Northern California, we figured that the only high schools that were perfectly safe were Piedmont, Gunn, Lowell, and one or two Marin high schools. The closest Arne Duncan came to admitting what a failure NCLB was with the statement if it was taken to its conclusion, 85% of American schools would close. By the time I retired my students were living with the consequences—a deracinated curriculum that treated students as if they were stupid. No more reading full-length books! They were dropped in favor of anthologies and “workplace documents.” In junior high! They told me it was a relief to read a real book in my class and not hover over a screen. Thank you, Diane, for your tireless exposure of the educrats and disrupters.
Thanks, Cindy. NCLB was a disaster from the start, and Arne Duncan made it worse by layering on Common Core and lashing out at teachers for failing to raise test scores, then tying their job evaluations to scores.
Here’s the thing about low expectation based on race and class prejudices. They are like sepsis, spreading through the body politic. They seep into the beliefs of all of us, the privileged and excluded and exploited alike. So, in five decades in education I’ve seen teachers with the full range of expectations and accompanying range of prejudices, across racial differences. However, those on the high bias end of the spectrum did not acquire those attitudes from some dark place in their hearts. It comes from the biased structures of how we live.
Gotta’ say in response to Bush’s “Soft bigotry of low expectation,’ “You’ve got a lot nerve to say you are my friend. When I was down, you just stood there grinning.” These are the gleeful budget -cutting folks who make all sorts of demeaning demands from folks in need of government support. Why? Racist and classist low expectations.
The low expectation thing is a ruse to blame teachers instead of the inequity that feeds privilege and keeps us divided.
“The low expectation thing is a ruse to blame teachers instead of the inequity that feeds privilege and keeps us divided.” Thanks for this, an important distinction. It encapsulates the disingenuousness of the entire ed-reform movement, whose premise from the get-go has been that the school is some sort of hermetic environment where social issues do not apply.
There are other sorts of bias a teacher can fall prey to, especially beginners, especially if they haven’t yet raised children of their own. For example one might tend to expect less of those with poor impulse-control &/or who appear to have minimal attention spans, and those reluctant to participate. Just a plug for smaller classes here. The smaller the group, the easier it is to “catch someone doing something right” [& praise/ encourage], & to assess on the ground.
Of course I agree w/all the ed-reformer bashing re: “high expectations.” And as a born cynic I truly believe it was all disingenuous. It was folks of multiple non-education agendas jumping onto a sincere bandwagon articulated by black activists decades ago– that too little was expected of poor black students.
But the teacherly aspect of the issue is timely for me. Just today I realized that my very youngest group [they were toddlers in September] understand the commands “Levántense” and “Siéntense” (Stand up, Sit down)– & a couple of others– without being given any physical cue. And now I am bashing myself. For yrs I sailed along demonstrating these [& many other commands] as we did listening-comp exercises together, only recently trialing assessment by standing back to see if they can just listen-&-do. I learned immediately that 4’s & 5’s love the challenge & it sharpens their listening/ learning new material. But I had no clue how much just-turned-3yo’s had already learned, & how quick on the heels of the 4’s/ 5’s they were. DUH!
My experience may be hard to relate to your mid&hischoolers, especially in the major subjects. World Lang teachers are fortunate that standards-nuts haven’t yet poked their heads into the classroom. The current crop of textbooks are awful, but thanks to little knowledge of the field– & no hi-stakes tests– admins don’t hold you to them. And at the PreK level there’s nothing bit a mishmash of amateur curriculum out there. Expectations are limited to ACTFL guidelines. You could do nothing but songs & stories for the 30 hrs I have them [= 1/2-hr wkly for 3 30-wk PK schyrs] & still achieve ‘novice beginner.’ I’ve always done more than that, but I’m finding my expectations need to be higher – because they’ve been learning more quickly than I realized.