Arthur Camins, scientist and technologist, warns that public policy in both education and healthcare is deeply flawed and cannot be fixed with patches. No matter how many potholes are fixed, the underlying problems go untouched and unchanged.
Our flawed policy is the result of deeply ingrained flawed thinking.
The United States, he writes, is the victim of a combination of forty years of skepticism of government solutions and acceptance of “let’s be realistic about what we can accomplish” thinking.
For example, for decades scattershot treatments of outcomes have characterized bi-partisan education improvement efforts with little to nothing to show for it except undermined public education and stress. The driving causes of inequitable outcomes, systemic inequity, its enabler, racism, and resultant precarious lives remain rampant and unaddressed.
Instead, the dominant education interventions have been to push or blame individuals. These include rewards and punishments for educators or students based on standardized test scores; rigid discipline regimes; and, more recently, a focus on developing grit to work through, put up with, or overcome rather than eliminate challenging social and economic conditions.
Equally, if not more, insidious is you-can’t-save-everyone solutions, such as escape hatches for some kids through charter schools and vouchers, most of which are no better than local public schools. More broadly, the lack of universal health care and inequitable funding of schools through local real estate yield the same help-a-few result.
Open the link and read the rest.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“An Ohio-focused, in-depth piece in the Washington Post this week described a troubling web of relationships between sponsors, charter operators, and charter-affiliated for-profit real estate companies. It’s all very disheartening. Here’s hoping there’s more to the story than presented in the Post.”
Ed reformers- who employ thousands of people in policy and research and promoting and marketing charters – are “hoping” Ohio charters are not as bad as far as conflicts on interest and sleazy deals as the newspaper report says they are.
Couldn’t one of the thousands of full time, paid ed reformers do a real analysis of Ohio charters? Or is that impossible? They’re pushing to convert all of “public education” to charter or private school vouchers. Would it perhaps be prudent to look at the privatized schools they already run and do an honest evaluation? Or will we just get another round of lockstep cheerleading no matter the “results” in Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania?
Ohio has had charters for twenty years. When are ed reformers planning on regulating them? They designed these “charter governance” systems. If they don’t work, whose fault is that?
“Patching never Works.” Neither does chronic disruption. How has treating education as a marketplace worked? Nobody seeks to evaluate this radical turn in education policy. The magic market is supposed to solve all our problems, but the reality is it hasn’t, and it won’t. In fact, it has undermined public education, caused a teacher shortage along with Covid, wasted tons of tax dollars on failing amateurs that dabble in fraud, embezzling and corruption, and it has exacerbated inequality and segregation.
This country once cared about its young people, and it fought for democracy. Young people require investment in order to prepare for the future, Both quality education and access to heath care will provide young people with the support they need to grow and development into responsible citizens. This country needs to stop ignoring issues and start trying to solve problems. Patches do not work in education and healthcare, and there is no patch big enough to solve our climate crisis. We need serious leaders that can tackle serious issues.
cx: develop
Disruption is a way to steal money and not get caught.
It’s the equivalent of creating a distraction in order to rob a bank.
By disrupting things first, one can claim that “we just need to give it some time to work”.
Meanwhile, one can be making ones escape with the money bags.
“Flawed policy is the result of” Koch and Gates spending.
Why does Josh Edelman, the Gates Foundation’s guy, have a position at the U.S. Dept of Ed? Shouldn’t the public suspect Gates is a self-appointed (and, self-serving) ed policy autocrat aligned with Wall Street and Silicon Valley? Gates lives in the state with the most regressive tax policy in the nation. The founder of the Gates-funded
Pahara Institute said the goal of charters was, “brands on a large scale.” Gates funded a campaign to defeat the re-election of Washington state judges who had rendered verdicts favorable to public schools.
The Koch machine posted an article at Daily Beast this week. We should be suspicious. The attempt in this case was to spin Christopher Rufo’s words and actions (anti-CRT), The Koch writer opined, “The most prominent figure in this crusade is Manhattan Institute (Koch) Fellow Christopher Rufo, who has freely admitted to a strategy of tying various ‘cultural insanities’ to the ‘CRT brand’ “. The Koch spin is that anti -CRT, “has been crude, filled with hyperbole.” Others describe it as dangerous lies that provoke Americans to turn against each other.
Our real battle is not between CRT proponents and anti-CRT supporters. This is a contrived smokescreen to keep the left and right busy fighting with each other. The big struggle is really the ultra-wealthy and everybody else. If people making less than $200,000 dollars per year worked together, they could make some real change in this country that could break the wealthy stranglehold on governance.
Agree.
You are correct, retired teacher.
Btw, reading the 1619 Project. Wow!
Linda, yes. Retired teacher, yes, nailed it.
Our country is falling apart, the environment is becoming unlivable, but a handful of billionaires is making a gang of money, so whatever’s clever, Trevor, it’s all good.
