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Jan Resseger: What Is White Christian Nationalism?

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2024 //
15

Jan Resseger provides a thoughtful analysis of what seems to be a new phenomenon called “white Christian nationalism.” Others say it’s nothing new, that it is just another manifestation of racism, as in the KKK, the White Citizens Councils, and other hate groups. She reviews a new book, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy that provides a historical perspective.

She writes:

Our politics and our national ethos seem to have gone awry, and a lot of people blame it on something called Christian nationalism or white Christian nationalism. And yet, the book bans, the efforts to prohibit honest teaching about slavery, and the attempts to quash equity and inclusion seem to have nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, embodied, for example, in the Great Commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matthew 22: 39) If, like me, you have been confused by the seeming contradictions, I recommend a book that begins: “This book is a primer on white Christian nationalism, what it is, when it emerged, how it works, and where it’s headed. White Christian nationalism is one of the oldest and most powerful currents in American politics.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 1)

The book is The Flag and The Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, by two professors of the sociology of religion, Philip S. Gorski at Yale University and Samuel L. Perry at the University of Oklahoma. The book is short, readable, and extremely relevant to the political maelstrom in today’s United States.

The authors trace the existence of white Christian nationalism back to the introduction of slavery to Virginia; the subjugation of American Indians beginning in Massachusetts and then westward through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Civil War and subsequent collapse of Reconstruction followed by Jim Crow; the Mexican American War; and the Spanish American War with the establishment of an American empire including the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico.

So… what is white Christian nationalism? “White Christian nationalism is a ‘deep story’ about America’s past and a vision of its future. It includes cherished assumptions about what America was and is, but also what it it should be…  America was founded as a Christian nation by (white) men who were ‘traditional’ Christians, who based the nation’s founding documents on ‘Christian principles.’ The United States is blessed by God, which is why it has been so successful; and the nation has a special role to play in God’s plan for humanity. But these blessings are threatened by cultural degradation from ‘un-American’ influences both inside and outside our borders.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 3-4)

Gorski and Perry continue: “Like any story, this one has its heroes: white conservative Christians, usually native-born men. It also has its villains: racial, religious, and cultural outsiders. The plot revolves around conflicts between the noble and worthy ‘us,’ the rightful heirs of wealth and power, and the undeserving ‘them’ who conspire to take what is ours. Sometimes the conflicts culminate in violence—violence that restores white Christians to what they believe is their rightful place atop America’s racial and religious hierarchy… But this story is a myth… At this point, the skeptical reader might wonder what’s ‘Christian’ about this deep story.  It is ‘Christian’ because the vast majority of those who believe this story identify as such.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 4-5)

Why has white Christian nationalism exploded in recent years? “The source of the growing pressure is a set of slow-moving changes in American society.  The United States has slowly become less white, less Christian, and less powerful; more diverse, secular, and cosmopolitan. And this collided with a certain conception of America as a white Christian nation favored by God and ruled by white Christian men ready to defend freedom and order with violence.” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 103) Gorski and Perry describe the January 6th insurrection as a symbol of the conflict.

After defining “white Christian nationalism,” Gorski and Perry explain what it is not: “(W)hite Christian nationalism is not ‘Christian patriotism’; white Christian nationalism…. is rooted in white supremacist assumptions and empowered by anger and fear. This is nationalism, not patriotism… Second, white Christian nationalism is not synonymous with white evangelicalism per se, even if there is considerable overlap… Third and finally, white Christian nationalism is not just a problem among white American Christians. There are secular versions of white Christian nationalism that claim to defend ‘Western Culture’ or ‘Judeo-Christian civilization.’ And there are secular white Americans who know how to leverage white Christian nationalist language. For such Americans, the ‘Christian’ label simply signals shared tribal identity or veils political values that would otherwise be socially unacceptable. That is certainly how Trump himself used the label—as a rallying cry and a fig leaf—and one reason why so many white Christians have been attracted to him: not because he himself is an exemplar of Christian piety, but because he waved the Christian flag and announced his willingness to ‘fight’ for it.” (The Flag and The Cross, pp. 8-10)

The book is not principally about the institution of public education, but it says a lot about today’s assault on inclusive public schools. The authors name some of what’s been happening in recent years and in addition create a theoretical scaffolding to help us understand attacks on public education as part of a scheme to use public schools to protect the dominant culture.  Here are four threats to public education that reflect white Christian nationalism:

  • opposition to teaching about racism in American history, and the passage of state laws to ban multicultural education, and ‘diversity, equity and inclusion;’ (The Flag and The Cross, p. 14);
  •  efforts to permit religious education at public expense—promotimg the beliefs of specific faith traditions and undermining the protection of religious liberty (The Flag and The Cross, p. 16);
  • efforts to block school integration after Brown v. Board of Education (The Flag and The Cross, p. 69); and
  • the recent proposal by the Heritage Foundation of a strategy to overturn Plyler v. Doe to exclude from public schools undocumented students who cannot afford to pay tuition.

