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Phonics Is Important. But There Is No “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2023 //
48

One of my grandsons sent me an article about the national rush to mandate “the science of reading,” and it caused me to explain briefly (without boring him) the background of the latest panacea.

I didn’t tell him the history of the “reading wars,” which I researched and wrote about in Left Back (2000). I didn’t tell him that reading instruction has swung back and forth between the phonetic method and the “whole word” method since the introduction of public schooling in the first quarter of the 19th century. Horace Mann opposed phonics. But the popular McGuffey readers of that century were phonetic. In 1930, the Dick-and-Jane readers were introduced, and they swept the country. Unlike the McGuffey readers, they featured pictures of children (white and suburban), they used simple words that could be easily recognized, and they were bright and colorful. By the 1950s, Dick and Jane style readers were used in about 80% of American schools. They relied on the whole word method, also know as look-say.

In 1955, this national consensus was disrupted by the publication of Rudolf Flesch’s wildly popular book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, which castigated the look-say method and urged a revival of phonics. The fervor for phonics then is similar to the fervor now.

But the debate about which method was best quickly became politicized. “Bring back phonics” was the battle cry of very conservative groups, who lambasted the whole-word method as the conspiratorial work of liberal elites. Phonics thus was unfairly tarnished as a rightwing cause.

The definitive book about the teaching of reading was written in 1967 by Harvard literacy expert Jeanne Chall: Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Chall wrote about the importance of phonics as part of beginning reading instruction, followed up by wonderful children’s literature. She warned against going to extremes, a warning that has been ignored with every pendulum swing.

The 1980s began the dominance of whole language, which brought back whole-word sight reading and de-emphasized phonics. Textbook companies boasted that their programs were whole language. Literacy conferences were focused on whole language. Phonics was out. Many reading teachers held on their phonics books, even though phonics was out of style.

There is always a crisis in reading, so in the late 1990s, the pendulum began to move again. As it happened, a very influential supporter of phonics held a key position at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Reid Lyon was director of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Development. His field of expertise was learning disabilities.

From Wikipedia:

From 1992 to 2005, Lyon served as a research neuropsychologist and the chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the NICHD at the National Institutes of Health; in this role he developed and oversaw research programs in cognitive neuroscience, learning and reading development and disorders, behavioral pediatrics, cognitive and affective development, School Readiness, and the Spanish to English Reading Research program. He designed, developed and directed the 44-site NICHD Reading Research Network.

Lyon selected the members of the National Reading Panel. Like him, most were experimental researchers in higher education. Only one—Joanne Yatvin— was experienced as an elementary school teacher and principal. She wrote a “minority view” dissenting from the report, and she worried that the report would be misused.

President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law on January 8, 2002. This law was the single largest intrusion of the federal government into education in American history. Before NCLB, education was a state responsibility. Since passage of NCLB, the federal government established mandates that schools had to obey.

One of the components of this law was the Reading First program. RF was based on the report of the National Reading Panel, which emphasized the importance of phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and fluency.

The Reading First program allocated $6 billion over six years to encourage districts to adopt the “science of reading,” as established by the National Reading panel.

There were two reasons that the program ended.

First, there were financial scandals. Google “Reading First Program Scandals”). The New York Times reported here about conflicts of interest and steering of contracts to favored textbook publishers. “In a searing report that concludes the first in a series of investigations into complaints of political favoritism in the reading initiative, known as Reading First, the report said officials improperly selected the members of review panels that awarded large grants to states, often failing to detect conflicts of interest. The money was used to buy reading textbooks and curriculum for public schools nationwide.”

Second, the final evaluation of the program found that it taught what it aimed to teach but there was no improvement in students’ comprehension.

Here is the summary of the final evaluation:

The findings presented in this report are generally consistent with findings presented in the study’s Interim Report, which found statistically significant impacts on instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) in grades one and two, and which found no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension as measured by the SAT 10. In addition to data on the instructional and student achievement outcomes reported in the Interim Report, the final report also presents findings based upon information obtained during the study’s third year of data collection: data from a measure of first grade students’ decoding skill, and data from self-reported surveys of educational personnel in study schools.

