Governor Greg Abbott and his State Commissioner Mike Morath hand-picked Mike Miles as Houston’s superintendent, based on the alleged failure of one school, Wheatley High School. In fact, Wheatley had made significant progress and was no longer a “failing” school, and HISD was a B-rated district.
Nonetheless, the state took control of HISD, ousted the elected board and a well-qualified superintendent. Mike Miles took control with a puppet board, charged with “fixing” 28 schools. The 28 quickly turned into 85 schools, all required to submit to Miles’ authoritarian “New Education System.” He pledged to leave the district’s other 190 schools alone. Miles has never been a teacher or a principal. His tenure as superintendent in Dallas was cut short after multiple controversies.
Houston ISD English teacher Karen Calhoun enjoyed short-lived relief this summer when her principal at Askew Elementary School opted not to join the dozens of campuses getting overhauled by the district’s new superintendent, Mike Miles.
Despite the decision, Calhoun has watched in recent weeks as her beloved school seemed to morph into a version of the turnaround initiative, known as the “New Education System,” that she hoped to avoid.
Less than a week before classes began, Askew’s principal told reading and math teachers they had to use the same curriculums as NES schools, Calhoun said. The principal also directed all staff to check that students understood the lesson every four minutes or so using “multiple response strategies” — the same techniques that teachers at NES schools are required to use, Calhoun said.
The orders deflated the spirits of many teachers at Askew, a B-rated campus on Houston’s west side, she said.
“The bulk of our teachers have taught 10-plus years. So that means that everybody in that room pretty much knows what they’re doing,” Calhoun said. “You can do multiple strategies in a lesson, but it’s authentic, it’s not mandated. It’s not like, ‘Every three minutes you have to do something. Every four minutes you have to do something.’”
One month into HISD’s school year, significant curriculum and instructional changes have crept into campuses that were supposed to be exempt from Miles’ overhaul, teachers and families at 15 non-NES schools told the Houston Landing in recent weeks. The new practices appear to contradict comments made earlier this summer by Miles, who said he planned to largely leave most schools to operate as they were while he transformed 85 other campuses under the NES umbrella.
In interviews, the educators and parents said many of the changes they’re seeing include elements initially advertised as only for NES schools. Thirteen of their 15 schools scored A or B ratings under the state’s academic accountability system in 2022.
For teachers, the new requirements include removing classroom decor, writing daily lesson objectives on whiteboards at the front of the classroom and repeatedly incorporating the every-four-minute learning checks into their lessons.
In addition, principals leading nearly two-thirds of non-NES schools are choosing to use new reading and math curriculums, Amplify and Eureka, that are mandated in the overhauled campuses, HISD officials confirmed Thursday. Educators at those schools must use the teaching practices recommended by the curriculum providers, such as a daily quiz, called a Demonstration of Learning.
“It sure does feel like NES,” said Melissa Yarborough, an English teacher at the non-NES Navarro Middle School, who now has to use the new curriculum after her principal chose to adopt it this year. “If you don’t get to that Demonstration of Learning by the time you’re supposed to get to it, then that administrator is going to be telling you your pacing is wrong.”
Houston Independent School District, the largest school district in Texas, is at the center of a controversial state takeover by the Texas Education Agency. After working its way through the legal system for several years, last winter the Texas Supreme Court greenlit the replacement of district superintendent and the locally elected board of trustees by the head of the TEA, appointed directly by the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott. And last month, school was back in session under the newly appointed superintendent, Mike Miles – former US State Department ambassador, charter school CEO, and scandal-ridden Dallas ISD superintendent – amid dozens of pedagogical and policy changes that left teachers, parents, and students confused, frustrated, and afraid.
Among the most troubling changes is a strict “multiple-response strategy” where teachers must adhere to a four-minute timer to pause instruction and assess students for understanding – an intervention with seemingly no pedagogical justification. These strategies are paired with heavily scripted activities that are centered on drill and kill: repeat information over and over to memorize content. There has also been an increase in invasive admin walkthroughs to check for compliance with the scripted methods, which teachers and students have described as a distraction from learning. Teachers are required to keep a webcam on in their classroom at all times and their door must remain open. Defending these changes, Miles stated:
“Every classroom has a webcam and a Zoom link, and it’s on 24/7, if a kid is disruptive, we pull that student out of class. We put them in what we call a team center, and they’re being monitored by a learning coach, and they Zoom right back into the class they get pulled from.”
