Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, published an article in the New York Times yesterday in which he lamented the “learning loss” caused by the pandemic and called for a new national effort, like No Child Left Behind, to instill rigor and accountability, which he says will raise test scores. Time to bring back tough love, he wrote.
I have a hard time criticizing Mike Petrilli because I like him. When I was on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute, I got to know Mike, and he’s a genuinely good guy. But when I left the board of the TBF Institute in 2009, it was because I no longer shared its beliefs and values. I concluded as early as 2007 that No Child Left Behind was a failure. I wrote an article in the conservative journal EdNext in 2008 about NCLB, saying “End It,” paired with an article by the late John Chubb saying, “Mend It.”TBF sponsored charter schools in Ohio—a move I opposed because think tanks should be evaluating policy, not implementing it; also, during the time I was on the board, the charters sponsored by TBF failed.
By the time I left, I had concluded that the NCLB emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing was a disaster. It caused narrowing the curriculum, gaming the system, cheating, excessive test prep, and squeezed the joy of teaching and learning out of classrooms.
Furthermore, the very idea that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education were stigmatizing schools as failures and closing them was outrageous. I worked in the US ED. There are many very fine career civil servants there, but very few educators. In Congress, the number of experienced educators is tiny. Schools can’t be reformed or fixed by the President, Congress, and the Department of Education.
NCLB and Race to the Top were cut from the same cloth: Contempt for professional educators, indifference to the well-established fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income, and a deep but misguided belief that punishing educators and closing schools were cures for low test scores. Both the law (NCLB) and the program (RTTT) were based on the assumption that rewards and punishments directed at teachers and principals would bring about an educational renaissance. They were wrong. On the day that the Obama administration left office, the U.S. Department of Education quietly released a study acknowledging that Race to the Top, having spent billions on “test-and-punish” strategies, had no significant impact on test scores.
And as icing on the cake, Mike Petrilli wrote an article in 2017 about the latest disappointing NAEP scores, lamenting “a lost decade.” That “lost decade” was 2007-2017, which included a large chunk of NCLB and RTTT. In addition, the Common Core standards, released in 2010, were a huge flop. TBF was paid millions by the Gates Foundation both to evaluate them and to promote them. The NAEP scores remained flat after their introduction. Please, no more Common Core.
I wrote two books about the failure of NCLB and RTTT: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010) and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
Mercedes Schneider and I both wrote posts commending Mike Petrilli in 2019 when he wrote about the “dramatic achievement gains” of the 1990s and early 2000s before NCLB kicked in. He attributed those gains to improving economic conditions for families and declining child poverty rates. I wanted to give him a big kiss for recognizing that students do better in school when they are healthy and well-nourished.
So, what did No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top produce? A series of disasters, such as the Tennessee Achievement School District and Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority, both gone. A landscape of corporate charter chains, for-profit charters, for-profit online charters, and now vouchers, in which red states commit to pay the tuition of students in religious schools and fly-by-night private schools. A national teacher shortage; a sharp decline in people entering the teaching profession.
Please, no more tough love. No more punishment for students, teachers, principals, and schools. Let bad ideas die.
Yes, NCLB and RTTP failed to mediate the class- and race-related “achievement gap,” its stated goal But, in other ways it was a huge success in its real goal: Pave the way for privatization of core democratic common good: quality public education for everyone. Now, we are seeing it play out in states across the nation with support from the latest ruse, anti-woke rhetoric.
That failed thing? Let’s do a lot more of it.
Yeah, Mike P. That makes loads of sense.
Seriously. What a fool.
He’s a tool.
He has profited handsomely from all this stuff.
Thank you for the second to the last sentence in the second to the last paragraph.
It’s a huge mistake to ignore that privatization, from the perspective of political activists on the right, is primarily about right wing religious schools and secondarily, about profit taking. Republicans view the White male hierarchy as flourishing at the time students in the central states attended Catholic schools. The Catholic Church remains a bastion of discrimination against women.
The sought-after domination by Whites and men can be intuited in the demographic make-up of boards like Claremont Institute, an organization made infamous by right wing Catholic, John Eastman.
It’s sad and dangerous times for the US when Black people and women advance right wing religion. The sects are inextricably linked to despots who work to rob them of their rights.
I added comment to the post about 50CAN that relates.