Analyses of the impact of Reading First on aspects of program implementation, as reported by teachers and reading coaches, revealed that the program had statistically significant impacts on several domains. The information obtained from the Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency indicates that Reading First had a positive and statistically significant impact on first grade students’ decoding skill.

The final report also explored a number of hypotheses to explain the pattern of observed impacts. Analyses that explored the association between the length of implementation of Reading First in the study schools and reading comprehension scores, as well as between the number of years students had been exposed to Reading First instruction and reading comprehension scores were inconclusive. No statistically significant variation across sites in the pattern of impacts was found. Correlational analyses suggest that there is a positive association between time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program and reading comprehension measured by the SAT 10, but these findings appear to be sensitive to model specification and the sample used to estimate the relationship.

The study finds, on average, that after several years of funding the Reading First program, it has a consistent positive effect on reading instruction yet no statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension. Findings based on exploratory analyses do not provide consistent or systematic insight into the pattern of observed impacts.

After the disgrace of the Reading First program, support for phonics dissipated. But in the past few years, journalists (led by Emily Hanford) have trumpeted the idea that the report of the National Reading Panel established the “science of reading.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about the “Mississippi Miracle,“ claiming that the “science of reading” had lifted fourth grade reading scores, and no new spending was needed in a very poorly resourced state. Kristof did not explain why the SOR did not cause a rise in eighth grade scores in Mississippi, nor did he understand that retaining low-scoring third graders raises the percentage of fourth graders who get high test scores. State after state is now mandating the “science of reading.”

And so the cycle begins again.

Categories Education Reform, History, Literacy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Peter Greene: Petrilli Says, Let’s Do NCLB Again

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2023 //
64

Peter Greene weighs in on Mike Petrilli’s article in the New York Times.

He writes:

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.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, High School Graduation, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Turnaround Schools, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

No, Mike Petrilli, We Must Not Revive NCLB

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2023 //
57

Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, published an article in the New York Times yesterday in which he lamented the “learning loss” caused by the pandemic and called for a new national effort, like No Child Left Behind, to instill rigor and accountability, which he says will raise test scores. Time to bring back tough love, he wrote.

I have a hard time criticizing Mike Petrilli because I like him. When I was on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute, I got to know Mike, and he’s a genuinely good guy. But when I left the board of the TBF Institute in 2009, it was because I no longer shared its beliefs and values. I concluded as early as 2007 that No Child Left Behind was a failure. I wrote an article in the conservative journal EdNext in 2008 about NCLB, saying “End It,” paired with an article by the late John Chubb saying, “Mend It.”TBF sponsored charter schools in Ohio—a move I opposed because think tanks should be evaluating policy, not implementing it; also, during the time I was on the board, the charters sponsored by TBF failed.

By the time I left, I had concluded that the NCLB emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing was a disaster. It caused narrowing the curriculum, gaming the system, cheating, excessive test prep, and squeezed the joy of teaching and learning out of classrooms.

Furthermore, the very idea that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education were stigmatizing schools as failures and closing them was outrageous. I worked in the US ED. There are many very fine career civil servants there, but very few educators. In Congress, the number of experienced educators is tiny. Schools can’t be reformed or fixed by the President, Congress, and the Department of Education.

NCLB and Race to the Top were cut from the same cloth: Contempt for professional educators, indifference to the well-established fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income, and a deep but misguided belief that punishing educators and closing schools were cures for low test scores. Both the law (NCLB) and the program (RTTT) were based on the assumption that rewards and punishments directed at teachers and principals would bring about an educational renaissance. They were wrong. On the day that the Obama administration left office, the U.S. Department of Education quietly released a study acknowledging that Race to the Top, having spent billions on “test-and-punish” strategies, had no significant impact on test scores.