All  of these attacks exemplify pushback against inclusion and welcome for ‘the other’: “The first and most fundamental way in which white Christian nationalism threatens American liberal democracy is that it defines ‘the people’ in a way that excludes many Americans. White Christian nationalism is a form of what is often called ‘ethno-nationalism.’ Liberal democracy rests on what is usually called ‘civic nationalism’ It defines the nation in terms of values, laws, and institutions.’” (The Flag and The Cross, p. 114)

Categories Education Reform

Network for Public Education Ranked One of Nation’s Most Influential Education Organizations!

By dianeravitch
April 26, 2024 //
2

A group of scholars at Indiana University led by Christopher Lubienski developed a methodology for ranking organizations and individuals in the field of education.

It was disheartening to see that nine of the ten most influential organizations advocate for school privatization, for charter schools and vouchers. It was also disheartening to see that these nine organizations have revenues in the millions of dollars each year. They are heavily funded by rightwing organizations and billionaires.

It was exciting, however, to see that #3 on the list of the 10 most influential organizations was the Network for Public Education!

It also was the organization with the smallest budget!

Wow! Standing up for public schools without billionaire $$$!
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Media, Privatization, Research, School Choice, Supporting public schools

Carol Burris on the Wisdom Rick Hess Gleans from Uber Drivers

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2024 //
23

Years ago, there was buzz about New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s tendency to quote taxi drivers to capture the view of the “man on the street.” Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for public Education, has recently noticed that Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute has a similar journalistic gambit. He picks up policy clues from Uber drivers.

She writes:

It seems like Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a think tank that loves all things school choice, has an extraordinary gift for bringing out the inner Betsy DeVos in every Uber Driver he meets.

 Recently, the Hessian Uber adventure was a story about how his Uber driver hates student loan forgiveness. Yes, of course, that must be true. An Uber driver would be absolutely furious if they or their brother, son, or daughter had some help with their crushing student debt. Everyone knows that Uber drivers only hang with the 2%.

 When I call an Uber, I never get the same driver, but Rick gets repeats. Just a few months ago, that same driver picked up Rick and gave him an earful about the Newton, Massachusetts, teacher strike. For the second time, she even let Rick take her picture in the rearview mirror and put it in Ed Next. 

 However, that Uber driver is not nearly as outraged as the teacher-bashing Uber driver Rick met in 2018. She was even willing to throw her own teacher husband under the bus (or should I say, cab). And Rick got it all down, along with her picture.

 Please don’t confuse that Uber driver with the very well-informed driver Rick met in 2016 who told Rick that “reformers used to take great joy in seeing traditional school districts pilloried by John Stossel …”  Now that is one interesting Uber driver. I never heard of John Stossel. All of this pillory talk was part of a deeper conversation about Jon Oliver’s very funny show criticizing charter schools. This Uber driver defended public schools, but by the end of the ride, Rick had set him straight.

 I don’t take Ubers. I prefer yellow cabs. We talk about traffic, the weather, or the price of gas. These Uber rides must be absolutely exhausting for poor Rick. Maybe next time, he should call a Lyft. 

 

 

Categories Education Reform

David Berliner: The U.S. Has Many Wonderful Teachers, and Few Who Are “Bad” Teachers

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2024 //
12

Good and Bad Teachers: So Many More of the Former,

So Many Fewer of the Latter

David C. Berliner 

Arizona State University

A refereed journal article by colleagues1reported on a survey of adults, asking for their beliefs about “good teachers.” The respondents defined good teachers as those who “knew me, cared about me, and wanted me to do well; created interesting activities for us to do; praised me and other students for good grades and improvements; gave extra help or a challenge to students who needed or wanted it; covered a lot of material that was useful; and made learning relevant to me and my life.”

These respondents had little trouble recallingsuch teachers. Good teachers demonstrated caring and support, along with strong subjectmatter knowledge. They also estimated that more than two-thirds of their teachers were good or very good teachers, and they believed that only 12% of their teachers were bad or very bad.

​With a different set of colleagues2, I studied what students said about their “bad teachers”. In that study we had access to 4.8 million ratings of teachers! Using a 100-point scale, 55% of our respondents gave a maximum rating of 100 (the best score), 75% gave a rating of 80 or more, and 89% gave a rating greater than 50 points. These data are compatible with other studies suggesting that America’s students are exposed to highpercentages of “good” teachers, and a lowpercentage of “bad” teachers. 

