I wrote this article for The Progressive. It describes the failed bipartisan consensus of the past 20 years.
It’s my view of what Joe Biden needs to do to reverse the toxic legacy of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, and the current Every Student Succeeds Act.
With the Biden administration’s decision about testing, he’s off to a bad start.
The article begins:
President Joe Biden will have his work cut out in repairing the damage done to U.S. education caused by Donald Trump and his one-time Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. But Biden and his Secretary of Education nominee, Miguel Cardona, must also reverse at least twenty years of federal education policy, starting over with measures that allow teachers to teach and children to learn without fear of federal sanctions.
Since the enactment of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002, the nation’s public schools have been required to administer standardized tests in reading and mathematics to every student in grades three through eight, a practice unknown in any high-performing nation. These tests have high stakes for students (who might fail to be promoted), teachers (who might be fired if their students’ test scores don’t rise), and schools (which might be closed if test scores don’t go up).
We have poured billions of dollars into that fake corporate-style reform and achieved little other than demoralized teachers.and students.
In addition, three successive presidential administrations—Bush, Obama, and Trump—have pressured school districts to accept privately managed charter schools. Educators and parents have tried to fend off a powerful and well-funded privatization movement that promotes privately managed charter schools and vouchers as the cure for low test scores (which they are not). This so-called reform movement has paid little attention to the need for adequate and equitable resources.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
The Failure to the Top
The Failure to the Top
Is different than it seems
It yield$ an endle$$ crop
Of dollar$ for the $cheme$
Have any of them ever admitted an error or changed course, even slightly?
They’re pushing charters, vouchers and testing as a “response” to the pandemic. That’s exactly what they were pushing the day before the pandemic hit. Is anyone at all surprised that the “response to the pandemic” is the same list of ed reform remedies they’ve been selling since 1999? I would have been shocked if it had been different.
If anything they’ve doubled down on vouchers. “Vouchers” now include any private contractor who could possibly be characterized as “educational services”. This isn’t a “response” to anything- it’s what they had on tap next and they’re just rolling it out with some pandemic-related rhetoric.
Great post, Diane!
NCLB: “LEFT our students BEHIND.”
RttT: A Race to the Trough.”
ESSA: “Every Student UNSuccessfrul Act.”
Amazing how Congress can dream up acronyms where the outcomes are … JUST THE OPPOSITE.
It’s certainly no accident.
A lot of time and effort go into coming up with deceptive names for bills.
We — you and I and anyone else who pays taxes — are paying to be deceived by our ” representatives” (which itself is a term of propaganda).
Orwell’s that ends well
Orwell ain’t got nothin’
On Congress of today
Our “Reps” are simply bluffin’
With everything they say
While I agree that students must be assessed for proper placement, I do not in any way support the big test. First, it is returned to teachers too slow to be of value. Second, it’s done in a mob setting. Not ideal to determine real levels. Third, it’s just a snap shot in time No need for the big test as a small pretest will do. And it is immediately used to judge teachers and students.
Assessment is only as good as the information gathered and it’s application to the education of the child. It isn’t about who’s first and who’s last, it’s about proper placement In my school, years back, we did one on one assessment that only took 15 minutes. That gives the snap shot while teachers made adjustments in the classroom.
As children return to in school learning, those assessments are essential. Now the question becomes what do we do when 7th graders are not 7th grade level.
Someone should write a book about that…… wait a minute, I already did!
That teacher in the classroom part is essential for assessment. I have told this anecdote before, but it still carries weight. Years (and years) ago when I was in seventh grade, my district decided to pilot a Spanish program for Jr. High students. We all took a test to determine eligibility. I didn’t make the cut, but the Superintendent put me in the class against the instructions of my parents who felt that if I didn’t test in I shouldn’t be in the class. I ended up being second in the class behind the Superintendent’s daughter who had lived in a Spanish speaking country. At that point he told my parents that I hadn’t scored high enough for the class. The soft skills that all these tests ignore (in addition to test taking ability) made a huge difference.