And as icing on the cake, Mike Petrilli wrote an article in 2017 about the latest disappointing NAEP scores, lamenting “a lost decade.” That “lost decade” was 2007-2017, which included a large chunk of NCLB and RTTT. In addition, the Common Core standards, released in 2010, were a huge flop. TBF was paid millions by the Gates Foundation both to evaluate them and to promote them. The NAEP scores remained flat after their introduction. Please, no more Common Core.

I wrote two books about the failure of NCLB and RTTT: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010) and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.

Mercedes Schneider and I both wrote posts commending Mike Petrilli in 2019 when he wrote about the “dramatic achievement gains” of the 1990s and early 2000s before NCLB kicked in. He attributed those gains to improving economic conditions for families and declining child poverty rates. I wanted to give him a big kiss for recognizing that students do better in school when they are healthy and well-nourished.

So, what did No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top produce? A series of disasters, such as the Tennessee Achievement School District and Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority, both gone. A landscape of corporate charter chains, for-profit charters, for-profit online charters, and now vouchers, in which red states commit to pay the tuition of students in religious schools and fly-by-night private schools. A national teacher shortage; a sharp decline in people entering the teaching profession.

Please, no more tough love. No more punishment for students, teachers, principals, and schools. Let bad ideas die.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, For-Profit, History, Inequity, Joy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Teach for America TFA, Turnaround Schools, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: How the States Adopted Failed Federal Policies to Push Privatization

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2023 //
10

This post is one of Jan Resseger’s best, most trenchant analyses of the robust and evil plot to defund public schools. She explains how the federal government—through No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—drove federal Test-and-Punish practices and laws into the states. Even though those two vast federal programs failed, they remain alive in the states. Their “success,” if you can call it that, was in discrediting public schools and promoting privately-managed charter schools and vouchers.

The transformation of education from a civic obligation to a consumer good accelerated the passage of voucher legislation. Meanwhile the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing public schools” has quietly disappeared. Red states are lifting their income limits on voucher eligibility to make them available to all students, rich and poor. Despite research showing that vouchers are worse for poor students than the public schools they left, red state legislators are undaunted. Despite evidence that most vouchers are claimed by students already enrolled in private schools, red states continue to expand them. In effect, the rationale for privatization is no longer to fund a better alternative to public schools, but to hand public money to a clamorous interest group: private school parents.

Jan Resseger begins:

The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in 2002, embodied school reform premised on the theory of test-based accountability—the requirement of high-stakes standardized tests for all students and the application of sanctions for schools unable to raise test scores. The idea was that if you threatened schools with closure or threatened to turn them into charter schools or threatened to punish teachers if their students’ overall scores were low, you could make the teachers work harder and somehow raise an entire school’s test scores. It was an experiment whose proponents believed all children could be made proficient by 2014.

By 2013, those of us who support our nation’s public schools knew the experiment had failed. Even the Congressional supporters of No Child Left Behind knew it had not worked; they created waivers for the growing number of school districts unable to guarantee all students would be proficient in 2014. In 2015, when Congress reauthorized the federal education law as the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new law reduced federal punishments, while it still required the states to test students every year and create plans to turn around low scoring schools. Test-and-Punish school reform did not end, however. Its remnants remained in the state policies that had been mandated by NCLB and Race to the Top and had been enacted in state laws.

Today after two decades, it is clear that overall test scores have not risen; neither has the stated goal of corporate school accountability—closing achievement gaps—been accomplished. Diane Ravitch explains that test-and-punish school accountability, “overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.”

State politics has now, however, made it even more difficult to push back against the forces attacking public schooling. The federal legislation was designed to drive a test-and-punish agenda into the state legislatures. No Child Left Behind began by mandating testing and sanctions. Then Race to the Top bribed states to enact their own sanctions for low-scoring schools and punish teachers by tying their evaluations to their students’ test scores. And ESSA continued requiring testing all students and required states to devise turnarounds for the lowest scoring schools. While under No Child Left Behind and the early days of Race to the Top advocates across the states could collaborate nationally to push back against the federal policy itself, the school reform battle in recent years has devolved to the state legislatures which enacted the federal requirements idiosyncratically into their own laws. Right now we are watching the state takeover of the public schools in Houston, Texas and Oklahoma’s threatened takeover of the Tulsa public schools, at the same time we are watching the consequences ten years later of the closure in 2013 of 50 public schools in Chicago’s poorest African American neighborhoods.