A veteran Houston ISD teacher, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of administrative backlash, reached out to back up these claims, describing the impact these reforms have had on teachers and students:
…I left to teach at a Title 1 Houston ISD campus, so I’m getting the luxury to watch this mess unfold, and I assure you, there’s definitely ‘something rotten in Denmark” with what’s happening to us.
My school is not NES nor NES-aligned, but Miles has carved his path in such a way that we’re being evaluated multiple times a day, being forced to follow this horrible curriculum in a lesson cycle that as far as my research has found–has no pedagogical roots. It’s literally drill and kill. Apparently this is a trend or something. Miles is something else and when you Google him or any of the administrations around him calling the shots, you’ll not see any pedigree of education, but multi-millionaire board members whose backgrounds are in gentrification projects and such.
I’m exhausted by the end of the day. Texas teachers are evaluated all the same, using the T-Tess system–well except us now. Their move to push through that District of Innovation leads me to believe they simply want to weed anyone who was part of the old system out. It absolutely feels like he’s pushing to make us all quit. We were notified that although we’re given 10 sick days for the year, if we’ve taken 4 days leave by November or so, we will be terminated. We had an impromptu faculty meeting and had to sign that we’d gotten notification of this. Plus that we’ll be evaluated different.
Before the takeover, HISD was told to shape up or that’s the end of the line. We scored a “B” as a district in the last ratings and still are being taken over. The Abbot/Morath/Miles steamroller is moving right along.
Being a District of Innovation will be the coup de gras for us, really. He wants to add weeks to the school year, he’s already firing any teachers who simply ask questions, and he’s even gaming the system in many ways to ensure that he’ll have “results.” Special Education? Accommodations? Support structures for at-risk students? All gutted. It’s hard to believe this stuff is legal.
I’m stressed and miserable. It’s hard to believe some of the insane stories about his demands–but I assure you they are true. Teaching with doors open, such a security risk. Stuff like no snack time in elementary if it’s not tied to a Texas standard. I at least teach…But we all were forced to watch an hour or so musical he put on that would rival anything out of North Korea.
At this pace and the way things are going, I just can’t sustain it. I can’t stand seeing such a grift ruin education as it’s doing. We definitely had issues as a district but this can’t be the best solution. I’ll try to make it this year, but I’m beginning to apply elsewhere. My students were often successful at the state test, but it’s a crazy world when I teach…and am afraid to ask to take a class day to show my students the library and have them check out books. It’s nuts.
Of course please don’t use my name or anything that might come back to bite me… As Miles promised in his introduction to us that “he’d find out whose spreading dissent and act” and by most accounts that’s exactly what’s been occurring.
Parents and community members have flooded school board meetings with accounts from teachers who are similarly afraid to speak out, for fear of losing their jobs, as teachers who question the changes have been labeled “insubordinate” and had their jobs threatened. Parents have also spoken publicly about how the changes have affected their own children, as one mother recounted to the board before having her mic cut-off:
“For the last week, I’ve had a kid that cries every morning and every evening. Crying not to go to school, and beginning not to go in the morning. She says school’s boring, she’s not learning, and she’d rather be homeschooled at this point…She’s miserable. Her confidence is plummeting, and she’s starting to lose her joy for learning.”
At a board meeting on September 14th, a 12-year-old HISD student delivered prepared remarks about the disruptive timers, distracting admin walkthroughs, and palpable teacher stress. The board cut her mic, too:
“Due to the new open door policy, I and many other students have a hard time concentrating due to the many distractions in the hallways. Isn’t it your first priority to have kids in HISD like me learn? Students should be in a place they want to go to inst- (mic is cut off)”
Please open the link and finish reading. Miles apparently wants to turn HISD into a “no-excuses” district.
This is the only post today. Read as much of it as you have time for. The report is a valuable reminder that Ed-tech is oversold and even dangerous. It has its uses, for sure. But it should never replace teachers or parents.
The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers.
Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?
You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets.
The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech:
[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.
The summary says:
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences.
Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.
Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning.
Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology.
In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures.
The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…
Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…
Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.
The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.
Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]
Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.
It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…
Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.
Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.
A new Florida Department of Education employee who’s reaching out to conservative school board members makes $126,000 a year, a salary funded by a federal grant designed to boost “well-rounded educational opportunities,” health and safety and effective use of technology.