I was a C, occasionally B student in French, but I was given the opportunity to be part of the regional (Erie County) French Contest and scored second highest in the school (11th overall) behind the student (#1) who was from a French speaking country. Hundreds of students sat for this “competition”.
It wasn’t that I was one of the best in the county in my French abilities, it was because I had just enough knowledge of French to leverage my test taking abilities into a higher score than I deserved.
As an aside, I took three years of French in High School and one year in college, but I was still pleased that thirty years later when I was proctoring the first year NYS French Proficiency exam with eighth graders that I understood the oral exam and would have also passed the written part. (I still “got” it).
“West Virginia Republicans are betting virtual charter schools could succeed online, where public schools struggled and access is limited.
GOP lawmakers are pushing legislation that would use state taxpayer money to enroll as many as one in 10 public school students in virtual charter schools.”
Exact same virtual charters Jeb Bush and the rest of the echo chamber have been pushing for 20 years- they added the word “pandemic” for the new marketing campaign.
Right now, in Ohio, the massive virtual charter chain that collapsed in a heap of corruption is fighting the state to avoid paying the 60 million dollars they robbed.
So let’s roll it out in West Virginia! Onward, ideological soldiers! Maybe West Virginia, too, can experience a giant failed virtual charter corporation. Why should Ohio have all the fun?
https://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/education/wv-republicans-are-pushing-virtual-charters-after-public-schools-struggled-amid-covid-19-but-whether/article_a2549a36-2126-588c-a9e7-2f72b15573ba.html
Thank you for your review of the “reform” debacle. Unfortunately, there has little has change since governors declared that we were “a nation at risk.” The federal government is still playing the blame game, and data collection is more important that the students themselves, even in the middle of a pandemic. The only so-called accomplishment is more students continue to be funneled into privatized schools of questionable value. There remains little evidence to show that transferring public funds to private corporations offers any value at all.
Our testing obsession is misguided. We can draw some comparisions from the Covid-19 pandemic. Imagine if when people presented with Covid symptoms the only action taken is to repeatedly take their temperature. If their temperature spikes they get sent to a better private hospital where they will take their temperature hourly. If the taking of a temperature is the only intervention, we will continue to see more people dying at alarming rates. If we also take payment away from the first hospital when the patient is transferred, then care in the first hospital will deteriorate as well. Without any additional treatment for Covid, more and more patients would continue to die. This ridiculous analogy roughly describes what is happening in public schools for the past twenty years. All we do is make a feeble attempt to measure students, schools and teachers by standardized tests and offer an array of punishments for so-called failure.
The conclusion of this article is that Dr. Cardona has an opportunity to change our false belief that market based education and testing will improve education. Dr. Cardona could listen to what Joe Biden promised during the campaign. He could eliminate racist standardized testing and the federal slush fund for charter school expansion. Along with increased funding for Title 1 and support for community schools with wrap around services, we might actually be able to improve academic outcomes for the nation’s students.
At least taking their temperature would tell medical professionals some useful information. These high stakes standardized tests do nothing to inform classroom instruction.
I am a subscriber the Progressive and was pleased to see this well-informed and clear statement in print. I was not aware of the Time Magazine link and the much larger audience for the same content.
Biden appears to have been co-opted by the same people and groups responsible for the failed polices jump-started with A Nation at Risk.
I see that we now have a Secretary of Education. I still do not understand the authority given to (or taken by) Ian Rosenblum in requiring schools to do testing this year. HIs letter with edicts was issued before the confirmation of Miguel Cordona. I suppose this letter was a response to lobbying by organizations funded by the B&M Gates and Walton Family foundations and other billionaires. Too many billionaires remain intent on making public schools live up to their concocted image of being failures, as if state standardized tests had meaning for “accountability.” They do not.