Test-based, punitive school reform has also dangerously discredited the nation’s public schools. The school accountability movement created the concept of “failing schools,” persistently condemned the schools in urban America, and accelerated the drive for school choice and privatization. Twenty years of school reform has culminated in the vast expansion of school privatization in the form of vouchers. This year, 12 states—by my count, and I may have missed some—have enacted or significantly expanded state-funded private school tuition vouchers at the expense of public school funding: Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin.

Please open the link and finish reading this important post.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Extremism, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, Vouchers

Tom Ultican: The Delaware School Reform Disaster

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
5

Tom Ultican writes about the Delaware disaster. Delaware went all in for neoliberal school reform, being one of the first winners of a Race to the Top award, and has seen its academic performance decline. It’s time to switch gears, he says, and let teachers teach without threats and fear. He writes that the Delaware story should be a lesson for the nation on the failure of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top ideology —both representative of neoliberal school reform. This is one of Tom’s very best posts. Open the link and read it all!

He begins:

An unholy alliance between neoliberal Democrats and education reform oligarchs is harming Delaware public education. This is a lesson for the rest of the nation.

A new charter school law introduced to reduce principal professionalism is the latest example. Data clearly shows for almost two decades, top-down education reform has been ineffective and seriously damaged a once exemplary system.

In March, the Delaware Professional Standards Board recommended charter school certification requirements match public school rules. Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, immediately responded, “All Delaware charter schools are led by highly qualified administrators.” She said charter school principals have a different role than public school leaders and need to be excellent marketeers to raise funds and drive enrollment.

Did she mean charter school principals don’t need to be professional educators?

For the Standards Board recommendation to take effect, adoption by the State Board of Education is required. Before they acted, Senate President Pro Tem David P. Sokola introduced senate bill 163 to relax certification rules for charter school principals.

The heart of Democrat Sokola’s legislation says:

“The bill creates new subsections in Section 507(c) of Title 14 of the Delaware Code to define the licensure and certification requirements more clearly within Chapter 5 of Title 14. Finally, the bill requires the Secretary of Education to work with the Delaware Charter Schools Network to create a qualified alternative licensure and certification pathway for charter school administrators engaged in the instruction of students (Instructional Administrators).”

Teachers’ union leader, Mike Matthews, wrote to the Senate Executive Committee:

“I was disheartened to see that SB 163 — a bill that will actually deprofessionalize the education profession — was introduced by Senator Sokola. I was even more disappointed — and concerned — to see it filed in the Senate Executive Committee instead of the Senate Education Committee where it belongs. Why was that?”

The Bill was passed by the State Senate and is currently awaiting action in the House Administration Committee. The House Education Committee, like its counterpart in the Senate, is not involved.

Neoliberal Education Reform

A Delaware Live headline howls, “School test scores dismal again despite new math, reading plans.” Two decades of 4th and 8th grade reading and math data on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) support the headline. NAEP is often referred to as the nation’s education report card. The above graphs beg the question,“what happened in 2010?”

Long-term NAEP data showed that from 1971 until 2002, there was steady growth in math and reading. The steady growth ended concurrent with the adoption of the bipartisan Kennedy-Bush education reform called No Child Left Behind. The graphs illustrate this phenomenon.

Why did Delaware’s scores start falling?

In 2010 educator and blogger, Susan Ohanian, reported,

“Delaware and Tennessee came out on top in round one of RTTT: Delaware got $100 million (about $800 per student), and Tennessee $500 million (about $500 per student). Since these states radically changed their education strategies to receive what amounts to 7 percent of their total expenditures on elementary and secondary education, the feds are getting a lot of bang for the buck.”

The $4.5 billion dollar Obama-era Race To The Top (RTTT) program was administered by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Grants were given to states that complied with three key elements: (1) Evaluate teachers based on student test scores (2) Close and turn into charter schools public schools that continue to get low test scores (3) In low-test score schools, the principal and half of the staff are to be fired and replaced. In addition, states were encouraged to create more privately-managed charter schools.