Terry Stoops was tapped in April to head the department’s new office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts. Most of his contacts during his first months on the job were to school board members who’d been endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and representatives of conservative groups, his emails and calendar show.
In April, for example, he met several school board members at a “Learn Right” summit in Sarasota spearheaded by a founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative group launched in Florida and focused on schools.
He emailed more than a dozen school board members endorsed by the governor in the 2022 election cycle and others who had the backing of Moms for Liberty, including Alicia Farrant, elected to the Orange County School Board in November.
And in May, Stoops met with the Herzog Foundation; its goal is “Advancing Christian Education.”
Apolitical school boards have not been contacted.
DeSantis, who is running for president, told Fox News in June that if elected he would try to abolish the federal education department and other agencies. If Congress would not approve doing that, “I’m going to use those agencies to push back against woke ideology and against the leftism we see creeping into all institutions of American life,” he said in that interview on June 28…
Stoops also met with people who were not school board members but seemed to share his political views. For example, he attended a virtual meeting about American Birthright, a blueprint for how to teach students social studies that embraces “the ideals of conservative Americans.”
Stoops, who spent nearly two decades in North Carolina mostly working on education policy for the conservative John Locke Foundation, was on the executive committee that helped devise American Birthright, which was released last year.
A reader who identifies as “Democracy” left a comment here about DeSantis’ war against the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) courses. DeSantis manufactured a culture war issue, a familiar tactic for him, but don’t defend the AP exams: They are worthless, says he or she.
Democracy wrote:
While I certainly do not agree with — and am appalled by — the Florida dictate, I hate to see the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program in the bannerhead of this issue because it makes it appear that the AP program is somehow being victimized, and it helps to propagate the AP brand.
It’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff here. The Florida requirement – state law – is part of a larger effort by conservatives (Republicans) across the country to, as USA Today put it, “restrict learning and materials about controversial topics.” Or, in other words, topics that conservatives hate to talk about: racism, misogyny, equality, sedition, tolerance, democracy, reproductive rights, climate change, sex…..
The original law required a cataloging of all books in “a school library media center.” The DeSantis-controlled Florida DOE interpreted that broadly to include classrooms. The Republican legislature amended the law to say that a school library media center is
“any collection of books, ebooks, periodicals, or videos maintained and accessible on the site of a school, including in classrooms.”
As The Sarasota Herald Tribune reported in April of this year,
“The law, governing instructional materials for classes from kindergarten to 12th grade, passed last year and holds school districts responsible for the content of all materials used in a classroom, made available in a school library or included on a reading list. It requires each book in a school library to be certified by a media specialist and for a list of these materials to be available on school websites. The law took effect in January.”
This is incredibly cumbersome, especially for elementary school teachers who have large troves of books for their students. And if it reeks of conservative religious state-imposed censorship, that’s probably because it is. As ABC News (and other media) reported, “Books targeted by conservative groups were overwhelmingly written by or about people of color and LGBTQ people, according to anti-censorship researchers.”
All of this is worrisome. It’s dangerous territory.
But that does not mean that AP is the victim. Nor should it imply that AP is actually educationally beneficial for most students. As I’ve noted here previously, more colleges and universities are either refusing to accept AP test scores for credit, or they are limiting credit awarded only for a score of 5 on an AP test. The reason is that they find most students awarded credit for AP courses are just generally not well-prepared.
Dartmouth no longer gives credit for AP test scores. It found that 90 percent of those who scored a 5 on the AP psychology test failed a Dartmouth Intro to Psych exam. A 2006 MIT faculty report noted “there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard.”
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006) Clifford Adelman scolded those who had misrepresented his original ToolBox research by citing the importance of AP “in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. Adelman said, “To put it gently, this is a misreading.” Moreover, in statistically analyzing the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.”
College Board executives often say that if high schools implement AP courses and encourage more students to take them, then (1) more students will be motivated to go to college and (2) high school graduation rates will increase. There are educators who parrot the College Board line. Researchers Kristin Klopfenstein and Kathleen Thomas “conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims.”
Why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because, increasingly, “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.” It’s a depraved stupid circle that has swept up parents, guidance counselors, administrators and school boards, teachers, and the general public – not to mention public education reporters – into the misbelief that “AP is better.” It isn’t.