That’s what happens after 20 years though- they’ve been selecting for ed reformers for two decades now. The thing is self-perpetuating at this point. They hire people who agree with them and those people then hire others who agree, and we end up with a “bipartisan consensus” that is deeply embedded.
They say it themselves. The “movement” consists of “accountability” and “choice”. Hence, public schools get only “accountability”- tests.
The shape of the thing was set at the beginning. Public schools would get the stick and “choice” schools would get the carrot. There is nothing else on offer for public schools in ed reform- they never had a positive agenda for our schools and they still don’t. They don’t think they need one. We are, after all, the status quo, factory, government schools. The language isn’t accidental. It’s 100% negative for a reason.
” the authority given to (or taken by) Ian Rosenblum in requiring schools to do testing this year. HIs letter with edicts was issued before the confirmation of Miguel Cordona.”
That was certainly no coincidence.
Get the unpopular stuff out of the way before the Secretary comes in and you can claim s/he had nothing to do with it and basically present it as a fait accompli.
The games being played got old long ago.
These people think that the American public are all idiots.
And maybe they are correct in that assessment.
Agreed. This was a political manipulation for the neoliberals to get what they want without blaming Cardona for the unpopular decision.
I remain hopeful but I have yet to see any of these people “improve” any public school anywhere, and I’ve been a public school parent in a state utterly dominated by ed reformers for 30 years.
I think they DESPERATELY need a course change but since the motto of the “movement” seems to be “we know what works” I don’t think hiring the same group of people will do it.
If the Biden Administration is stacked with DFER and Gates and Walton alums, we will get the same thing we’ve been getting for 20 years. I have yet to see any of these people admit an error or even examine the dogma. It’s a closed circle. The sorting happens at the hiring stage. They’re choosing for adherence to the “movement”.
The difference now is that Dr. Cardona and, hopefully, Marten will be in charge, and they can stand up to the DFER, CAP and Gates members of the team.
As in standup comedy?
Ha ha ha.
The main problem with most education policies is that there are not any educators sitting at the table when they are being made. It is a bunch of 1%ers, lawyers, and lobbiest that don’t know anything about education or child development.
We have raised the largest generation of uneducated students in history. The numbers will say “we have the highest graduation percentage of all time” . The problem is most are just being pushed out the door by schools to make their numbers look good. The numbers are just a house of cards. Looks impressive from the outside but but are just waiting to collapse into reality.
The “brain trust” (sarcasm alert) in DC comes up with these crazy ideas and puts them into effect. The states then adopt them and send them to local districts. The districts send them to the buildings. And the buildings leadership says to the teachers “pass them or else you will have more work to do”. Most teachers just go along because they don’t want to be hassled. They pass kids along to make them someone elses problem, meanwhile the students are not held accountable for anything. The adults are masterminding how to get around the system.
Now we have a whole gereration the can’t and keep a job because.
1. They can’t get to work or get there on time, because the school let them pass without any consequences when they were late or absent frequently.
2. The have not learned any perserverance. When the going gets tough, some adult will fix it, not the student.
3. They have no sense of work ethic, because someone else will do it for them.
4. They do not have any skills because they can barely read or write, because they were just passed along.
This is a systemic problem, not a teacher problem. The system is broken. To much reliance on numbers and not on people.
Poverty is a another systemic problem that does not get addressed. It is much easier to scapegoat teachers and schools than launch an anti-poverty campaign. As we have noted, education alone cannot defeat poverty. The $15 dollars an hour would have been a step in the right direction, but it was bounced by the parliamentarian.
You are correct, poverty is a huge issue. We have system designed to keep people poor and on it for a generations. There is no process for working your way out of it.
A seat at the table
We need a seat at the table
To get a decent deal
We’ve always been at the table
Because we are the meal
But as the meal we would be on the table, not in a seat at the table.