From other research, Berliner estimated the number of “bad” teachers in the USA to be about 3%, with “bad” being generally and poorly defined. The well-respected Hechinger report, in 2014,reported that states such as Tennessee, Michigan, Georgia, Florida, and Pennsylvania, particularly in Pittsburgh, all provided estimates of “bad” teachers that were in this same low range. Danielson, who visited and coded hundreds of classrooms, estimated the “bad teacher” percentage to be around 6%. From those who are experienced classroom analysts, that seems to be on the high end of the estimates in the literature—though it is still a relatively low percentage. 

Furthermore, in our study, when we analyzed the comments associated with teachers judged to be “bad,” we found that unanimity among the classmates of those who rated their teachers poorly was quite rare. Nevertheless, we did find a few classrooms where the unanimity and diversity of the charges leveled by students against their teachers made us think that a particular teacher should be dismissed immediately! However, for large numbers of teachers who were rated “incompetent” or “bad” by many of their students, we found other reviews (and sometimes many such reviews) of the same teacher that were positive. Further analysis showed why such disparate judgements made sense. For example, a teacher may be rated poorly because they have strict rules about how essays should be done andgrade them accordingly. And teachers’ who were quite strict about classroom behavior, or who gave out lots of homework, might also be rated low by some of their students. But for other students–say those who make few grammatical mistakes, those who don’t act out in classes, and those who do not find their homework burdensome, ratings of their teachers might be considerably higher. In our study, this seemed to explain why so many reviews of teachers by students were not uniformly either positive ornegative. 

​So, what do we know through research–not from publicity-seeking partisan news columnists, irate parents, or the public-school critics among the “Moms for Liberty? Research suggests wecan defend a general statement such as this:“Among America’s 3+ million public-schoolteachers, the numbers of genuinely “bad” public school teachers are quite small, while the numbers of “acceptable” and “good” public school teachers is quite large.” Furthermore, both the positive and negative characteristics of these teachers are recognized by adults long after they have experienced them. Given the relatively low pay, low prestige, difficulty of the work, and fairly regular abuse of teachers by some parents and newspapers, how lucky we are to have staff for the public-schools that are generally so well regarded.

 

 

1. Haas, E., Fischman, G., & Pivovarova, M. (2023). Public beliefs about good teaching. Research in Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/00345237231207717

 

2. Valcarcel, C., Holmes, J., Berliner, D. C., & Koerner, M. (2021). The value of student feedback in open forums: A natural analysis of descriptions of poorly rated teachers.  Education Policy Analysis Archives, 29 (January – July), 79. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.29.6289

Categories Education Reform, Research, Teachers

Peter Greene: How to Ease the Burden of Teachers Who Are Overworked

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
43

Peter Greene was a classroom teacher for 39 years, and he knows that teachers are overworked. There are not enough hours in the day for them to meet all their obligations. He considers in this post what to do. He certainly does not think that AI or scripted curriculum is the answer.

He writes:

When I was ploughing through the Pew Center survey of teachers, I thought of Robert Pondiscio.

Specifically, it was the part about the work itself. 84% of teachers report that there’s not enough time in the day to get their work done, and among those, 81% said that a major reason was they just have too much work (another 17% said this was a minor reason, meaning that virtually no overstretched teachers thought it wasn’t part of the problem at all). The other reasons, like non-teaching duties, didn’t even come close.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world this weekend, Pondiscio was presenting on something that has been a consistent theme in his work– Teaching is too hard for mere mortals, and we need a system that allows teachers to focus on teaching. 

Pondiscio has long argued that some aspects of teaching need to be taken off teachers’ plates so that they can put more of their energy into actual classroom instruction. I’ve always pushed back, but maybe I need to re-examine the issue a bit. 

Plugging 47 Extension Cords Into One Power Strip

Certainly every teacher learns that there’s never enough. One of my earliest viral hits was this piece about how nobody warns teachers that they will have to compromise and cut corners somewhere. It touched many, many nerves. We all have stories. My first year of teaching I worked from 7 AM to 11 PM pretty much every day. I had a gifted colleague who couldn’t bring herself to compromise on workload, so once every nine weeks grading period, she took a personal day just to sit at home and grade and enter papers. And let’s be honest–being the teacher who walks out the door as the bell rings, and who carries nothing out the door with them–that does not win you the admiration of your colleagues.

Being overworked is part of the gig, and some of us wear our ability to manage that workload as a badge of honor, like folks who are proud of surviving an initiation hazing and insist that the new recruits should suck it up and run the same gauntlet. On reflection, I must admit this may not be entirely healthy, especially considering the number of young teachers who blame themselves because they can’t simply gut their way past having overloaded circuits. 