One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if i didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school.”
What do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP courses and tests? For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see ‘DBQ’ ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.”
And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.”
Another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests: “The majority of high-achieving kids in my buddies' and my AP classes couldn’t have given less of a crap. They showed up for most of the classes, sure, and they did their best to keep up with the grades because they didn’t want their GPAs to drop, but when it came time to take the tests, they drew pictures on the AP Calc, answered just ‘C’ on the AP World History, and would finish sections of the AP Chem in, like, 5 minutes. I had one buddy who took an hour-and-a-half bathroom break during World History. The cops were almost called. They thought he was missing.”
And an AP reader (grader), related this about the types of essays he saw:
“I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”
The Florida law is clearly not in the interests of kids and learning. But AP ain’t necessarily all that either.
Although the gloomy claims of that influential document have been repeatedly challenged, even debunked*, it continues to control educational discourse with its assertion that American schools are failing. “A Nation at Risk” led to increased testing, to the passage of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind in 2002, to the creation of Barack Obama’s Race to the Top in 2009, to the release of the Common Core standards in 2010.
Despite nearly a quarter century of focus on standards and testing, policymakers refuse to admit that these policies have failed.
And nowhere have they been more destructive than in the early grades, where testing has replaced play. Kindergarten became the new first grade.
But says Bailey, the current Secretary of Education wants to ratchet up the pressure on little kids.
She writes:
In What Happened to Recess and Why are our Children Struggling in Kindergarten, Susan Ohanian writes about a kindergartner in a New York Times article who tells the reporter they would like to sit on thegrass and look for ladybugs. Ohanian writes, the child’s school was built very deliberately without a playground. Lollygagging over ladybugs is not permitted for children being trained for the global economy (2002, p.2).
America recently marked forty years since the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform which blamed schools as being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.
Berliner and Biddle dispute this in The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. They state that most of these claims were said to reflect “evidence,” although the “evidence” in question either was not presented or appeared in the form of simplistic, misleading generalizations (1995, p. 3).
Still, the report’s premise, that public schools failed, leading us down the workforce path of doom, continues to be perpetuated. When students fail tests, teachers and public schools are blamed, yet few care to examine the obscene expectations placed on the backs of children since A Nation at Risk.
Education Secretary Cardona recently went on a bus tour with the message to Raise the Bar in schools. Raising the bar is defined as setting a high standard, to raise expectations, to set higher goals.
This is through New America,whose funders include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Waltons, and others who want to privatize public education. Here’s the video, Kindergarten as a “Sturdy Bridge”: Place-Based Investments, describing the plan focusing on PreK to 3rd grade. This involves Reading by 3rd and the Campaign for Grade Level Reading.
Cardona says in the announcement:
Getting kindergarten right has to be top of mind for all of us, because what happens there sets the stage for how a child learns and develops well into their elementary years and beyond.
Ensuring that kindergarten is a sturdy bridge between the early years and early grades is central to our efforts both to Raise the Bar for academic excellence and to provide all students with a more equitable foundation for educational success. The kindergarten year presents an opportunity to meet the strengths and needs of young learners so they can continue to flourish in the years to come.
Raise the bar? Kindergarten is already the new first grade. What will it be now? Second? Third? Fourth? What’s the rush? How is this developmentally sound? One thing is for sure: there will still be no idle time for children to search for ladybugs.
Few bear the brunt of A Nation at Risk,as do early learners whose schools have been invaded by corporate schemes to force reading and advanced learning earlier than ever expected in the past.
If kindergartners aren’t doing well after all these years of toughness, higher expectations, and an excruciating number of assessments, wouldn’t it seem time to back off, instead of raising the bar higher?
Editor’s note:
*James Harvey and I will discuss the distortions contained in the “Nation at Risk” report at the Network for Public Education conference on Oct. 28-29 in Washington, D.C. James Harvey was a high-level member of the staff that wrote the report. He has written about how the Reagan-era Commissuon in Excellence in Education “cooked the books” to paint a bleak—but false—picture of American public schools. Please register and join us!
Frank Breslin, a retired high school teacher in New Jersey, wrote recently at Medium that critical thinking is the missing ingredient in high school, even though it is the most important tool that students need.