Here’s an Ohio charter/voucher lobbying group and their “response” to the pandemic:
“Yet another possibility is to give families access to private schools that are open five days a week. As national surveys indicate, private schools are more likely to have continued to operate in person over the past year. That’s true here, too, as we see in a recent article from Southwest Ohio. In their enrollment efforts for next fall, those private schools have even promoted their ability to stay open and offer in-person instruction. The problem, of course, is that only families with the disposable income to afford tuition—or those who are eligible for the state’s private-school scholarships—have access to these schools. Under current law, EdChoice offers scholarships for students attending low-performing public schools or from low-income households.”
They just lobbied for an got a massive expansion of vouchers in Ohio. State lawmakers got absolutely nothing accomplished for the 90% of students who attend the unfashionable public schools in this state, but ed reformers got their voucher demands met.
They’re back with still more voucher demands, but with a new “pandemic” label!
These people contribute nothing to public schools. There’s no upside for public school students or families. They simply do not serve our schools or students.
Don’t move to Ohio if you plan to send your kids to public schools. The state is utterly captured by the ed reform lobby and public schools are the last priority.
drext727 Two things came immediately to mind when reading your note:
(1) The serial relationship between LARGE CLASSES; the time it takes to grade essays (written by a large number of students); and the ease of grading bubbles or multiple choices. In my view, the loss of good managed discussion (smaller groups), essay writing, and other forms of student expression with good teacher-feedback (which becomes overwhelming with larger classes) explains much about your comment: “We have raised the largest generation of uneducated students in history.”
(2) Using an anecdote to explain: In a class discussion once, another student told of how the college administrator was quoted in a discussion about changing the curriculum, saying that HE didn’t have a liberal studies background, and he didn’t suffer for it.
The point of course is that IF he had experienced a good liberal studies curriculum, he would NEVER have considered ridding his campus of such programming. But HE was the administrator drawing from his own lack of experience to set programming for a huge number of students.
considering both (1 and 2) above, we can recall the saying “the banality of evil.” In other words, where thoughtlessness reigns, evil cannot be far behind. CBK
Good morning Diane and everyone,
As I’ve pointed out before, during pandemic teaching when I have 2-6 kids in a class, I can see and hear that they’re getting the material so why even give a test in most cases??? I don’t! We move on quickly and easily. Bing bang boom! 🙂 (oh and it’s less stress for all of us, too!)
Why give a test?
Maybe to confirm your intuition . . .?
Let’s not forget that tests also require studying which is independent review (and reinforcement) of the material.
Students who attend class daily, pay attention, meet all requirements and study adequately for the test also receive a more tangible reward in the form of a high test grade.
Test grades balance other graded classwork to produce that report card grade and are certainly part of a parental expectation.
One of the best policy changes I made regarding tests was to allow students to use a 5 x 8 “crib card”. If they forgot their card, they often realized that they really didn’t need it – that writing it more or less forced a good study habit.
I just don’t see the counter-argument for eliminating classroom tests.
Sorry
There is no argument against classroom tests that cover what was taught.
There are many good arguments against state standardized tests that are disconnected from what was taught, whose results are reported 4-6 months later, which contain questions that teachers are not allowed to see, and whose answers by students to specific questions are not revealed to the student or teachers.
No student can prepare for a standardized test. Nothing is learned by the student or teacher when no one knows which questions the student got right or wrong.
The only beneficiary is the testing corporations.
Bonjour Rage!
I’m not saying that I NEVER give quizzes or tests. Of course I still do! Je n’oublie rien! I just haven’t given them as much. I’m also struggling with the ethical problem of giving tests and quizzes to my in person students and also to remote students. It’s not really fair that the kids at home on the computer can look up every answer while the kids in front of me had to study and know the material. How can I balance the grades of both groups of students? Maybe I can’t. I guess that’s just the way it is nowadays!
Fair point re “remote only” students.
Diane
100% on Common Core testing, though here in New York NYSED was eventually forced to release some test questions. The state science tests required through NCLB and now, ESSA are a different story. Objective and fair science standards and complete transparency in testing. Anyone can look up all 19 years of tests and answer keys. Unfortunately the switch to NGSS and companion tests will be a CC version of science.