Education historian and former Assistant US Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch predicted the program’s utter failure when it was announced:

“All of these elements are problematic. Evaluating teachers in relation to student test scores will have many adverse consequences. It will make the current standardized tests of basic skills more important than ever, and even more time and resources will be devoted to raising scores on these tests. The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, because of the link between wages and scores. There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system.”

For more than a century, brilliant educators have been skeptical of top-down coerced education reform like those from Duncan, Obama, Bush and Kennedy. Alfred North Whitehead published his essay, “The Aims of Education” in 1917, stating:

“I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.” (Page 13)

“But the first requisite for educational reform is the school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs, and evolved by its own staff. If we fail to secure that, we simply fall from one formalism into another, from one dung-hill of inert ideas into another.” (Page 13)

Former McKinsey Consultant and Democrat with neoliberal inclinations, Jack Markell, was elected Delaware Governor in 2009. His first major victory was winning the RTTT grant. He said:

“What’s really important today is where we go from here; whether we have the will to put our children first and move forward with reforms to improve our schools so that Delaware children can successfully compete for the best jobs in an increasingly competitive global economy. That won’t be easy, but we have proven in these past few months that it can be done.  I would like to thank all those who worked with us in support of our application and look forward to moving ahead to improve our schools.”

Markell praised then Senate Education Committee Chair, David Sokola, for his work on the RTTT grant proposal, the same Senator who just introduced legislation to soften certification requirements for charter school principals.

Since the RTTT announcement, Delaware has gone from consistently scoring above the national average on all NAEP testing to dropping well below.

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Data, Delaware, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Perry Bacon Jr: Is “Education Reform” Dead?

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2023 //
32

In 2020, when I published my last book, Slaying Goliath, I opined that education “reform” as defined by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top (standardized testing, school closings, school grades, charter schools, evaluating teachers by student scores, merit pay, Common Core, etc.) was a massive failure. The test-and-punish and standardization mandates had turned schooling into a joyless, test-obsessed experience that demoralized teachers and students alike. None of the promises of “reform” came to pass, but privatization via charter inevitably led to vouchers and the defunding of public schools.

The failure of federally-mandated reforms seemed obvious to me but Congress continues to use standardized tests as the ultimate gauge of students, teachers, and schools, despite the destruction that was obvious to anyone with eyes to see. And the reviewer in The New York Times slammed my book for daring to doubt the virtue of the “Ed reform” movement.

Perry Bacon Jr. wrote an article recently for the Washington Post titled “‘Education Reform’ Is Dying. Now We Can Actually Reform Education.” It was amazing to see this article in The Washington Post because for years its editorial writer was a cheerleader for the worst aspects of that destructive movement (Rhee could do no wrong, charters are wonderful, firing teachers and principal is fine). But the education editorial writer retired, hallelujah, and we get to hear from Perry Bacon Jr., in addition to the always wonderful Valerie Strauss (whose excellent “Answer Sheet” blog does not appear in the printed paper but online).

Earlier today, John Thompson earlier today responded on this blog to Bacon’s brilliant article. I meant to post the article by Bacon but forgot. Here it is. What do you think?

Perry Bacon Jr. wrote:

America’s decades-long, bipartisan “education reform” movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline. What should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.

Joe Biden is the first president in decades not aggressively pushing an education agenda that casts American schools and students as struggling and in desperate need of fixing. He has not stated that “education is the civil rights issue of our time,” a sentence said by presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. His administration has backed policies, such as an expanded child tax credit, that view giving people more money, not more education, as the main way to reduce poverty.

There is a push from experts and politicians across partisan lines, including from Biden, to get employers to stop requiring college degrees for so many jobs. There is also a growing defense of college students who study English, literature and other subjects that don’t obviously lead to jobs in the way that, say, engineering does.