There’s also resistance because the “let’s give teachers a break” argument is used by 1) vendors with “teacher-assisting” junk to sell and 2) folks who want to deprofessionalize teaching. That second group likes the notion of “teacher-proof” programs, curriculum in a box that can be delivered by any dope (“any dope” constitutes a large and therefor inexpensive labor pool).

We could lighten the teacher load, the argument goes, by reducing their agency and autonomy. Not in those exact words, of course. That would make it obvious why that approach isn’t popular.

Lightening the Load

So what are the ways that the burden of teaching could be reduced to a size suitable for actual mortals. 

Some of the helps are obvious. Reduce the number of non-teaching duties that get laid on teachers. Study halls. Cafeteria duty. Minute-by-minute surveillance and supervision of students. 

Some of the helps are obvious to teachers, yet difficult to implement. Most schools has a variety of policies and procedures surrounding clerical tasks that are set up to make life easier for people in the front office, not teachers in the classroom (e.g. collecting students excuses for absence, managing lunch money, etc). Then there’s the tendency to see new programs adopted at the state or district level with a cavalier, “We’ll just have teachers do that” as if there are infinite minutes in the teacher day and adding one more thing won’t be a big deal. Imagine a world in which preserving teacher time was a major sacred priority. 

Some of the helps would be hard to sell because they would cost real money. Quickest way to reduce teacher workload? Smaller classes. Or more non-teaching hours in the day for teachers to use for prep and paperwork (hard sell because so many boards believe that a teacher is only working when she’s in front of students). These are both tough because they require hiring more staff which 1) costs a bunch of money and 2) requires finding more of the qualified teachers that we already don’t have enough of.

So what are we left with?

Hiring aids to do strictly clerical stuff like scoring objective tests and putting grades into the gradebook. There are also plenty of folks trying to sell the idea of suing AI to grade the non-objective stuff like essays; this is a terrible idea for many reasons. I will admit that I was always resistant to the idea of even letting someone record grades for me, because recording grades was part of how I got a sense of how students were doing. Essentially it was a way to go over every single piece of graded work. But that would be a way to reclaim some time.

But after all that, we’ve come down the biggie, and the thing that Pondiscio has always argued is a huge lift for mere mortals–

Curriculum and instructional planning.

The Main Event

As a classroom teacher, the mere suggestion of being required to use canned curriculum made my hackles climb right up on my high dudgeon pony. For me, designing the lessons was part of any important loop. Teach the material. Take the temperature of the students and measure success. Develop the next lesson based on that feedback. That’s for daily instruction. A larger, longer, slower loop tied into larger scale feedback plus a constant check on what we’d like to include in the program. 

I like to think that I was pretty good at instructional design. But I must also admit that not everyone is, and that teachers who aren’t can create a host of issues. I will also fly my old fart flag to say that the last twenty years have produced way too many neo-teachers who were taught that if you design your instruction about the Big Standardized Test (maybe using select pieces of the state standards as a guide) you’re doing the job. I don’t want to wander down this rabbit, but I disagree, strenuously. 

So is there a place for some sort of high-quality instructional design and curriculum support for mere mortal teachers. Yes. Well, yes, but.

While I think a school should have a consistent culture and set of values, I think a building full of teachers who work in a wide variety of styles and approaches and techniques is by far the best way to go. Students will grow up to encounter a wide variety of styles and approaches in the world; why should they not find that in school (and with that variety, a better chance of finding a teacher with whom they click)?

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

SAVE THE DATE: The Ravitch Lecture at Wellesley Is April 18, This Thursday!

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
12

All are welcome to a very important lecture at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Admission is free. Join me!

The speaker is a pioneer of critical race theory.

Professor Soo Hong, chair of the Education Department at Wellesley, released the following announcement.

We are thrilled to announce that our 2024 Ravitch Lecture in Education will be presented by Professor Patricia Williams ’72, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. Professor Williams’s talk is titled, “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History.”

This is a topic that feels relevant now more than ever. 

The lecture will be held on Thursday, April 18, 4:30 PM in Jewett Auditorium. Please share the details of this event widely!

