In 2020, when I published my last book, Slaying Goliath, I opined that education “reform” as defined by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (standardized testing, school closings, school grades, charter schools, evaluating teachers by student scores, merit pay, Common Core, etc.) was a massive failure. The test-and-punish and standardization mandates had turned schooling into a joyless, test-obsessed experience that demoralized teachers and students alike. None of the promises of “reform” came to pass, but privatization via charter inevitably led to vouchers and the defunding of public schools.
The failure of federally-mandated reforms seemed obvious to me but Congress continues to use standardized tests as the ultimate gauge of students, teachers, and schools, despite the destruction that was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. And the reviewer in The New York Times slammed my book for daring to doubt the virtue of the “Ed reform” movement.
Perry Bacon Jr. wrote an article recently for the Washington Post titled “‘Education Reform’ Is Dying. Now We Can Actually Reform Education.” It was amazing to see this article in The Washington Post because for years its editorial writer was a cheerleader for the worst aspects of that destructive movement (Rhee could do no wrong, charters are wonderful, firing teachers and principal is fine). But the education editorial writer retired, hallelujah, and we get to hear from Perry Bacon Jr., in addition to the always wonderful Valerie Strauss (whose excellent “Answer Sheet” blog does not appear in the printed paper but online).
Earlier today, John Thompson earlier today responded on this blog to Bacon’s brilliant article. I meant to post the article by Bacon but forgot. Here it is. What do you think?
Perry Bacon Jr. wrote:
America’s decades-long, bipartisan “education reform” movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline. What should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.
Joe Biden is the first president in decades not aggressively pushing an education agenda that casts American schools and students as struggling and in desperate need of fixing. He has not stated that “education is the civil rights issue of our time,” a sentence said by presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. His administration has backed policies, such as an expanded child tax credit, that view giving people more money, not more education, as the main way to reduce poverty.
There is a push from experts and politicians across partisan lines, including from Biden, to get employers to stop requiring college degrees for so many jobs. There is also a growing defense of college students who study English, literature and other subjects that don’t obviously lead to jobs in the way that, say, engineering does.
An education gospel is being dismantled, one that was 40 years in the making. In 1983, the Reagan administration released a report called “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” It warned that America’s status as an economic powerhouse was under threat because its students were doing so much worse than those from other industrialized nations on standardized tests. That report put education reform on the national agenda and explicitly tied it to economic growth.
But this education fixation wasn’t just about the economy. The two parties couldn’t agree on racial policy. Democrats wanted more funding and explicit policies to help Black people and heavily Black areas to make up for past discrimination, and the Republicans largely opposed them.
What Democrats and Republicans could agree on was making education a priority. So Republican politicians, particularly Bush, pumped more money into schools, as Democrats wanted. And Democrats broadly adopted the view that education was the main way for Black people to make up for the effects of racism, thereby shifting responsibility for Black advancement from the government to individual African Americans, as Republicans wanted.
Eventually education, particularly getting a college degree, became viewed as the primary way for economic advancement for not just Black people but people of all races who weren’t born into the middle class.
The result was a bipartisan education fixation for much of the period between 1990 and 2016. It included the expansion of charter and magnet schools as an alternative to traditional public schools; an obsession with improving student test scores; accountability systems that punished schools and teachers if their kids didn’t score well; increased government spending on college loans and grants as part of a movement to make college essentially universal; and a push for Black students in particular not to just get college degrees but ones in “STEM” fields (science, technology, engineering and math) that would help them get higher-paying jobs.
This agenda was racial, economic and education policy all wrapped into one.
The problem is that this education push didn’t work. While the number of Americans who have graduated from high school and college have skyrocketed in the past three decades, wages and wealth haven’t grown nearly as much. Black people in particular haven’t seen economic gains matching these huge increases in education levels.
Instead of increased education benefiting Americans broadly, this education dogma created a two-tiered system. White-collar, secure, higher-paying jobs with good benefits went disproportionately to college graduates, while those in the worst jobs tended to not have degrees. And to get those degrees, Americans often had to borrow tens of thousands of dollars.