But did you get test answers for individual students? Did you learn what questions your students got right and wrong?
You know, as I look back at my almost 30 years of teaching, I see the absurdity of so much I was required to do as a teacher and the crazy attitude with which I did so much of it. Age and distance bring new perspectives and sometimes wisdom. Sometimes I want to apologize to my former students. When I prepped students for the NYS Regents in French, on the second week of class we took a regents exam and I told them, “This test is what we’re aiming to do well on this year. This is our goal” Over the course of the year, we did 15-20 old French regents exams and maybe more. Can you imagine that? I cringe just typing it. I made lists of words that would recur from exam to exam. I quizzed them mercilessly. We practiced every single role play imaginable for the speaking part. I drilled them with reading and translation. Every day work and more work. By May or earlier I could predict between 3-5 points what a student would get on that test. After the exam, I broke down data on all the questions to see items that were most missed. It usually came down to a word or expression that I hadn’t taught. But what could I have done as a teacher to rectify that? Teach the entire Petit Robert dictionary? Usually that data didn’t tell me much about my teaching or what I already knew students could do. And what was the point of going back over the test? The students never wanted to see a regents exam again. And who can blame them? What if I didn’t have to teach to that test? Could I have brought more of my own interest to the classroom and to my students? Could we have relaxed a bit? Could we have used the time to do some more fun activities (there were a few!). Yes. And we all would have been better for it.
I was guilty of the same with the NY state science test and completely softened my approach in recent years. However, I never hesitated teaching material that I felt was important even if I knew it would never appear on the state test. I talked to many HS Regents and AP teachers who would never teach a topic if it wasn’t on the test.
High stakes tests zap the joy out of learning. They turn students and teachers into robot like beings. The deformers want to clog public schools with so much bureaucratic baloney and punishment that students will “choose” other options like charter schools.
Mamie
One day each week (usually Friday) in my high school German lit class, we played Jeopardy in German. It was a blast and very educational.
The rest of the week we read and discussed literature by Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Goethe and others. Very serious.
But I think I learned as much from Jeopardy.
And we didn’t have to take a regents exam back then –not in languages, at least.
Roger Hophan was the teacher, by the way — a great teacher and great guy.
I did take regents tests in science and math, which were mostly a joke, at any rate.
I went through the public education system in NY but I doubt I would even recognize it today.
The people setting the agenda like Andrew Cuomo are just corrupt idiots.
It’s very sad when I think about it.
I have to say I am enjoying the clueless Cuomo going through the media wringer for his misdeeds.
Cuomo is like one of those WWE officials who is getting beaten up by a tag team of wrestlers.
Every time Cuomo turns around, someone else hits him with a chair over the head.
He’s sounding more incoherent by the day.
Diane,
In answer to your question. Yes, I did get the answers to the test for each of my students.
Diane
Yes, we were able to score the exams in-house. We just couldn’t score our own students, but the feedback was very helpful. Overall the ILS (Intermediate Level Science 5 – 8) exam has been very fair. The scores across the state were so much better than the Pearson and Questar (CC) ELA tests that NYSED administers it to 8th graders on the first Monday in June. It has often coincided with Ramadan when all Muslim students are fasting. NYSED has yet to respond to my emails regarding this scheduke.
All Regents and AP tests scores for individual students are made available to teachers. Regents exams are scored in-house, but teachers cannot grade their own students tests.
Mamie and Rage,
Your intense test prep sounds like Shakespeare’s education:https://daisychristodoulou.com/2017/03/shakespeare-and-creative-education/
Maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.
Ponderosa,
How can one be sure that Shakespeare did not succeed despite his regimented education instead of because of it?
Einstein also experienced extreme regimentation and testing for a good part of his education, but said himself that it was antithetical to creativity.