************************************************************

Description of “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History” 
We live in an oddly contradictory moment: politicians who position themselves as supporters of “absolute” freedom of speech simultaneously enact laws that restrict access to books about race, gender, or critical theory, and seek to constrain conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. There have always been “culture wars” in America—it is not surprising that conversations about traumatic histories and contested historical perspectives might be fractious. In a civil society, we commit to arguing our way to consensus, however noisily or uncomfortably, and even if it takes generations. But it is the mark of an uncivil—or authoritarian—society when we find ourselves without the right to speak, hear, write, publish, dissent, or share common space even in our disagreement. The First Amendment rightly allows us to curtail speech that poses an “imminent threat of physical harm.” But recent “anti-woke” laws banish from public spaces books and ideas that merely might inspire “shame,” “guilt,” or “discomfort.” This lecture will ponder the conceptual chasm between those two notions of constraint upon speech. What power imbalance, what uses of force are rationalized in erasing whole histories from collective contemplation? What civic dispossession is enacted when certain lives or lived narratives are discounted as intolerable, unknowable–whose mere recounting is silenced as illegal?

Wellesley Logo

Soo Hong

The lecture will be taped and available online at a later time.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Racism

Julian Vasquez Heilig on a Bluebook of Educational Thinkers

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2024 //
61

Julian Vasquez Heilig, Provost at Western Michigan University and founding board member of the Network for Public Education , here reflects on his personal connection to a comprehensive new review of prominent thinkers in education—of which he is one!

He begins:

The upcoming Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers evokes a deep sense of connection with the lineage of educators and thinkers who have sculpted the contours of educational discourse and practice from antiquity onward. The roster of thinkers, whose work spans the spectrum of educational thought and action, represents a mosaic of visions and voices that have collectively pushed the boundaries of what education can and should be…

Then the Table of Contents:

The list of these thinkers, as featured in the handbook, reads as a roll call of transformative influence and enduring legacy:

Section I. Antiquity to 1200 
1. Peter Abélard  
2. Aristotle  
3. Buddha  
4. Cicero  
5. Confucius

6. Horace  
7. Isocrates  
8. Plato  
9. Plutarch  
10. Pythagoras 
11. Seneca  
12. Socrates  
13. St. Augustine 

14. Thucydides  
15. Virgil  
16. Hipparchia 
17. Akka Mahadevi  
18. Gargi Vachaknavi 
19. Hypatia  
20. Hildegarde of Bingen 

Section II. 1200 – 1900


1. Rodolphus Agricola  
2. Louisa May Alcott  
3. Thomas Aquinas  
4. Matthew Arnold  
5. Robert Ascham  
6. Francis Bacon  
7. Louis Braille  
8. John Calvin  
9. John Amos Comenius  
10. Gabriel Compayre  
11. Charles Darwin  
12. Eugenio Maria De Hostos  
13. Michel de Montaigne  
14. Charles Dickens  
15. Thomas Elyot  
16. Ralph Waldo Emerson  
17. Desiderius Erasmus  
18. Johann Gotlieb Fichte  
19. August Herman Francke  
20. Benjamin Franklin  
21. Valentin Friedland  
22. Fredric Froebel  
23. Nikolai Frederick Grundtvig  
24. Francois Guizot  
25. Valentin Hauy  
26. Georg Wilhelm 
27. Johann Friedrick Herbart  
28. Thomas Jefferson  
29. Immanuel Kant  
30. Arthur F. Leah  
31. John Locke  
32. Ignatius Loyola  
33. Martin Luther 34. Horace Mann  
35. Phillip Melanchthon  
36. John Stuart Mill  
37. Richard Mulcaster  
38. John Henry Newman  
39. Friedrich Nietzsche  
40. Robert Owen 

41. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi  
42. Wolfgang Ratke  
43. Charles Rollin 
44. Jean Jacques Rousseau  
45. John Ruskin  
46. Egerton Ryerson  
47. Herbert Spencer 48. Johannes Strum  
49. Juan Luis Vives  
50. Wilhelm Von Humboldt 
51. John Wesley  
52. Mary Wollstonecraft 

Section III. 1900 – 1970 

1. Jane Addams  
2. Hannah Arendt  
3. Margaret Bancroft  
4. Alfred Binet  
5. Benjamin Bloom  
6. Harry Broudy  
7. Jerome Bruner  
8. Martin Buber  
9. Cyril Lodovic Burt  
10. Noam Chomsky  
11. Lawrence A Cremin  
12. John Dewey  
13. Donalda Dickie  
14. WEB Dubois  
15. Emile Durkheim  
16. M.K. Gandhi  
17. Antonio Gramsci  
18. Kurt Hahn  
19. Martin Heidigger  
20. Susan Isaacs  
21. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze  
22. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper 23. Bel Kaufman  
24. 22. Helen Keller  
25. Clark Kerr  
26. Melanie Klein  
27. Janusz Korczak  
28. Charlotte Mason  
29. Maria Montessori  
30. A.S. Neill  
31. Michael Oakeshott  
32. Jean Piaget 
33. Carl Rogers  
34. Bertrand Russell  
35. Edward Said  
36. Joseph Schwab  
37. BF Skinner. 
38. Rudolf Steiner  
39. Rabindranath Tagore  
40. Ralph Winifrid Tyler  
41. Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky  
42. Booker T. Washington  
43. Max Weber 