So Americans started revolting. The Black Lives Matter Movement emerged in 2013 and expressed frustration not only with police brutality but also with the continued economic struggles of Black Americans. In the 2016 presidential campaign, both Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Trump appealed to voters who felt abandoned by a bipartisan political establishment that appeared unbothered by the disappearance of manufacturing and other jobs that didn’t require higher education. Sanders called for free college, appealing to young people frustrated that their best path to a good job was accruing tens of thousands of dollars in education debt.
After Trump’s election, both parties embraced the idea that they must try to help Americans, particularly those without college degrees, who feel stuck in today’s economy. So politicians are no longer casting education as the ideal solution to economic or racial inequality. Biden and the Democrats are specifically trying to create jobs that would go to non-college graduates, and they are pushing policies, such as expanding Medicaid, that would disproportionately help Black Americans even if they don’t have much advanced education.
But if the real aim of education policy is no longer really economic and racial policy, what should its goals be? Neither party seems to have a clear answer. Most Democrats defend teachers, a core party constituency, and extol public schools and community colleges, trying to shed the Democrats’ reputation as the party for graduates of Ivy League schools. But they don’t have a broader theory of education policy.
The Republicans are doing something much worse. At the state level, they are largely abandoning public schools and instead aggressively pushing universal voucherlike programs for K-12 education to help as many families as possible to enroll their kids in private and/or religious schools. They are also casting K-12 public school teachers and in particular college professors as propagandists who impose liberal values on students. At the college level, Republicans are trying to force out left-leaning faculty and push campuses to the right.
I certainly prefer the “teachers, professors and public schools are good” perspective (the Democratic one) over “teachers, professors and public schools are bad” (the Republican one). But neither is a real vision for American education.
Here’s one: Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.
They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. Our schools and universities should of course also provide people the core skills for jobs that actually require higher education. They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.
What our education system should not be is 16 years of required drudgery to make sure that you can get a job with stable hours and decent benefits — or a punching bag for politicians who have failed to do their jobs in reducing racial and economic inequality.
“What I think colleges and universities should do right now is to stop selling this myth that education is going to be the great equalizer,” University of Wisconsin at Green Bay professor Jon Shelton said in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed.
Shelton, author of a new book called “The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy,” added, “I think what we need to do is focus on being the institutions that are going to help society solve these bigger problems, to be the place where people can encounter controversial ideas on campus, where we can have far-reaching conversations about what needs to change in our economy, and how we’re going to create the kind of world in which climate change doesn’t destroy our entire way of life.”
Blessedly, education reform is dying. Now we can reform our schools and colleges in a way that actually improves teaching and learning.
If you can open the article, you will see two graphs displayed: one shows that Black educational attainment has risen substantially (the percent who have graduated high school and college) but Black income and wealth has stalled. Those who were counting on education alone to eliminate poverty were wrong.
Note to reader: a version of this post was published at 1:30 p.m. This was WordPress’s error. This is the finished version. Too complicated to explain.
Commoditizing education is – and always has been – a mistake: folly. Likewise the spot of primacy that this fellow puts for “economics” doesn’t suggest an apple falling far enough from that tree for me.
Sure, learn to think critically, read well and deeply. Question, think. Train in math, review science. And recognize when and what analysis is: someone’s hypothesis.
For an insight into a little considered reason for why educational reforms consistently failed in the 20th Century and something that can be done about it please see: Paul Zachos and William E.J. Doane — Knowing the Learner: A new approach to educational information.
Please give us a summary/table of contents. Thanks!
Is a zombie dead?
That’s what deform is.
Most of it is still around, often with a different name.
Changes that are made in the education system tend to persist until new changes displace them, often discontinuously.
Then the new changes become zombies until yet more zombies displace them.
The worst part is that there is never any determination ahead of time whether the proposed changes will even do what is claimed.