Poet,
If you read the whole article, you’ll find what I consider to be a very strong case that the rote learning was integral to his creativity.
As for Einstein, he might be right, but I think there’s also a good possibility that he was blind to the role that knowledge gained by traditional study played in his insights. We are unconscious of a lot of the things our long-term memory does for us. As Bill Gates proves, eminence in one field does not make one an authority in all fields.
Ponderosa
I have no regrets re test prepping 8th graders for a comprehensive
(4 year) state science test because the standards were objective, age appropriate, thorough, and were for the most part covered the essential and important foundational facts and concepts that kids needed for success in high school science. All that is changing here in NYS with the unfortunate adoption of the NGSS which devalues content knowledge over problem solving and critical thinking skills – even in the early grades. Pretty hard to “think like a scientist” without the knowledge base of one. The ghosts of Common Core continue to haunt us.
r
“WATCH — 5 Ways Americans Can Challenge Schools’ Status Quo Amid the Pandemic: Jeb Bush, Arne Duncan, Margaret Spellings, Shavar Jeffries & Bart Epstein on a ‘Historic Opportunity’”
No matter who we elect as President we get these same people.
Just amazing. An absolute lock, for 20 solid years and now going on FOUR US Presidents.
They list Jeb Bush first, as they should, since it’s ALL Jeb Bush.
The former Florida governor has set US public education policy for the last 20 years and he was never elected to do it. Apparently we’re stuck with “market based ed reform” forever. We have an whole generation of public school students who have had Jeb Bush directing public education policy for their entire lives.
The status quo is twenty years of failed testing and punishment. Jeb Bush has made lots of money from this lie.
Jeb Bush and so many others
A superb capsule summary. He’s hoping that it will be widely read. Great job, Diane!
cx: Here’s
Hard to argue with this article. The interesting thing here is that all of us who post here know first hand that the failed system that has punished teachers and undereducated students for the past two decades will never go away until everyone agrees that it is a failed system. I do not want to sound like a trump supporter who believes the election was stolen, but this will not happen until the mainstream media begin to write articles based on the reality of our failed reform. They will not do that.
Fake education news is a real thing.
Really Fake News
The news is really Fake
It’s true, I kid you not
The news is Shake ‘N Bake
And DeeFERs helped a lot
The national media have been indifferent to the Grand School Theft. Some are admirers of it because they won’t let go of Hollywood fantasies about “miracle schools,” which somehow are always charters, until you look behind the curtain and learn about their selection process and their attrition rates.
Hollywood has an oversized influence on everything.
The Stand And Deliver movie certainly did no one in education any favors.
Among other things,it made every TFA recruit believe they were Jaime Escalante, an absurdity of ever there was one.
Yeah, anyone can be Escalante if they have Ganas!
I bet they showed that movie during their 5 week summer training session.
The complete lack of interest in (actual) public schools is really something:
“David Osborne
Join us on Wednesday, March 10 at 1 pm EST for a webinar on Creating Opportunity for All with Early-College High Schools. Learn about the incredible progress low-income students make at GEO Academies in IN & LA and P-Tech in Brooklyn”
Ed reformers- completely clueless that hundreds and hundreds of ordinary public high schools offer college classes in high school.
This is what you get when public policy is set by people who have not entered a public high school since 1993.
They don’t know anything about your schools, yet they insist they’re the only people who can run public education. They all believe their own anti public school political campaigning. Their negative caricature of all public schools isn’t accurate but they don’t care. All public schools must be depicted negatively and all private and charter schools must be depicted positively, pursuant to echo chamber rules.
David Osborne has been shilling for the charter industry for 30 years.
Guess who is to blame for our divided country:
“Editor’s note: This article is signed by six former U.S. education secretaries: Lamar Alexander, Arne Duncan, John King, Rod Paige, Richard Riley and Margaret Spellings.
Following years of polarization and the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the world’s oldest constitutional democracy is in grave danger. We stand at a crossroads, called to protect this democracy and to work toward unity. Current and future generations will look back to examine how we chose to act, and why.