43. Simone Weil  
44. Ludwig Wittgensten  
45. Jose Ortega Y Gasset  
46. Howard Zinn 

Section IV. 1970 – Current 

1. Cami Anderson  
2. Josh Angrist  
3. Michael W. Apple 
4. James A. Banks  
5. David C. Berliner  
6. Jo Boaler  
7. Derek Curtis Bok 
8. Pierre Bordieux  
9. Geoffrey Canada  
10. Raj Chetty  
11. David Coleman  
12. David Cooperrider 
13. Linda Darling-Hammond  
14. Edward De Bono  
15. Jeff Duncan-Andrade  
16. Angela Duckworth  
17. Nell K. Duke 
18. Greg J. Duncan 

19. Carol Dweck  
20. Richard Elmore  
21. Michel Foucaut  
22. Paulo Freire  
23. Howard Gardner  
24. Henry Giroux  
25. Gene V. Glass  
26. John I. Goodlad  
27. Bryan Goodwin  
28. Maxine Greene  
29. Erin Gruewell  
30. Eric Hanushek 
31. Shaun R. Harper  
32. Clara Hemphill  
33. Frederick Hess  
34. John Holt  
35. bell hooks  
36. Ivan Illich  
37. Baruti Kafele  
38. Salman Kahn  
39. Lawrence Kohlberg  
40. Gloria Ladson-Billings 

41. Zeus Leonardo  
42. Dennis Littky  
43. Bettina Love  
44. Angela Maiers  
45. Jane Roland Martin 
46. Robert J. Marzano  
47. Deborah Meier 
48. Rich Milner  
49. Sugata Mitra  
50. Michael Grahame Moore  
51. Richard J. Murnane  
52. Nel Noddings 
53. Pedro Noguera  
54. Martha Nussbaum  
55. Julius Nyrere  
56. Gary Orfield  
57. R.S. Peters  
58. Robert C. Pianta  
59. Diane Ravitch  
60. Sean F. Reardon  
61. Joeseph Renzulli  
62. Sir Ken Robinson  
63. Pasi Sahlberg  
64. Seymour B. Sarason  
65. Lee S. Schulman 
66. Jack Pl Shonkoff 
67. Theodore Sizer  
68. Robert E. Slavin  
69. Catherine Snow

70. William G. Tierney  
71. Carol A. Tomlinson  
72. Beverly Tatum  
73. Virginia Uribe  
74. Paul Wehman  
75. Daniel Willingham  
76. Patrick J. Wolf

 77. Yong Zhao  
78. Estela Bensimon  
79. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot  
80. Adrianna Caesar

81. Julian Vasquez Heilig

Each name on this list represents a chapter in the ongoing story of educational evolution—a story marked by challenges, innovations, and insights that have, in their own unique ways, reshaped the landscape of learning and teaching.

He then goes on to discuss his personal relationship with several of those on the list, including David Berliner, Pierre Bourdieu, Linda Darling Hammond, Shaun R. Harper, Frederick Hess, bell hooks, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Bettina love, Pedro Noguera, Gary Orfield, me, and Sean Reardon.

Julian Vasquez Heilig and me!

Categories Education Reform, History

NEPC: There Is No “Science” in the “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
April 12, 2024 //
27

The National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado posted a summary of research about the current “Science of Reading” fad, which finds that the “science” is missing. SoR has turned into another “miracle cure” that is being imposed and mandated by legislatures, anticipating a dramatic result in which “no child is left behind.”

NEPC reports:

What’s scientific about the “science of reading?”

Not much, according to NEPC Fellow Elena Aydarova of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as explained in a recent article published in the peer-refereed Harvard Educational Review. In fact, she warns that legislators are using science-of-reading legislation to distract from more serious approaches to addressing students’ needs.

Using an “anthropology of policy approach,” Aydarova zeroes in on legislative debates surrounding science of reading (SOR) reforms that have swept the nation in the past half decade. As of July 2022, 29 states and the District of Columbia had adopted this approach, Aydarova writes.

Aydarova closely examines Tennessee’s Literacy Success Act (LSA). She analyses videos of legislative meetings and debates, stakeholder interviews, and examinations of bills, policy reports, media coverage, and other documents associated with the LSA, which was passed in 2021.

This SOR bill was first introduced in 2020. As the bill underwent revisions, the phrase “science of reading” was substituted with “foundational literacy skills” to describe the same content: “Across contexts and artifacts produced by various actors, the meanings of ‘science of reading’ shifted and were frequently replaced with new signs, such as ‘foundational literacy skills,’ ‘phonics,’ and others.”