It’s the most unscientific way that one could possibly do things.
Anyone who doubts the above need only consider the fact that Common Core was concocted by a billionaire and his handpicked henchmen and foisted upon states sight unseen.
If it were not so tragic for so many millions of students and teachers it would be laughable.
And NONE of the people responsible for the debacle was ever held accountable. And many of them (think tank wankers, for example) have reinvented themselves and emerged essentially unscathed.
This is an excellent “step back” on reform.
And, a perfect storm that is blowing up public education
Academic standards became accountability hammers:
Dr. Perry, Jr.’s take on reform paired with Dr. Ravitch’s books and the “inside baseball” look (and playbook) of what occurred during these same years. (And, neo-liberalism painted as “helping poor kids and the cities.”
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Mass appeal for anti-intellectualism.
Pairing “liberalism” with colleges, college educated, smartest person in the room, expertise, science that infringes with “you can’t tell me what to do” and Fox News (the anti-MSNBC, anti-NYT and WAPO, anti-NPR world).
And, President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and how many other candidates were demeaned because they are just too darn smart (and didn’t look like the good old boys)
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Get A Job, Instant Gratification, Play and Work in that order, and Politics as Sport (I win, you have to lose).
The author says it best: “What our education system should not be is 16 years of required drudgery to make sure that you can get a job with stable hours and decent benefits — or a punching bag for politicians who have failed to do their jobs in reducing racial and economic inequality.”
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(And, “leaders” nostalgic for America circa pre-1954 (and decades of increasing inclusion and opportunities for all, not just some)
On Jan Ressenger’s blog she has a two day account on how wrong so-called reform was. It is worth reading like a haunting walk down memory or nightmare depending your point of view. She references our blog host quite a bit as well.
Elite private schools enculturate the children of the privileged to accept and become leaders in an inequitable society in which the few will benefit. Public schools should prepare the children of the rest of us to become leaders in the struggle for an equitable society.
Author Camins Yes. But did I miss something in the post?
In today’s “culture” of political ignorance, only a brief hint about education for political awareness (making good citizens) . . . which in a democracy (“if we can keep it”) is essential to our survival as one from generation to generation. . . this, coupled with plenty of calls for freedom, but none for responsibility, makes for the FOX/MAGA know-nothing, anti-intellectual, morally depraved, pro-rich, shoot themselves in the foot, oligarch “culture” we have today.
Any “reform” of education after the smoke clears should take to heart the idea that every democracy needs to undergo a political revolution with each generation which essentially means a heartfelt transfer of power from external to internal self-mastery.
With political history, that idea should be a built-in part of high school education for everyone in the country if not on the planet (if we can keep it . . . the planet, that is), to include a clear understanding of WHY Jefferson read history and wrote about the essential distinction between church and state, so that everyone has a chance to understand what it means to live well in a democratic political environment, and to be responsible for it.
By definition, Trump and MAGA are inadvertently our best teachers. If we don’t do the above, we haven’t learned anything. CBK
Addendum I mean by “do the above” . . . make K-12, and especially high schools, into cultural and political hubs of activity fueled by student participation. (Some public schools still do this, and teachers know exactly what it means.)
But what the movement tried to steal from students and teachers was their inborn motivation. CBK
I think many public school students in elite suburbs are also enculturated to become leaders in an inequitable society.
Today’s public school students have effectively been turned by forty years of bipartisan support for corporate attempts to monetize the young people into sharecroppers. Sharecroppers! They pay rent with standardized test scores and wind up in debt to the landlord.
Public school students today are tenants of their educations, not owners.
True education reform would dissolve the restraining bonds of standardization and free teachers to grant students ownership of and agency over their learning, so that they could follow their interests and make education pay for them instead of the other way ’round.