A key part of our task is to reinvigorate teaching and learning of American history and civics in our nation’s schools. A constitutional democracy requires a citizenry that has a desire to participate, and an understanding of how to do so constructively, as well as the knowledge and skills to act for the common good.”
You guessed it- public schools. So none of the powerful political actors who cynically exploited divisions will be held accountable- instead we’re going to fix it with civics instruction written and directed by those same political actors.
Public schools are really convenient for powerful people in the US. They dump all the problems they create on them. Apparently the only people with any agency or power in this country are public school teachers. Show me a national problem and I’ll show you an ed reformer dumping it on public schools.
You got that right. We get every job you can imagine. Police get the same thing. Something happening? make a law against it and ask an underpaid cop to go out and enforce it.
Chiara “Public schools are really convenient for powerful people in the US. They dump all the problems they create on them.”
I think that, though they can’t express it, children who regularly sit in large classes with little one-on-one or guided group discussions, especially K-6+ children, interpret the situation as some version of: “I don’t really count. No one cares about me, whether I am here or not, except in punitive situations, or what I think or say.”
K-6 children are not developmentally prepared to do anything but accept such situations . . . just to live in them adapting as they go. And if no one engages them in reflective conversations at home, they are pretty-much left to take up whatever askance child-language and online and/or TV interpretive frames that are offered to them.
The worse rendition of this situation becomes manifest when we see people who cannot express themselves, except by screaming the same obscenities over and over again. And then there was the guy at the C-PAC meeting who was kneeling and praying at the base of that gold statue of Trump. I suppose he could have gotten a good K-12 education, but I kind of doubt it. CBK
I’ve wondered: where did these conspiracy theory nuts and crazy trump supporters, Capitol invaders, ages 40 – 50, receive their education?
Darrell That’s probably a weedy place to research, but I also think it’s a good question. Where did the people who stormed the Capitol get their education? What happened in their formative years? It’s probably a good time to ask . . . because the worst of them most likely be sitting in a jail cell for quite some time. A potentially reflective time, to be sure. CBK
Darrell: The reason that is not a good question is that the idea of a good one is that a person can get the best education available, and if he does nothing for the rest of his life but listen to the guys down at the cafe, he will be no better than they are.
I have a really cool kid this year who started comparing the russian revolution to the French Revolution. I scored her a copy of Anatomy of a Revolution, Crane Brinton’s monumental work. If she reads it, and I sense she is doing that (not bad for a high school freshmen) then perhaps she will read other important works that will keep her from following some buffoon down a rabbit hole. But time will tell.
If one asked the same question — where did they get their education? — about Ted Cruz, one would get a surprising answer (for some, at least):. princeton and Harvard. Law school.
Princeton forgot to indoctrinate Cruz.
Great article! Thank you!
And how did I not know that “The Progressive” has been publishing this “Public School Shakedown” since September 2013? Thank you to the The Progressive.
If this policy were going to work we would have seen measurable results by now. After 20 years of this failed experiment, it’s time to change course.
Unfortunately, all the hype and disinformation have blinded too many to the truth. It’s similar to a large segment of the population believing that the election was stolen from Trump. Not true. Not true.
Diane, I imagine you’ll have something to say about this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/civics-social-studies-education-plan/2021/03/01/e245e34a-747f-11eb-9537-496158cc5fd9_story.html
What I wonder is, do the leaders of this initiative really know anything about education? Or are their brains just filled with the usual mishmash of respectable-sounding education cliches?
I read with trepidation their denigration of fact-learning and glorification of inquiry. I wonder if any of them have read this powerful debunking of “inquiry learning”:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1
Ponderosa I’m about half-way through your article that you say powerfully debunks inquiry learning. I’ll finish the article; but if I were you, I wouldn’t stop your critique of the present state of cognitional theory or its relationship to formal pedagogical methods, based on this article or, indeed, many of its references.