About misinterpretation of NAEP Scores by people who present themselves as experts on education
Let’s assume just for giggles that these tests actually measure, accurately, what they purport to measure—reading and math ability. That’s a BIG assumption, but let’s make it.
Possible scores on a NAEP test range from 0 to 500. These are 500-point tests. Average NAEP scores for Grade 9 students in 2022 declined 5 points in reading and 7 points in mathematics compared to 2020. So, we’re talking declines of 1 percent and 1.4 percent.
1 and 1.4 percent. Barely ticks on the dials. TINY blips. Declines SO SMALL that they might be well within the margin of error of the testing.
So, the people like Petrilli expostulating about the crisis of this dramatic learning loss are making MUCH ADO ABOUT ALMOST NOTHING.
To put this into perspective, suppose that you had a grading scale like this for a classroom test:
A+ (97–100), A (93–96), A- (90–92), B+ (87–89), B (83–86), B- (80–82), C+ (77–79), C (73–76), C- (70–72), D+ (67–69), D (65–66), D- (below 65)
A decline of 1 percent would not even, typically, move you down a portion of a letter grade. Oh, gosh, I dropped from a 99 to a 98 (from an A+ to a slightly lower A+), from an 88 to an 87 (from a B+ to a slightly lower B+). Or, worst case, from an 87 to an 86 (from a B+ to a B).
Oh, the horror!!! Where are the smelling salts? The sky is falling! This is the end!!!! Quick, call Bill Gates! He has the solution to every problem, even ones this dire!!! Maybe ChatGPT can solve this biggie? Or Clippy the Paperclip! It’s surely going to take a long time to recover! The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Aie yie yie. Ridiculous.
Yet journalists and pundits and presidents of think tanks where thinking tanks keep on talking about this as though this “decline” (oh, the horror!) were significant.
It’s not.
Obviously bogus claims are made in service of the unstated goal: undermine confidence in public education. These folks have no integrity.
Quick, call Arne Duncan and Homer Simpson!
@Bob — Kids told me some teachers said they had an “F+”. When I taught Credit Recovery night classes, I always asked the kids, “How are you doing? What do YOU think is holding you back?” Many would say, “The teacher said I am improving as I have an F+.” Wow, you mean you are failing a little better than the next person? And the kid who never attends school? C’mon now.
lol
From the trenches…Yes, our schools were in “program improvement.” And once you are in, it’s hard to dig out. Only certain disciplines are important and like in Family Feud every meeting is like “…survey says…” Okay, more testing! What’s really scary (and sorry for my ignorance) is the PragerU videos running in some K-12 schools totally indoctrinating children into, well, as Christopher Columbus said “Slavery was everywhere. I mean it was better to be a slave than dead.” Since both the NCLB and RTTT, in my experience, more kids were left behind. How do I know? I was the guy at night and weekends working with these kids and adults who “fell behind.”
But, ofc, Columbus almost entirely wiped out the native Taino, enslaving and working to death some of them and giving others (girls) to his soldiers as sexual slaves. There’s a PragerU hero for you. PragerU, which is as much a university as Trump University was.
He and his minions didn’t find gold, so they established plantations. They worked native people to death. In short order, they killed some 200,000. PragerU has a thing for genocidal murderers and sexual predators, I guess.
Oh and wasn’t there some “cutting off of the hands”, stealing their gold, and giving the native people disease as well? I mean better than being dead. Glad we call it, “Indigenous Peoples Day” around here. And don’t get me started on the California Missions and Residential schools. Yes sir, we will “beat the native out of them.” But, PragerU might skip over that part.
Yeah, they just might
@Bob “the Legend” — As I do, I did some research on this PragerU and stumbled upon this guy, “The Cynical Historian.” I just finished as he analyzed “The Short History of Slavery.” I immediately thought, “Bob would love this.” Pay attention to PragerU’s sources. Hope you are doing well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeAw4xfnB2g
You like Mike Petrilli?…..The guy is a buffoon and just another grifter trying to keep his big paycheck so that he can live in his ritzy zip code with its faux public school system. His kids get to go to public schools with zero poverty issues, zero FARM kids and lots of parental $$$ to pump into the PTA for extra curricular activities, science experiments, field trips etc. Of course he loves his public schools, but he doesn’t get to see what his ideas (and other Deformers) do for the “other” children in the public schools. Even other parents in his walled off, wealthy district are leery of him and his ideas.