An education gospel is being dismantled, one that was 40 years in the making. In 1983, the Reagan administration released a report called “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” It warned that America’s status as an economic powerhouse was under threat because its students were doing so much worse than those from other industrialized nations on standardized tests. That report put education reform on the national agenda and explicitly tied it to economic growth.

But this education fixation wasn’t just about the economy. The two parties couldn’t agree on racial policy. Democrats wanted more funding and explicit policies to help Black people and heavily Black areas to make up for past discrimination, and the Republicans largely opposed them.

What Democrats and Republicans could agree on was making education a priority. So Republican politicians, particularly Bush, pumped more money into schools, as Democrats wanted. And Democrats broadly adopted the view that education was the main way for Black people to make up for the effects of racism, thereby shifting responsibility for Black advancement from the government to individual African Americans, as Republicans wanted.

Eventually education, particularly getting a college degree, became viewed as the primary way for economic advancement for not just Black people but people of all races who weren’t born into the middle class.

The result was a bipartisan education fixation for much of the period between 1990 and 2016. It included the expansion of charter and magnet schools as an alternative to traditional public schools; an obsession with improving student test scores; accountability systems that punished schools and teachers if their kids didn’t score well; increased government spending on college loans and grants as part of a movement to make college essentially universal; and a push for Black students in particular not to just get college degrees but ones in “STEM” fields (science, technology, engineering and math) that would help them get higher-paying jobs.

This agenda was racial, economic and education policy all wrapped into one.

The problem is that this education push didn’t work. While the number of Americans who have graduated from high school and college have skyrocketed in the past three decades, wages and wealth haven’t grown nearly as much. Black people in particular haven’t seen economic gains matching these huge increases in education levels.

Instead of increased education benefiting Americans broadly, this education dogma created a two-tiered system. White-collar, secure, higher-paying jobs with good benefits went disproportionately to college graduates, while those in the worst jobs tended to not have degrees. And to get those degrees, Americans often had to borrow tens of thousands of dollars.

So Americans started revolting. The Black Lives Matter Movement emerged in 2013 and expressed frustration not only with police brutality but also with the continued economic struggles of Black Americans. In the 2016 presidential campaign, both Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Trump appealed to voters who felt abandoned by a bipartisan political establishment that appeared unbothered by the disappearance of manufacturing and other jobs that didn’t require higher education. Sanders called for free college, appealing to young people frustrated that their best path to a good job was accruing tens of thousands of dollars in education debt.

After Trump’s election, both parties embraced the idea that they must try to help Americans, particularly those without college degrees, who feel stuck in today’s economy. So politicians are no longer casting education as the ideal solution to economic or racial inequality. Biden and the Democrats are specifically trying to create jobs that would go to non-college graduates, and they are pushing policies, such as expanding Medicaid, that would disproportionately help Black Americans even if they don’t have much advanced education.

But if the real aim of education policy is no longer really economic and racial policy, what should its goals be? Neither party seems to have a clear answer. Most Democrats defend teachers, a core party constituency, and extol public schools and community colleges, trying to shed the Democrats’ reputation as the party for graduates of Ivy League schools. But they don’t have a broader theory of education policy.

The Republicans are doing something much worse. At the state level, they are largely abandoning public schools and instead aggressively pushing universal voucherlike programs for K-12 education to help as many families as possible to enroll their kids in private and/or religious schools. They are also casting K-12 public school teachers and in particular college professors as propagandists who impose liberal values on students. At the college level, Republicans are trying to force out left-leaning faculty and push campuses to the right.


I certainly prefer the “teachers, professors and public schools are good” perspective (the Democratic one) over “teachers, professors and public schools are bad” (the Republican one). But neither is a real vision for American education.

Here’s one: Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.

They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. Our schools and universities should of course also provide people the core skills for jobs that actually require higher education. They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.
What our education system should not be is 16 years of required drudgery to make sure that you can get a job with stable hours and decent benefits — or a punching bag for politicians who have failed to do their jobs in reducing racial and economic inequality.

“What I think colleges and universities should do right now is to stop selling this myth that education is going to be the great equalizer,” University of Wisconsin at Green Bay professor Jon Shelton said in a recent interview with Inside Higher Ed.