Besides a mish-mash of references to human development as such, and as is evident in children moving from one grade to another, . . . and an apparent disregard for the overlapping and cumulative aspects of learning . . . just ONE (of many) problems that have emerged so far in the reading (and which may have more import than found at first glance) is the writers’ distinction between long and short term memory . . . by using chess novice-to-mastery as an example.
If that or similar kinds of examples are the only memory and retrieval examples they use, we can already raise the question of the influence of now/well-known positivist limitations.
With those limitations, we are way too far away from the kind of memory that is involved with history, literature, or story-telling and that portrays the potential recalling of the activities and thinking of whole human beings rather than merely remembering a gameboard. We can include in that a person-relevant understanding of civics as concretely recognizable in our own and others’ lives as we go forward in them. Need I say these learning fields are related to, but not the same by any means as other contexts and contents. . . .
Interesting article, but I would say: hardly the last word, at the very least. CBK
Ponderosa An addendum: It’s not that the studies in the article don’t have import or value. Rather it’s that so many who think from the positivist viewpoint (the same that pervades our present testing mania) regard their positivist viewpoint as the ONLY viewpoint; and the natural and physical sciences as the only valid fields.
And so comparative studies are purveyed in an either/or light; and their own viewpoint and data, etc., as having no relation to other viewpoints that, if understood vertically rather than horizontally, MAY afford a fuller view of the relationship between human development, human cognitional structure and its functional dynamism, and so naturally to formal pedagogy.
One formative citation: “Bernard Lonergan’s Insight, A Study of Human Understanding, 2000. CBK
CBK:
The chess study shows how information stored in our long-term memory comes to our aid at lightning speed when thinking, freeing up limited working memory for other tasks. It’s just one proof of their model of how the brain works. I find this model believable and useful. It suggests that the road to better thinking is not working out “mental muscles” but rather adding knowledge to long-term memory. Do you have a different model that you feel is more accurate?
Ponderosa Actually, in my field, the name for that “lightening speed” recall is resonance/dissonance . . . of relating present meaning with memory-meaning. Either one (similar/or/different present meaning) tends to “flag” and bring forward earlier-understood and related meaning from our memory. I mention my mother and, “with lightening speed,” you easily remember yours. this is also the basis of some reading theory, though I haven’t studied the entire field.
But the model presented is “believable and useful,” but is far from comprehensive; and, as I related in my other note, the writers take a mostly oppositional approach, which I think is unwarranted. I also have to struggle to figure out whether they are talking about children or adults, which makes a HUGE difference in choosing appropriate teaching methods.
And yes, there are other more comprehensive as well as verifiable models and methods. I’ve heard some scientists say that science is a little like a blind person feeling the leg of an elephant (Kuhn, and see my Lonergan citation). If we think that what we are feeling is ALL there is, either as method or as our data field, we might get to know a leg, but WOW what we are missing. CBK
Now that Cardona & the Undersecretary are in office, should they not both rescind the “order” from the “confidential” (whatever the rest of his title), Ian RosenBUM? They have the power to do so.
LCT: “Education is wounded. Pressure must be applied.”
Time for the protests in the streets people. Protest in the streets.
But doncha know?
Biden can’t change it now.
It’s already decided.
It’s already water over the bridge.
This just in from Washington Post Daily 202: (03-02-21)
“Massive investment in social studies and civics education proposed to address eroding trust in democratic institutions,’ by Joe Heim: ‘The Educating for American Democracy (EAD) initiative will release a 36-page report and an accompanying 39-page road map Tuesday, laying out extensive guidance for improving and reimagining the teaching of social studies, history and civics and then implementing that over the next decade.'”
Lord help us! Another spate of (unfunded) mandates. I am so glad I am not in the classroom now. It took me a long time to stop mourning the end of my eclectic teaching career, but I am not at all sorry to not have to answer to a bunch of know nothing talking heads.