Breslin writes:
The following warning should be affixed atop every computer in America’s schools: Proceed at your own risk. Don’t accept as true what you’re about to read. Some of it is fact; some of it is opinion masquerading as fact; and the rest is liberal, conservative, or mainstream propaganda. Make sure you know which is which before choosing to believe it.
Students are exposed to so many different viewpoints on- and offline and so prone to accepting whatever they read, that they run the very real risk of being brainwashed. If it’s on a computer screen, it becomes Holy Writ, sacrosanct, immutable, beyond question or doubt.
Teachers continually caution students against taking what they read at face value, since some of these sites may be propaganda mills or recruiting grounds for the naïve and unwary.
Not only egregious forms of indoctrination may target unsuspecting young minds, but also the more artfully contrived variety, whose insinuating soft-sell subtlety and silken appeals ingratiatingly weave their spell to lull the credulous into accepting their wares.
To prevent this from happening, every school in America should teach the twin arts of critical thinking and critical reading, so that a critical spirit becomes a permanent possession of every student and pervades the teaching of every course in America.
Teaching students how to be their own person by abandoning Groupthink and developing the courage to think for themselves should begin from the very first day of high school. More important than all the information they will be learning during these four crucial years will be how they critically process this information either to accept or reject it, or to keep an open mind.
It is a rare high-school graduate who can pinpoint 20 different kinds of fallacies while listening to a speaker or reading a book; who can distinguish between fact and opinion, objective account and specious polemic; who can tell the difference between facts, value judgments, explanatory theories, and metaphysical claims; who can argue both sides of a question, anticipate objections, rebut them, and undermine arguments in various ways.
The essence of an education — the ability to think critically and protect oneself against falsehood and lies — is a lost art in America’s high schools today. This is unfortunate for it is precisely this skill that is of transcendent importance for students in defending themselves.
Computers are wonderful things, but, like everything else in this world, they must be approached with great caution. Their potential for good can suddenly become an angel of darkness that takes over young minds.
A school should teach its students how to think, not what to think; to question whatever they read, and never to accept any claim blindly; to suspend judgment until they’ve heard all sides of a question; and interrogate whatever claims to be true, since truth can withstand any scrutiny.
Peter Greene wrote in Forbes about the results of the latest Gallup poll about schools. Bottom line: The extremist plot to dismantle public education has bamboozled the public, but not parents. The absurd conspiracy to portray teachers as groomers and pedophiles is undermining public trust in one of our most democratic institutions, the one that teaches us to live with others who are not just like us. As the extremist Chris Rufo said in his infamous speech at Hillsdale College, the road to universal school choice requires sowing distrust of the public schools.
Peter Greene writes:
Parental satisfaction with their local school is at an all-time high, while Americans’ satisfaction with K-12 quality is at a record-tying low, according to newly-released poll results from Gallup.
Starting 1999, the pollsters have asked Americans every August about their views of K-12 quality. There has always been a gap in the results: parents think their own schools are better than the national system as a whole, and non-parents think the national system is even worse. But this year the gap is especially huge.
Of parents of K-12 students, 76% consider themselves completely or somewhat satisfied with their oldest child’s education quality. But when it comes to the U.S. system as a whole, those parents are only 41% completely or somewhat satisfied (14% for completely). Americans as a whole are only 36% satisfied with K-12 education (8% for completely).
Only 9% of K-12 parents are completely dissatisfied with their children’s education. For the system as a whole, both the parents and the full group report 25% completely dissatisfied.
Educators have long suggested that this disparity is the result of negative coverage. That theory makes sense; you know your own child’s school first hand, but beyond that, you only know what you’re told second hand.
To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust.
This caps forty years of pressing home the message that U.S. public schools are failing. There was a time when supporting public schools was as politically innocuous as babies and apple pie. Now criticism of public education is the political norm, with accusations that teachers are pedophiles and groomers and porn peddlers are not unusual. And groups like Moms For liberty push the narrative that the majority of parents are themselves up in arms about the many failings of their districts.
As the poll shows, that’s not true.
If your child is in school, you see first hand the efforts of the district and the results for your child. But if you have no children at all, or your children’s school days were long ago, all you know about school is what you hear second hand, and that second hand space is dominated by voices declaring that U.S. education is failing.
The poll findings reflect that long repetitive negative messaging, and little else. After all, what would be a better way to gauge the quality of a particular restaurant: talk to people who just ate there, or the people who do PR for a rival eatery?