Shelton, author of a new book called “The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy,” added, “I think what we need to do is focus on being the institutions that are going to help society solve these bigger problems, to be the place where people can encounter controversial ideas on campus, where we can have far-reaching conversations about what needs to change in our economy, and how we’re going to create the kind of world in which climate change doesn’t destroy our entire way of life.”

Blessedly, education reform is dying. Now we can reform our schools and colleges in a way that actually improves teaching and learning.

If you can open the article, you will see two graphs displayed: one shows that Black educational attainment has risen substantially (the percent who have graduated high school and college) but Black income and wealth has stalled. Those who were counting on education alone to eliminate poverty were wrong.

Note to reader: a version of this post was published at 1:30 p.m. This was WordPress’s error. This is the finished version. Too complicated to explain.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Cruelty, Disruption, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Real Education, Standardized Testing, Teacher Shortage, Teachers and Teaching

Peter Greene: “No Labels” on Education Is Warmed-Over NCLB and RTTT

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2023 //
146

The enactment of No Child Left Behind in 2001 (signed into law on January 8, 2002) and the imposition of Race to the Top (a more punitive version of NCLB) created an era of bipartisanship based on testing, punishment, and privatization. The Democratic Party in DC abandoned its historic commitment to public schools.

Those closest to the classroom understand that the Bush-Obama program of 2002- ) was a disaster. After an initial increase in scores, the lines went flat about 2010; there is only so much that test prep can do to lift scores. Many schools were closed, many charters opened (and many swiftly closed), corporate charter chains thrived, teachers left in large numbers, enrollment in teacher education programs plummeted, now vouchers are subsidizing subprime religious schools.

Based on the evidence, the past two decades have been a disaster for American education.

Yet, as Peter Greene explains, a new third party, which calls itself “No Labels,” offers up an education platform that is a rehash of the Bush-Obama agenda. On education “No Labels” repackages the failed ideas of the past 20 years.

Know this about “No Labels”: it is targeting independent voters and will throw the election to Trump, if the election is close, as is likely. It is funded by rightwing billionaires. Caveat emptor.

Greene writes:

No Labels is supposed to be some sort of centrist break from the raging politics of left and right as a champion of “common sense,” and I’m not going to wander down that political rabbit hole (other than to note that saying you’re all about common sense while seriously considering Joe Manchin as a Presidential candidate plays about like a vegan eating a hamburger).

But they’ve got a platform, and it uses four points to address “America’s Youth” and so education, and that’s our beat here at the Institute, so let’s take a look, shall we?

Idea 11: As a matter of decency, dignity, and morality, no child in America should go to bed or go to school hungry.

The basic idea is solid enough– it’s a bad thing for children to go hungry. Some of the rationale is …odd? …off the point? 

Undernourished children “Make smaller gains in math and reading, repeat grades more, and are less likely to graduate from high school, which means they’re more likely to end up in prison.” That’s an interesting chain of causes and effects. Also, they disrupt classrooms more, interfering with other children’s education. 

Despite the heading, there’s not a moral argument in sight. And we still have to insert “even though Washington must reduce spending” we wave at some sort of significant expansion of funding or tax credits so children are fed. So nothing systemic about child hunger or poverty, I guess.

Idea 12: Every child in America should have the right to a high-quality education. No child should be forced to go to a failing school.

There is not a molecule of air between these “centrists” and the usual crowd of school privatizers. 

Rich kids get great schools and poor kids get terrible ones, so the solution is NOT to fix  or supplement funding, but to push down the pedal on charters and vouchers. Because, hey– America spends “more on education per school-aged child than any country in the world, with worse results.” Let’s also throw in some bogus testing results, and the usual claims about charter school waiting lists.

Because “we like competition too,” their common sense solution is to add 10,000 charter schools in the next ten years, to offer a “lifeline” to some students “trapped in failing traditional public schools.” I’m not going to take the time to argue any of this (just go looking through the posts on this blog). Let’s just note that there’s nothing here that Betsy DeVos or Jeb Bush would object to, other than they’d rather see more vouchers. This is standard rightwing fare.