My K-12 experience took me from ’79-80 to ’91-’92. In all that time, the educational ideology shoved down our throats was that, indeed, a college degree–especially in business–was the surest pathway to a guaranteed life of financial and economic success and security, all other priorities will be a pathway to abject poverty and failure and should be rescinded. Now, as a teacher, and someone who was in the workforce for 9 years prior to becoming a teacher and who saw the effects of this ideology upfront? An ideology peddled to us by everything and everyone–movies (Risky Business, Wall Street, etc.), friends, parents, some teachers, our superintendent–that business is all that matters, that greed is good. Talk about the infectiousness of the 80s zeitgeist revealed to be the stinkiest pile of BS ever peddled to students, a gigantic snake oil sales pitch. As a an English teacher, I still this ideology at work and I nip it in the bud whenever I hear it.
**still *see this ideology at work and I….
Yossarian Your note made me remember the multiple meanings of “price” and the “money is everything” idea that so saturates our culture.
As much as I love Antiques Roadshow, there is always this telling moment when the WOW! price is revealed, and then the pregnant moment that goes “plunk” when the person says, well it’s a part of our family, or some such similar reference revealing a completely different idea of value. CBK
True education reform could begin in earnest if Congress reauthorized the Every Student Succeeds Act with a mulligan, a do-over, one, and only one, one-sentence amendment. All other amendments and additions to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act not enacted prior to 1980 or after the signing of this bill into law are hereby annulled. Congress should consider writing annulled in all caps.
I’m with you!….. But I don’t think that will ever happen. The Deform movement is big business and imagine how many college educated people will be out of work with the stroke of a pen? College is big busine$$, financed on the backs of working class families and students taking out loans from the Big Banks. It’s all a house of cards that can come down with a puff of wind, but not a single person is willing to let the S— hit the fan to blow it over.
I think that this writer is moving the conversation to a different level considering his non partisan view.I think is about time that the perspective of competition for themselves is changed to a bigger view that includes more than the interests of the individual learner. Give each town a different curriculum that includes benefits for the people in the community .
I will look for more writings from this writer for sure.
Paula,
Americans are so mobile that it’s hard to see the value of different curricula for each town. What makes more sense to is to require that all teachers are knowledgeable in whatever they teach and allow them autonomy in their classroom, within the context of broad curricular guidelines.
Amen to this
Give them that autonomy and they will customize, incorporating local elements where appropriate. How do I know this? Because before we started micromanaging teachers top down, that’s what happened. The Biology teacher in New Hampshire talked about the Pink Lady’s Slippers and the beavers and the red-spotted newt!
When I lived in New Hampshire, I had these on my lawn. And there was a beaver pond a short hike away from my front door.
What Teachers Need Most
Give them astronomy
Give them the moon
Frontal lobotomy
Keeps them in tune
Amen to that!
I would like to come down on Paula’s side, with reservations. While there are universal ideas all students should learn, some local history and nature should be a part of the curriculum. For example:
Tennessee is now experiencing a massive population expansion. Places where my wife and I used to find rare plants are rapidly going to subdivision heaven. Tennessee, you see, has limestone glades which support 26 endemic species. They are not found anywhere else. Our education should teach people to appreciate these rare gems, but people in Minnesota should know about the Showy Ladies’ Slipper or some other local thing.
Similar local history is important.
Of course it’s good to teach local and state history and culture. But that’s not what I understood her to say.
Reading it again, I think you are correct. I focused on the local part. Hence the reservations.
” Places where my wife and I used to find rare plants are rapidly going to subdivision heaven.”
Didn’t you mean hell?