Possibly, Petrilli’s swan song will be a disavowal like Josh Cowen’s
Lisa,
I knew Mike as a young guy just starting out. He was always very thoughtful to me. At the time, we were on the same page. Now I am diametrically opposed to everything TBF is doing. They are in charge of education policy for Ohio—testing, charters, vouchers. TBF is wrecking the public schools of Ohio. Much as I disagree with TBF, like 100%, I have a residual feeling of friendship for Mike and Checker. It may be a weakness in me.
“Much as I disagree with TBF, like 100%, I have a residual feeling of friendship for Mike and Checker. It may be a weakness in me.”
This is not weakness! It is the only way forward. Stop the character assassination and name-calling and engage in legitimate dialog and debate.
Harriett Janetos….I live in MD and not far from Bethesda….the walled off enclave of the MD/DC wealthy. Yes, his kids go to public schools, but not like the public schools for the rest of the state. It’s like he never sees outside of his own zip code when he is running his mouth about policies affecting other people’s children. I’m entitled to call him a buffoon and a grifter (and I’m not lying when I say it) as he has helped to shape policy (bad policy….deforms) for my children and their public schools here in the state. I hate to hear him yammer on with his nonsense. He has earned his “reputation” as he does not feel remorse for policies that harm children. He is NOT a decent human being IMHO.
Lisa, I understand. He and TBF have done a lot of damage to public schools across the country.
Ms Ravitch….I will take a Chevy Chaser over a Bethesdite any day of the week. And I know you’ll understand what I mean since you’ve run in those circles!
Dr Ravitch,
Not a weakness but humane-ness, which you have in ample supply.
Civil gist?
Or civil buzz?
Civil is
As civil does
I’ve heard it said that a “good guy” is someone who shares his umbrella on a rainy day. That’s a very low bar for “goodness.” When I read at a Catholic Conference site, the right wing attempt to promote school choice, which dogmatically cites what appears to be a Fordham-written foreword to a research paper Fordham funded, the claim of good people lands with a thud.
Good people would stop misleading others. Katherine Stewart has it right in her final sentence of her recent article.
Test and punish had its day, and it is proven failure. It is time to move on with better ideas. It makes no sense to repeat the mistakes of the past. As I have said before, the ’90s were a golden age of progress in education. When draconian NCLB appeared, all of gains were lost, and it has been a slippery slope of bad, commodified ideas ever since. The ’90s were a time when educators were valued and had a voice. Students were engaged in learning with trained humans guiding the instruction. Students read, wrote and reasoned without an emphasis on bubble test scores.
We need to learn from our mistakes, not repeat them. Where is the evidence that privatization has made a tremendous improvement in education? Nobody other than perhaps a few independent organizations has even bothered to look at the negative impact it has had on our democratic public schools. The same is true for all the creeping cyber instruction. There is zero evidence that is has value, but it continues to be foisted on public schools because it is the political will of the wealthy. Nothing will change unless we return autonomy to the teachers that actually trained to do this important work and get the edumeddlers, profiteers and paid for pundits out of the way.
“I have a hard time criticizing Mike Petrilli because I like him. When I was on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute, I got to know Mike, and he’s a genuinely good guy.”
And herein lies the problem. You consistently conflate “nice” or “personable” for “good”. Dubya Bush, by all accounts, is a very personable, easy to get along with kind of guy, but he’s directly responsible for the deaths of at least a million Iraqis and Afghans and the torture of thousands more, so he’s most definitely not a “good guy”. Similarly, given the harm that Petrilli has caused to public education, he is most definitely not a “good guy”. “Niceness” when used for evil ends, is not good, it’s evil.
Dienne,
After I left the TBF board and turned against its core values, Mike Petrilli stuck his neck out and defended me against an unusually vicious attack. I appreciated that. I disagree with TBF’s views, policies, advocacy for Common Core and privatization.
You’re a good friend.
If you make the decision to become someone’s mouth, you will end up being his or her ass.
Further to my prior comment, I’m reminded of the documentary “The Bully Project” that came out years ago. There’s a scene where two boys have been fighting and the teacher separates them. She then tells them, “You boys apologize to each other.” One kid – a nice-looking, clean-cut guy – immediately shrugs and aw-shucks kind of shrug, smiles, extends his hand and readily says, “Sorry, man.” The other kid – rough and surly looking – shoves his hands in his pockets and snarls, “I’m not apologizing to him.” At first blush, the first kid is obviously the good kid, right? And the second kid is a troublemaker type.