I seethed the first time I became aware of “A Nation at Risk”in 1983. Then I became hopeful as I got involved with the Teaching Learning Center in Charlotte in the 1980s. We focused on the working conditions report out of “A Nation at Risk” and carried out a seminar that focused on site based decision making. We attempted to make lemonade. I presented our findings from the seminar at the Teaching Learning Center national work party and naively began to think we might make meaningful progress with teacher input. Later in Charlotte our organization worked with the “Workforce 2000” initiative in 1990 where businesses of all sizes met with educators to talk about needs for the 21st century. Low and behold, we heard from corporate and small business people that what they needed was critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity from future employees. No one listened. Soon the Clinton administration. all under the guise of “bi-partisanship”, started the Standards Movement that ushered in high stakes testing, privatization, and charter disruption. In the 1974 book “The One Best System”, David Tyach writes of the ongoing attempt by the public education establishment to problem solve with no input from those in the schools. School boards, state assemblies, and the Federal government were making the same mistakes we see today because too many so called leaders lacked the knowledge needed to understand the culture of schooling. This has been the practice of states and school districts almost since the inception of American public schools. In what I have read about Finland and Singapore, their success is due in good measure to their successful attempts to build their public schools from the bottom up with well trained, well prepared, and well paid teachers who are given the autonomy to make meaningful decisions on pedagogy and curriculum at the school house. If we have any chance of overcoming the current assault on public education in the US, policy makers have got to wake up and invest in a teaching force that makes the most significant decisions about student learning through effective colleges of education and internships that take the time to prepare young teachers for the work beyond 6 weeks of student teaching. Then we need to understand that paying teachers a professional wage is critical to attract the best candidates in a United States where income matters. Libertarians and most Republicans seem to believe that all we need to do is roll out the ball of capitalism and everything else will take of itself. What they fail to acknowledge is that, in the metaphor of team sports, is the best teams are those with players who are not only the best prepared, but allowed to creatively use their talents to outperform the competition. In other words, if we are going to build a workforce that can succeed in a 21st century economy, then we need to invest in the preparation of the participants and allow those teachers who work with students to use their expertise to serve them. The critical flaw in contemporary Republican economic thinking is that everything that is important flows from the top. This has been the problem with education policy as well. What neither seem to acknowledge is that a poor foundation will eventually result in the collapse of both our economy and public education.
Are you of a Spanish speaking background, Paul?
No. Why do you ask?
Because the length of your paragraph reminds me of the length of paragraphs in the Spanish speaking world.
The Black alumni association of the Gates Foundation may find history is far from kind to them.
No matter how the underlying problems
go untouched and unchanged, doing
the same thing over and over again,
and expecting a different result
continues.
No matter how many times test
scores are sliced and diced,
tests are given.
No matter how many books are read
or written, the underlying problems
go untouched and unchanged.
No matter how many articles are
read or written, the underlying
problems go untouched and unchanged.
No matter how many “brilliant”
arguments are made, the underlying
problems go untouched and unchanged.
No matter how many times
“mind reading” is played,the
underlying problems go
untouched and unchanged.
No matter how the “technology”
of precognition is used,
the underlying problems go untouched
and unchanged.
Using the same “strategy” over and
over again, and expecting a different
result, DOESN’T work, ffs…
Pessimist! 😉
When are they going to realize that testing students is not helping students? Destroying students’ already underfunded public schools or privatizing them is no solution either.
Years ago, the justification for standardized testing was to “determine where students need help.” Standardized tests are not very helpful in this capacity as they merely rate and rank. Now tests are used to shutter schools in poor neighborhoods so developers can gentrify areas and make enormous profits. If these tests are so useful, why then do many charter schools not need them? The main goal is not about improving education. The main goal for the wealthy and their “politicians for hire” is to move students and funding to private contractors.
I heard on the radio on the way home this afternoon that a district in my area, didn’t catch the name, is turning elementary schools into nine hours a day to combat learning loss from the pandemic. Little children working nine hour days plus homework. That’s child abuse. I haven’t heard any of the corporatists talk about eliminating excessive standardized testing to combat the resulting lost instruction time. Hypocrisy at its finest.
Hello Diane and everyone,
I keep reading articles about the teacher shortage and the difficulty in recruiting people to the profession. A few ideas that always run through my mind:
1. Allow foreign language teachers to teach ESL/ENL. As a foreign language teacher of 30 years, I definitely think I could handle this job and it might be an exciting new challenge.
2. In NYS, waive the $35,000 earning limit for retired teachers. Allow retired teachers to come back to work part-time if they wish. In fact, ENCOURAGE part-time work! Moreover, use retired teachers as mentors for new teachers in the district thus freeing up full-time teachers from that duty. A lot of retired teachers probably would love to work with new teachers while not having the stress of a full-time workload. I’ve often thought about doing a job like this but there are no avenues in the education system as it currently stands. A whole new career field could be created that actually uses knowledge teachers have acquired over a lifetime in the classroom! Imagine that!
3. Allow retired teachers to work in areas outside their certification but in areas in which the have specific knowledge. For example, some teachers might be able to work in the library or as an in-house tutor.
4. Allow teacher with a degree in a field but NOT certified in that field to work in that field. For example, a teacher may have a degree in Library Science but is not certified by the state.
5. If you want people to become teachers, you have to understand WHY they want to become teachers and then tailor a work environment to those desires. Streamline the certification process which is now confusing, convoluted and expensive.
6. Drop teacher class load to 4 classes instead of the usual 5 or 6. Give more prep time. Give more time for collaboration that is not mandated or micromanaged. Have fewer meetings. Most of them are useless wastes of time anyway. I’d love to come up with new ideas for the classroom and I have a lot already but no time to plan or implement them. So it all goes to waste.
7. Drop the number of professional development hours teacher have to do. They DO have lives outside school you know. And, don’t worry, the kids will be fine.
8. Throw the Danielson rubric in the circular file and really start TALKING to teachers about what they feel they need to be successful (whatever that means to them) in teaching.
Those are just a few ideas.
Politicians of both parties could stop treating teachers like dirt.
That might help too.
But I suspect that’s too much to ask.
Oh, well…that’s a given!