When Annie Murphy Paul reviewed (well, to be honest, did a heedless and thoughtless hatchet job on) Diane’s Slaying Goliath in the New York Times, she claimed that Ravitch had, in her book, declared the Ed Reform movement “dead.” Of course, Diane did no such thing. Here’s what Diane in fact did. I quote from my review of Ms. Murphy’s review:
[L]ike Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Silent Spring—Slaying Goliath is the kind of book that makes things happen. It is recent history. It is muckraking. But it is also a manual for resistance against the emergence of a New Feudal Order of oligarchical command, coercion, centralization, and control, showing how ordinary people can and have worked together to preserve democratic institutions like our public schools—a fight begun but not yet won. Other democratic institutions are under siege as well, of course, unions, Congressional oversight, family farming, small business, and every federal department and agency in the Trump misadministration formerly devoted to the public good, for example, so this book is an important guide for those who wish to preserve them. Like many of those other great muckrakers whose august company Ravitch so clearly joins, she presents, at the end of her book a vision of a better world in which the evils she has detailed [high-stakes standardized testing, the Common Core, VAM, school grading, and so on] are gone and argues that Disruption carries within it the seeds of its own failure because it is not a true grassroots movement and because it is an affront to human nature, human beings being driven in cognitive tasks not by extrinsic rewards like test scores but by intrinsic ones like learning something worth the effort. Nowhere does Ravitch claim that the war against Disruption has been won. Ms. Paul didn’t get that because she simply didn’t read the book closely or carefully, though Ravitch’s message, in closing, is obvious enough.
The crux of what Perry Bacon, Jr. writes is here:
“Our education system should be about learning…Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers…They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens…”
So, what do “good citizens” look like? What beliefs do they hold, and how do they behave?
As Aristotle described it,
“each government has a peculiar character…the character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy, and always the better the character, the better the government.”
So what is the “character” of democracy?
As recounted by Thucydides in ‘History of the Peloponnesian War,’ Pericles described this “character” in his funeral oration: popular sovereignty, equality, justice, freedoms, promoting the general welfare. These democratic values are embedded in the U.S. Constitution.
Aristotle and Pericles knew well that government can be “of the people,” or, it can be controlled by plutocrats.
Will and Ariel Durant noted in 1968 that there are inherent tensions “between wealth laudation, which favors concentration, and democracy, which promotes distribution.”
And Kevin Phillips pointed out in ‘Wealth and Democracy,’
“government…is one of the most powerful forces shaping the creation and distribution of wealth within the United States.”
To anyone who has studied history, that should not be a surprise.
So, how should government be used? The Constitution and early interpretations of it offer valuable insights.
Article I, Section 8 of that document gives the legislative branch broad, specific powers (among them taxing, borrowing money, regulating commerce, coining money and regulating its value, etc.). Indeed, Article I, Clause 1 gives Congress the power to tax for “the common defence and general Welfare of the United States.” Clause 18 of Section 8 stipulates that Congress had the power “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.”
Two Supreme Court decisions early in the republic’s history –– both unanimous –– supported and cemented a broad – liberal – interpretation of the implied powers of Congress.
For example in 1819 (McCullough v. Maryland) the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the U.S. government was “a Government of the people. In form and in substance, it emanates from them. Its powers are granted by them, and are to be exercised directly on them, and for their benefit.” Thus one of the purposes of government is to promote the general welfare.
Chief Justice Marshall wrote this about the necessary and proper clause: “the clause is placed among the powers of Congress, not among the limitations on those powers.” And he added this: “Its terms purport to enlarge, not to diminish, the powers vested in the Government. It purports to be an additional power, not a restriction.”
In Gibbons v Ogden (1824) Chief Justice Marshall wrote this about the Congressional commerce power: “This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution.”
Thus, it’s clear that a democratic society is predicated and contingent on a citizenry that understands and is committed to democratic values. In any democratic society, the people ARE the government. As Aristotle put it,
all citizens are “a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.” That is the essence of the social contract.
Public education is an integral piece of the social contract. And that’s exactly why public schooling holds a unique place in democracies, and why it’s so important. University of Chicago social scientist Earl Johnson called democratic citizenship “the supreme end of education in a democracy.” Horace Mann viewed public education as “the balance-wheel of the social machinery” in a democratic society. Gordon Hullfish and Philip Smith considered the development of critical intelligence –– “reflective reconstruction of knowledge, insights and values” –– essential to the maintenance of a democratic republic.