Aydarova finds little evidence that advocates, intermediaries, or legislators grounded their support in anything resembling scientific evidence. Instead, “science of reading” becomes a catch-all phrase representing a grab bag of priorities and beliefs: “[I]n advocates’ testimonies and in legislative deliberations, neuroscience as SOR’s foundational element was reduced to vague references to ‘brain’ and was often accompanied by casual excuses that speakers did not know what ‘it all’ meant.”

Motivations for supporting SOR reforms range from commercial to ideological. For instance, Aydarova notes that after the passage of The Literacy Success Act in 2021, nearly half of Tennessee’s school districts adopted curricula promoted by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. This campaign, supported by curriculum companies such as Amplify and wealthy backers such as the Charles Koch Foundation, added SOR wording to its marketing effort as the curriculum it had originally supported fell out of favor due to its association with Common Core State Standards, which had become politically unpopular in many states.

As the SOR bill reached the legislative floor, “science” was rarely mentioned.

“The link to science disappeared, and instead the sign shifted toward tradition rooted in these politicians’ own past experiences,” Aydarova writes. “During final deliberations, legislators shared that they knew phonics worked because they had learned to read with its help themselves.”

Concerningly, the bill’s supporters also positioned it as “a substitution for investing in communities and creating the safety nets that were necessary for families to climb out of poverty.”

For instance, legislators dismissed as “state over-reach” proposals that would have expanded access to early education or placed more social workers in schools in underserved communities. Yet they “emphasized the importance of proposing legislation to reform reading instruction to solve other social issues,” such as incarceration, impoverishment, and unemployment. Aydarova writes:

Based on artificial causality—poverty and imprisonment rates would decline if phonics was used for reading instruction—these reforms naturalized the widening socioeconomic inequities and depoliticized social conditions of precarity that contribute to growing prison populations. Through these material substitutions, the SOR legislation promised students and their communities freedom, and robbed them of it at the same time.

In the end, Aydarova finds that, “Science has little bearing on what is proposed or discussed, despite various policy actors’ claims to the contrary. Instead, SOR myths link tradition, curriculum products, and divestment from social safety nets.”

Categories Education Reform, Hoax, Literacy, Research, Tennessee

Michigan: State Board Passes Resolution to Put Charter Schools Under Same Rules as Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2024 //
16

Michigan, under Republican control for years, has given free rein to charter schools and has long been overrun with unaccountable for-profit schools. But the Governor, Gretchen Whitney, is now a Democrat, and the elected State Board of Education is no longer controlled by Republicans. The State Board took a shocking step this week. It resolved that charter schools should be held to the same rules as public schools.

The State Board of Education approved a resolution during its meeting today calling for legislation to open charter schools to be treated more like public schools in the state of Michigan.

Mitchell ROBINSON’s resolution made the agenda and asked the state Legislature to create and pass laws that would put charter schools under the approval of the Michigan Department of Education and make them more transparent by opening them up to the Freedom of Information Act and Open Meetings Act.

The resolution also asked for legislation that would require charter schools to follow many of the same requirements as public schools, such as bidding for vendors, requirements that no child be excluded from enrolling, not refusing transfer students if space is open, require teachers and administrators to hold certificates, and mandate contracts for management organizations be published online.

“So charter schools are technically public schools, so they should be expected to follow regulations regarding transparency, as all publicly funded schools are,” Robinson said.

However, he said many charter schools are dominated by politically-motivated special interest groups, those looking to be education reformers, and “predatory for-profit organizations.”

He said he’s looked at the charter school system in Michigan and found that they make up one-third of all the local education agencies in the state and are not accountable to the communities.

“I see no evidence of innovation in this service sector,” he said.

He said the public school system struggles to adequately fund itself, not even adding the charter system that also pulls funding for the 363 schools across 285 districts.

“This is financially irresponsible,” he said.

The sole no vote against the resolution came from Tom McMILLIN, a Republican board member. 

He argued that charter schools fill in gaps in education and were already fully transparent with the public funding they received. 

“These charter schools give parents choices. They fill up for a reason,” McMillin said.

He said the teachers and administrators were already required to be certified.

“What this would do is simply force charter schools to not open, which is what some people want,” McMillin said.

Marshall BULLOCK II pointed to troubles with charter schools in the Detroit area closing without warning or opening in a struggling district that could have the “unintended consequence” of splitting a neighborhood.

“That is how you destroy a neighborhood,” Bullock said.

McMillin called it “perverse” to not give parents a choice and “force them, based on their zip code, to a failing school.” He placed the problem at the feet of the state superintendent.