Except that as it goes on a few minutes longer, it becomes quite apparent that the first kid has been brutally bullying the second kid for months and has been able to get away with it precisely because he’s such a “nice, good kid.” In other words, he’s just superficially charming and slick – a budding sociopath.
This is the story of most politicians, business executives, etc. They get where they are because they are “nice” and “personable”, which allows them to hide the ruthlessness of their actions. Petrilli is just one example among thousands.
First, thank you Diane for your honest appraisal of Michael Petrilli. I only know him from his weekly podcast, but I hear the voice of someone who genuinely cares about education for ALL students–even if I often disagree with his proposals. The fact that some of your readers feel compelled to equate a difference of opinion with being a ‘bad’ person is very unfortunate to say the least. The rush to revile continues to be one of the most unfortunate aspects of your comments section and never fails to remind me how much the far left and the far right have in common.
Second, you refer to the “the well-established fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income”. I highly recommend Karen Chenoweth’s book Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement.”
Sorry, Harriet, but these people–Gates, Petrilli, and other champions of the pseudoscientific test and punish regime–have done enormous damage to kids and to our curricula and pedagogy. For their willful, heedless disregard of the dire consequences of their idiotic policies, they deserve the opprobrium they get.
But here, Bob, is where “my side” myopia comes into play. Many bleeding-heart liberals with “willful, heedless disregard of the dire consequences of their idiotic policies” have done equal damage by not addressing the educational needs of our most vulnerable students. We may hate to admit it, but there’s plenty of blame for all sides of the political spectrum.
Harriet Janetos,
Please give an example of a “bleeding heart liberal” who has not addressed the educational needs of our most vulnerable students. What I see is conservatives unwilling to spend any money for small class sizes and instead promote supposedly good charters that claim to have solutions but any honest person can see that what they do is cherry pick the students with no learning issues with the most engaged and committed parents while throwing the rest out like garbage, sacrificing the needs of a huge percentage of at risk children to the needs of the people enriching themselves by teaching the ones who enrich themselves.
Highest performing public schools have low attrition. Highest performing charters have high attrition. I am tired of dishonest people blaming the parents and kids for that in order to protect the people whose claims of wanting to “help” students ring hollow as the reality is that they seem to want to only help the students that make them look good. It’s unacceptable. If public schools acted in that way, falsely making claims that they could perform miracles, I would call them out. Why don’t you do the same? Please put the needs of children first.
They have never paid any price for the damage they have done
In fact, people like Petrilli have profited to the tune of millions of dollars.
The real problem is that people like this are allowed to get away with what they do.
Petrilli in a nutshell: accountability for thee, but not for me.
I am aware that some people believe that schools can break the cycle of poverty. But test scores are tightly correlated with family income. This is true of every standardized test: state, national, international. The kids from the wealthiest families have the highest scores. The kids from the poorest families have the lowest scores. That’s a fact. Sometimes, poor kids break out and get high scores. Sometimes, rich kids are dumb as a rock and get low scores. But the fact remains: test scores are tightly correlated with family income. If you want to know why, read Richard Rothstein’s book “Class and Schools.” Poverty is not just about lack of money to buy things. It’s about hunger, illness, housing insecurity, fear of crime and violence, living with mold and vermin, etc.
This is why the book Districts That Succeed is so important. It’s not about a few kids overcoming the odds–it’s about ENTIRE districts overcoming the odds. Two years ago I gave a copy to my superientendent and each board member. Here was my cover letter:
I hope the six beach chairs on the cover of this card will inspire each of you to take time this summer to read this book. It’s full of district data and personal profiles of people who made a difference in the lives of their students. I wish I could say there was a simple solution that is out there waiting to be implemented. But we know that the complexity of public education can’t be solved just by taking simple steps. However, this book shows that if we are willing to put in the time and energy to know better, then we can definitely do better.
I was head of the English department at San Lorenzo High School between 1989 and 1994 when we won a California Distinguished School Award. Looking back on what factors coalesced to achieve that goal, I find they mirror many of the factors outlined in this book: strong leadership, strong teacher collaboration, strong commitment to the belief that all kids can learn.