A reader who signs as “Retired Teacher” posted this astute analysis of how vouchers work. Why are billionaires like Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, the Waltons, etc. so enthusiastic about vouchers? No voucher will ever be large enough to send a child to the schools their children attend. Why do they want to defund public schools?
During the first phase of the privatization of education was the belief that the private sector can do everything better and more efficiently than the public sector. What ensued was trying to turn education into a commodity. Market based principles applied to education made everything so much worse including hiring the wrong people, endless testing, waste, fraud, firing legitimate teachers and closing public schools. The main goal of privatization has always been to gain access to public funds and transfer it into private pockets. The current interest in vouchers is an extension of this trend. It certainly is not about education as vouchers provide worse education.
Vouchers have always been the goal of DeVos, the 1% and right wing extremists. They are a way to scam the working class out of the public schools that protect their children’s rights and send them to valueless schools with zero accountability while teaching them religious dogma and almost anything else the school deems worthy for less cost. Unfortunately, the students are unlikely get a valid background in science, history, civics or the exposure to diverse students. Vouchers benefit the wealthy and affluent, and they are a losing proposition for the poor and working class.
Mike Petrilli, head honcho of the right-tilted Fordham Institute thinky tank, made it into the New York Times today to do some chicken littling about Learning Loss and suggest a bold solution. Don’t have a NYT subscription? That’s okay– let me walk you through the highlights of this festival of Things We Can Stop Saying About Education Right Now, Please.
Let’s start by invoking general Learning Loss panic. Petrilli points out that students “lost significant ground” during covid, and now NWEA says that students continue “backsliding” and “falling further behind.” People, in Petrilli’s view, are not panicking enough about “America’s massive learning loss.”
First, let’s use some more precise language, please. In all discussions of learning loss, we are actually talking about scores on a Big Standardized Test of reading and math going down. We will never, ever know how much of the slippage in tests scores is the result of students going a year or two without practicing for the BS Test. But in the meantime, it would be great if we stopped talking about test scores as if they were infallible equivalents of learning and achievement.
Second, “learning loss” is a misnomer. I’m willing to bet that verrrrrrry tiny number of students in this country actually lost learning. I’m equally certain that the vast majority of students did not learn as much as they would have in a non-pandemic year, but that’s not the same.
Think of it this way. It’s budget time, and the Mugwumps’ proposed budget increases spending on widgets from $500 to $600. The Wombats say, “Let’s only increase widget spending to $550.” That gets us to the part where the Mugwump talking point is “The Wombats want to cut spending on widgets.” When in fact everybody wants widget spending to go up.
That’s where we are. During the pandemic, learning occurred–just not as much as might have been expected in a normal-ish year. And this looks most like a crisis if you think of test scores like stock prices and focus on data rather than individual human students. (Petrilli does not invoke the baloney about impact on future earnings, so we’ll not go there right now.)
And, it should also be pointed out, it is where we were for a decade before covid even hit.
Having sounded the alarm, Petrilli bemoans the surfeit of leaders willing to make alarmy noises.The country is in desperate need of leaders who will speak the truth about what’s happening in our K-12 schools, and are willing to make the hard choices to fix it. Simply put, we need to bring some tough love back to American education.
Tough love? Back? Petrilli doesn’t really explain how the pandemic led to a loss of tough love in education. But that’s the dog we’re going to try to hunt with.
He cites Michael Bloomberg, who is ceaselessly alarmed about anything going on in public schools. Bloomberg wants a plan from Washington, a joint session of Congress, a Presidential address.
Ah, says Petrilli–you know when politicians were on the same page about education, presumably flinging tough love around with wild abandon.
We’re talking, of course, about the golden days of No Child Left Behind.
Petrilli remembers it fondly, citing how we saw “significant progress” which of course means “test scores went up,” which they did, at first, for a few years. Anyone who was in a classroom, especially a math or reading classroom, can tell you why. Within a couple of years, schools figured out what test prep would be most effective. Then they targeted students who were teetering on the line between High Enough Scores and Not High Enough Scores, especially the ones in special subgroups, and test prepped the hell out of those kids. At which point scores started stagnating because schools had done all they could do.
The Average Yearly Progress requirements were set up as a bomb that would go off during the next administration. Again, if you were working in a school at the time, you remember that chart, showing a gentle upward glide for a bit before jutting upward to 2014, the magical year in which 100% of students were to score above average on the BS Test. Oh, Congress will fix that before it happens, we were told. They did not. By the early 20-teens, there were two types of school districts–those that were failing, and those that were cheating.