The Framers envisioned a democratic society “ in which the common good was the chief end of government.” They agreed with John Locke’s view that the main purpose of government –– the main reason people create government –– is to protect their persons through –– as historian R. Freeman Butts put it –– a social contract that placed “the public good above private desires.” The goal was “a commonwealth, a democratic corporate society in which the common good was the chief end of government.”
THIS is why public schools exist, and this is essence of democratic citizenship.
Years ago my friend, Caren Black, and I created this book. I did the illustrations. Check it out. https://www.heinemann.com/products/e00281.aspx
His idea of what education “should be” is eerily similar to what it had already evolved to, before the reformers started to throw their $$$ around.
It’s difficult to find a more ignorant Attorney General than the one Indiana is stuck with. He believes we have many teachers in Indiana who work to teach scientifically incorrect anti-American propaganda and expose students to sexual and perverted materials. How many parents & citizens in Indiana read his email garbage and believe teachers need to be controlled? Blessed be Saint Attorney General Rokita. [BARF!]
As students return to classrooms, Attorney General Todd Rokita [R-IN] promotes Parents’ Bill of Rights 4.0
Launched in 2021, Parents’ Bill of Rights empowers parents to direct children’s education and upbringing by ensuring they know legal rights and responsibilities
Attorney General Todd Rokita this week rolled out the fourth update to his office’s Parents’ Bill of Rights — a roadmap for moms and dads seeking to maximize their involvement in school governance, curriculum, medical decisions for their children and choosing where their kids attend school.
The latest version includes a new section emphasizing Hoosiers’ precious freedom to practice their religious beliefs, including within the walls of public schools.
“The Parents’ Bill of Rights is the result of direct conversations with parents,” Attorney General Rokita said. “Across Indiana, Hoosier moms and dads tell us that their children’s schools spend more time indoctrinating kids with historically and scientifically incorrect anti-American propaganda and exposing them to sexual and perverted materials than teaching math, science, reading and writing. With our test scores falling behind the rest of the world, schools cannot afford one second of distraction from these subjects.”
The best educators fully respect the value of involved parents in the process of maintaining high-quality schools, Attorney General Rokita noted.
“The single most effective way to ensure school accountability is for parents to fulfill their rightful roles in directing their children’s education and upbringing,” Attorney General Rokita said. “The Parents’ Bill of Rights empowers them to do just that by ensuring they know their legal rights and responsibilities in Indiana.”
Attorney General Rokita and his team released the first volume of his Parents’ Bill of Rights in June 2021. That installment focused on school governance, curriculum adoption, standards adoption and civil rights complaints.
The second volume, released in November 2021, detailed parents’ rights regarding medical decisions for their children, such as access to student health records, vaccination requirements, and educational accommodations.
The third volume, released in July 2022, focused on school choice — the liberty of parents to choose where their children attend school.
Attorney General Rokita’s team has updated all three of those existing volumes with fresh information arising from such developments as new legislation or to answer additional questions submitted by Hoosiers from across Indiana — along with adding the new section on religious liberty.
“In this one nation under God, America’s founders knew the fundamental importance of faith,” Attorney General Rokita said. “Just as they sought to protect liberty in their generation, our team works to prevent government from infringing on Hoosiers’ rights in our own time.”
The latest installment features a helpful Q-and-A section, including such questions as:
Can students read or distribute religious material at school? (Yes, provided that the material is distributed during non-instructional time.)
Can students leave campus during the school day to participate in religious instructional activities? (Yes. Under Indiana law, a parent may request that a student be released from his or her public school for up to two hours each week to attend outside religious instruction.)
Can religious clubs meet on school grounds? (Yes. A school must treat every recognized non-curriculum-related student organization equally.)
The entire Parents’ Bill of Rights is available online at in.gov/attorneygeneral. Changes to the law will be reflected in future digital publications.
Watch Attorney General Rokita’s live press event discussing updates on his office’s work to protect Hoosier children and defend parents’ rights here.