My principal was not a ‘fluffy, utopian idealist’. Rather, like every effective leader the author profiles, he was a ‘hard-headed career educator’ willing to leave his ego at the door, admit failure, harness the talents and contributions of EVERY staff member regardless of their position–and hold himself and everyone else accountable.
I believe our district is poised to become a district that succeeds. Thank you for your efforts in forging this path to success.
Harriette-
Is your letter crafted to promote mom and apple pie with the most hackneyed phrases possible?
“Let’s do better, all kids can learn, let’s collaborate, harness talents, forging a path to success,…”
Does this approach work with barbarians at the gate…or, anyone?
Linda, what’s it like living with a siege mentality? Seems stressful. I hope you’re okay.
Harriett
There’s a job for you in the Houston school district. Be sure to give your letter to Mike Miles.
I was going to order a copy of this book, Districts That Succeed, on your recommendation, Ms. Janetos, but then I saw the Amazon blurb about the book attributing success to becoming data driven. But what is provided by the invalid tests is not data. It is, in ELA, data-appearing drivel. Why? Well, there are several reasons, which I discuss here:
Thanks for the link, Bob. Excellent piece. I think my response may have been too long to post here, so I replied at the site. I encourage everyone to read this piece. I ended with:
So when you say, “decades of mandated federal high-stakes testing hasn’t improved outcomes and hasn’t reduced achievement gaps”, here’s what came to mind. When those five districts in Districts that Succeed do have improved outcomes and reduce the achievement gap, you belittle that improvement. And yet–if these districts have adopted knowledge-building curricula and have changed their teaching methods and promote ‘continuity of curriculum’–why should we dismiss out-of-hand their transformation?
if these districts have adopted knowledge-building curricula
Ah, THIS!! Thanks, Harriet. I will have a look at this book.
Lots of public schools are doing outstanding work with young people in poverty, but we rarely hear about them. Poverty is difficult to overcome, but it does happen. I know this from my long career teaching poor ELLs where a number of my former students moved into the middle class in a single generation. It requires a shared commitment, lots of outreach to families, pure determination and hard work. Investment in the community school model shows great promise of supporting vulnerable students to do better in school.
Grasshoppa,
Talk doesn’t cook rice…
The return of these failed ideas?
It’s like a monster movie where the creature just keeps coming back. You think it’s dead with a stake through it’s heart…but no….
Nightmare on U.S.A. Street 2023
It’s a Hydra! Chop off one arm and three grow back bigger and stronger than the first. They need to “stake” the actual Hydra in order for this mess to die out. Kill the testing and it’s evil twin Common Bore and things can return to some kind of normal.
For years ago it reminded me of that arcade game “Wack a mole.” But I’m dating myself here….
I think Mike Petrilli should be sentenced to Finland until he earns a teaching credential there and teaches in Finland’s public schools for at least five years. Maybe he’d learn something useful.
They Do it for Money
They do it for the money
They do it for the Bill$
And when they call you “Honey”
They’re moving in for kill$
Trump says we should consider injecting disinfectant.
Petrilli says we need more NCLB.
Geniuses, these guys.
Bob
I too thought that this was Petrelli crying over NAEP scores. But after a bit of deep diving, not so in this NYT column.
It’s even worse. This recent (July) report was based on NWEA MAP tests that are administered three times a year and the very convoluted *RIT scores that they produce.
From the NWEA website:
NWEA’s RIT scale stands for Rasch UnIT scale. There are several RIT scales: one each for reading, language usage, mathematics, and general science plus a few scales that are under development.
What are the characteristics of the RIT scales?
These RIT scales are stable, equal interval scales that use individual item difficulty values to measure student achievement independent of grade level (that is, across grades). “Equal interval” means that the difference between scores is the same regardless of whether a student is at the top, bottom, or middle of the RIT scale. “Stable” means that the scores on the same scale from different students, or from the same students at different times, can be directly compared, even though different sets of test items are administered. A RIT score also has the same meaning regardless of the grade or age of the student.
In summary, the RIT scale is:
An achievement scale
Accurate
Equal interval
Useful for measuring growth over time
The same regardless of the grade or age of the student
Don’t dare to look at their website if you value your sanity.
Rage, if the NWEA tests are not measuring what was taught, what are they measuring?
Student apathy and test fatigue.