Petrilli claims maybe success probably, saying NCLB “likely contributed” to graduation rates (no, schools just learned how to game those), college attainment rates (eh, maybe, but correlation is not causation) and “possibly” future real-life outcomes (absolutely not a shred of evidence–even reformster Jay Greene said as much).”It’s true that No Child Left Behind was imperfect,” says Petrilli. No. It stunk. But Petrilli has quite the tale here.There were fierce debates over “teaching to the test” and “drill and kill” instruction; about closing low-performing schools versus trying to fix them; and about the link between student achievement and family poverty. But once the law’s shortcomings became apparent, policymakers responded by adopting common standards and improving standardized tests, so as to encourage higher-level teaching. They poured billions into school turnarounds, invested in stronger instructional materials and started grading schools on how much progress their kids made from year to year, rather than focusing on one snapshot in time — an approach that is markedly fairer to high-poverty campuses. Still, the bipartisan effort that was No Child Left Behind ultimately fell apart as our politics fractured.
That’s quite the load. There was no debate about teaching to the test or drill and kill, because nobody was in favor of it except shrugging administrators who were staring at 2014. Petrilli also forgets that “teach to the test” ended up meaning “cut out any other classes–or recess–that does not appear on the test.” Arts slashed. History and science cut (at least for those teetering students). Closing low-performing schools was, in fact, the quickest way for a district to free itself of the low scores; who knows how many districts were restructured to put predictably low 8th grade scores under the same roof as better scores from lower or higher grades. And yes, poverty affects scores, despite all the No Excusing in the world.
What came next did not address any of these issues, The Common Core was an amateur hour fiasco. Were standardized tests improved? Not really (as witnessed by the fact that states dumped the SBA and PARCC as quickly as they could)–but it made a lucrative contract for some test manufacturers. Including progress in scores is great–unless you’re teaching kids who are already scoring at the top. School turnarounds have consistently failed (e.g. Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District).
But he’s right that Trump’s election and appointment of Betsy DeVos hurt the reformster alliance (despite the fact that DeVos had long been part of the club). But then, so was the increasing split between the social justice wing of reform and the free marketeer AEI-Fordham wing.
But look– NCLB and the sequel, Race to the Top, were just bad. They started from bad premises: 1) US education is failing because 2) teachers either don’t care or don’t know what they’re doing. They rest on a foundation of using a mediocre BS Test as an unquestioned proxy for student learning and teacher effectiveness, creating a perfect stage on which to conduct a national field test of Campbell’s Law (when you make a measure a proxy for the real thing, you encourage people to mess with the measure instead of the real thing, and it gets worse if the measure isn’t very good). And none of the “policymakers” who championed this mess ever came up with a single solitary idea of how to Fix Things that actually worked on either a local or macro scale.
The pandemic did not help anything in education. But it did lead to some flaming prose, like Petrilli’s assertion that “here we are, with decades of academic progress washed away and achievement trends still moving in the wrong direction.” This kind of overheated rhetoric is nothing new from the folks who gave us The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading as a headline. But what does it even mean? Washed away to where? Did knowledge dribble out of students’ heads? Did the learning of the past several years retroactively vanish with former students waking up across America feeling a little bit dumber somehow? Did teachers forget everything they knew about how to teach students, so they have to start over? Or do we just mean “test scores are down”?
Petrilli breaks this down to some other issues. His first point starts out fine– there’s an attendance problem right now. But he tries to set that beside an alleged nationwide move to lower standards. I’m not sure what basis there is for that assertion. He points to the “no zeros” rule used in some schools, but that rule existed in many places (like my old district) for ages. Maybe it’s letting slackers slide through in other places, but my own experience with no zeros policy is that it merely kept students working who would otherwise have given up–kind of the opposite of encouraging slacking.
But then he’s slicing NCLB-style baloney again:Virtually all schools and districts have enjoyed a vacation from accountability. Almost nobody is worried about state officials shutting their campuses because of low performance, or forcing district schools to replace their principals or teachers.
You say that like it’s a bad thing, Mike.