Tiffany TILLEY asked that the board hear a presentation to look at what other states are doing in terms of charter schools.

“Michigan has become kind of like the Wild Wild West when it comes to charter schools,” Tilley said.

She said you can’t have “thousands” of charter schools with no transparency and continue to maintain a well-funded system, but putting a limit on the number of charters schools could help.

“We do need to change the laws and this has gone on for a very long time,” she said.

Now if only the Michigan legislature would ban for-profit charters! No public school operates for profit. The “profit” is inevitably taken from students and teachers. It’s wrong.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Michigan

New York Will Move Away from Teacher Evaluation Tied to Test Scores

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2024 //
48

Back in 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rolled out his Race to the Top program to reform American education. The U.S. Department of Education offered a total of $5 billion to states. To be eligible to compete for a part of the huge prize money, states had to agree to authorize charter schools, to adopt the Common Core (not yet finished), and to evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students.

The requirement to change teacher evaluation was heated. Duncan scoffed at critics, saying they were trying to protect bad teachers and didn’t want to know the truth.

Debate over this methodology was heated.

I was part of a group of education scholars who denounced this method of evaluating teachers in 2010.

In 2012, three noted scholars claimed that teachers who raised test scores raised students’ lifetime incomes; President Obama cited this study, led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, in his State of the Union address. It seemed to be settled wisdom that teachers who raised test scores were great, and teachers who did not should be ousted.

In 2014, the American Statistical Association warned about the danger of evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. The ASA statement said that most studies of this method find that teachers account for 1-14% of the variation in test scores. The greatest opportunity for improvement, they said, was to be found in system-level changes.

The Gates Foundation poured hundreds of millions of dollars into districts willing to test value-added methodology, and eventually gave up. Teachers were demoralized, teachers avoided teaching in low-income districts. Overall improvements were hard to find.

Arne Duncan was a true believer, as was his successor, John King, and they never were willing to admit failure.

Teachers never liked VAM. They knew that it encouraged teaching to the test. They knew that teachers in affluent districts would get higher scores than those in less fortunate districts. Sometimes they sued and won. But in most states, teachers continued to be evaluated in part by their students’ scores.

But in New York state, the era of VAM is finished. Dr. Betty Rosa, the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, reached an agreement with Melinda Person, president of New York State United Teachers, to draft a new way of evaluating teachers that moves away from students’ standardized test scores.

New York state education leaders and the teachers’ union have announced an agreement to change how New York school teachers and principals are evaluated, and move away from the mandated reliance on standardized test scores.

State Education Department Commissioner Betty Rosa and New York State United Teachers President Melinda Person hand-delivered their drafted legislation Wednesday to lawmakers to create a new system that doesn’t use students’ test performance to penalize educators. The state teacher evaluation system, known as the Annual Professional Performance Review, or APPR, was modified in the 2015 budget to place a greater importance on scores.

“It’s connecting research to practice and developing strategies to ensure that teachers have the best tools and principals to make sure our young people are getting the best quality education,” Rosa told reporters Wednesday in the Legislative Office Building.

When NYSUT elected president Person last year, she said her first task was to change the teacher evaluation system, and state lawmakers said with confidence Wednesday it will happen this session.

The proposed law, which has not officially been introduced in the Legislature, would remove the requirement to base evaluations on high-stakes tests. School districts would have eight years to transition, but could make the changes faster than the required deadline.

Person argued it will support new teachers who are often burdened by the required paperwork under the current model.

“This would be a fair and a just system that would support them in becoming better educators, which is ultimately what they want to do anyway,” Person said.

The proposal was negotiated in agreement with state superintendents, principals, school boards, the PTA, Conference of Big 5 School Districts and other stakeholders. The issue has been contentious for union and education leaders for years, and both state Education Committee chairs in the Legislature said they’re thrilled with the agreement. 

“That’s such a nice thing in Albany,” said Senate Education chair Shelley Mayer, a Democrat from Yonkers. “Who can do that? Who gets agreement? It’s very hard around here.

“It takes a woman to do it,” Assembly Education chair Michael Benedetto replied with a smile.

Benedetto, a Bronx Democrat, was a classroom teacher for decades and recalled how feedback helps educators develop when done in the proper way.

“It’s like anything else — we want stability in our lives, we want to know where we’re going, how we’re going to be rated and what we’re going to be rated on, as a teacher, as a professional,” the assemblyman said.

Lawmakers will review the proposal and draft legislation in the coming weeks.

Remembering how strident were the supporters of VAM, it’s kind of wonderful to hear the collective sigh of relief in Albany as it fades away.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling)
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