Embedded here are many of the same bad assumptions that have driven ed reform for decades. Teachers and schools have no motivation to do their jobs unless they have some kind of threat of punishment hanging over their heads. This isn’t just bad education policy–it’s bad management. As management which W. Edwards Deming pointed out often, fear should be driven out of the workplace. But NCLB and RttT were always all stick, no carrot, always starting out with the worst possible assumptions about the people who had chosen education as their life’s work (assumptions made largely by people who had never actually worked in a school).
And even if you don’t dig Deming, there’s another thing to consider–none of the stuff Petrilli misses actually worked (which was Deming’s point). He points out that the kind of thing being done in Houston right now has become rare, to which I say “Good,” because Houston is a nightmare and it will end just like all the other similar attempts–no actual success, but lots of disruption and dismay and upheaval of children’s education.
Petrilli will now argue for NCLB 3.0. We need “action at scale,” but we can’t ignore “the support and assistance schools require.” Holding schools accountable wasn’t enough because– wait for it– if NCLB failed it was because schools lacked the expertise and know-how to do it right. And now Petrilli almost–but not quite–gets it.“Teaching to the test” and other problems with No Child Left Behind stemmed from schools resorting to misguided practices to meet requirements. Under pressure to boost scores, but without the training to know what to do, some educators engaged in endless practice testing, and stopped instruction in any subject that was unlikely to be on the state assessment. In a few places, educators even resorted to outright cheating. They likely felt they had no choice, because they hadn’t been given the tools to succeed.
Nope. Close but no cigar. No, the reason all those things happened was because, as NCLB 1.0 and 2.0 were designed, those things were the tools to “succeed.” Because “success” was defined as “get maximum number of kids to score well on a poorly-designed multiple-choice math and reading test.” Granted, when most of us think about “success” in education, we have a whole list of other things in mind–but none of those things were valued by NCLB or RttT.
But we’re rolling up to the finish now. But after a decade of building capacity, offering helping hands and adding funds, it’s time once again to couple skill-building with will-building.
That is a great line. But what capacity-building? More seats in unregulated charters and voucher-accepting schools? Which helping hands? And exactly whose will needs to be built? Parents? Children? Teachers? Policymakers? I’m seriously asking, because I think a hell of a lot of will was involved in slogging through the last couple of years.
Petrilli calls on schools to spend their “federal largesse” to “catch their kids up”–and I think the call to accelerate education is one of the most infuriating calls of the last few years. Sure– because all along teachers have known how to educate children faster but they just haven’t bothered to do it, but hey, now that we have certified lower test scores, teachers will all bust the super-secret Faster Learning plans out of their file cabinets.
Petrillii says we don’t actually need to bring back NCLB, though he seems to have been talking about nothing else– just let’s get out those big sticks and get back to (threats of) “tough interventions for persistent underperformance,” because that has totally worked in the past. No, wait. It hasn’t actually worked ever. Kids, too, should know that it’s time to hit the books again. We need to rethink our lax grading policies, make clear to parents that their children need to be at school and bring back high school graduation exams and the like to ensure that students buckle down.
Also, get those kids off our lawns. And while you’re making sure parents know their kids should be in school, maybe talk to all the reform crowd that has been working hard to build distrust of public schools and deepen disrespect of educators.
And the big finish:Education matters. Achievement matters. We need leaders who are willing to say so, and educators who are willing to act like these simple propositions are true.
This seems straightforward enough, though if you replace “achievement matters” with “standardized test scores matter,” which is what he really means, it doesn’t sound quite as compelling. And it’s insulting as hell to suggest that the ranks of educators are filled with people who are unwilling to act as if education matters.
Well, the piece is completely on brand for the New York Times, and it certainly echoes the refrain of that certain brand of reformster whose response to their own policy failures has been, “Well, get in there and fail harder.” No Child Left Behind failed, and it not only failed but left some of its worst policy ideas embedded in the new status quo, continuing to do damage to public education right through today.
The pandemic did many things, and one thing it did was panic the testing industry, which faced an existential threat that everyone might realize that school without the BS Test, or NWEA’s lovely test-prep tests, might actually be okay. It’s no wonder that they feel a special nostalgia for the days when the entire weight of the government reinforced their importance. So here we are, painting low reading and math tests scores as an educational crisis whose only solution is to get more fear, more threats, and especially more testing back into schools.
I’m sorry if this assessment of some reformsters, their policies, and their motives seems harsh, but, you know– tough love.