Idea 13: America should make a national commitment that our students will be number one in reading and math globally within a decade.

You know-number one in the international rankings based on Big Standardized Test results, a position and ranking that the United States has never held ever. And yet somehow, leading nations like Estonia have failed to kick our butt. These guys invoke China’s test results, when even a rudimentary check would let you know that China doesn’t test all of its students. 

If America wants to maintain our lead in the technologies of tomorrow, we’d better spend less time on waging culture wars in our schools and more time focusing on promoting, rewarding, and reaching for excellence.

Remember that, so far, we have maintained that lead without improving our test score ranking.

But if excellence in education is the goal, maybe rethink voucher-based subsidies for schools that mostly are religious and teach creationism and reading only “proper” stuff and just generally waging those same culture wars. Or starting up 10,000 charter schools that don’t necessarily do anything better than a public (and who may soon also have the chance to operate in a narrow, myopic, discriminatory religious framework).

Idea 14: Financial literacy is essential for all Americans striving to get ahead

Oh, lordy. Remember all those poor kids in Idea 11? Well, No Labels has an explanation.

Almost six in 10 Americans say they are living paycheck to paycheck. Inflation is arguably the biggest driver of this insecurity, but far too many Americans also lack the knowledge and tools to become financially independent and get ahead.

Inflation and bad accounting. You know what helps people become financially independent? Money.

So let’s have financial literacy classes so people can get better credit scores.

Also, in Idea 22, they want civics education so people will be proud of America. Idea 24– “No American should face discrimination at school or at work because of their political view,” and I’m going to send them right back to their support for vouchers and charters that are working hard to be free to do exactly that.

Look, I feel the frustration over education’s status as a political orphan, an important sector that neither party stands up for. But if you’re looking for someone who understands some of the nuances of education and wants to stand up for the institution of public education, No Labels are not the party, either.

This sounds mostly like right-tilted Chamber of Commerce-style reformsterism from a decade ago. Even in a world in which both parties have lurched to the right, this is not a centrist approach to education. It’s the same privatizing reformster baloney we’ve been hearing since the Reagan administration drew a target on public education’s back. If you’re looking for the vegan candidate, this burger is not for you.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Hoax, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Trump

Nancy Bailey Eviscerates the “Mississippi Miracle”

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2023 //
30

Veteran teacher and blogger Nancy Bailey was stunned by Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times describing Mississippi’s schools as a national model of success. Her reaction: Can children learn to read when they are segregateed and hungry?

Bailey points out that Kristof is praising the work of Jeb Bush, who has pioneered third grade retention and even funded the study that allegedly proves the value of holding back third graders who flunk the reading test. This helps to improve fourth grade scores but multiple other studies assert that it harms those who are held back.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Education Industry, Literacy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Nora de La Cour: It’s Long Past Time to End the Tyranny of High-Stakes Testing!

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2023 //
104

Nora de la Cour writes in Jacobin about the damage done to children by our politicians’ obsession with high-stakes standardized testing. They do not test what was taught; they encourage teaching to the tests; the results come back too late to be helpful; they distort teaching and learning.

Nora de la Cour writes:

When I taught at an alternative public school for kids with exceptional social-emotional, behavioral, and learning needs, one of my students — I’ll call him Dante — got As in every class he took. School staff would frequently elevate Dante’s extraordinary focus and commitment as an example for his peers.

In the spring of Dante’s senior year, his counselor informed him he’d earned the status of valedictorian. His beaming smile of pride after hearing the news affirmed everything I love about public education. When his mother found out, she burst into tears of joy.

Then, abruptly, we were informed that there had been a mistake. Because Dante’s exceptional learning needs made it impossible for him to pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) — the standardized tests that Massachusetts requires high school students to pass prior to graduation — he would not receive a diploma. Without a diploma, he couldn’t be valedictorian — even though, according to his grades and the unanimous judgment of his teachers, he clearly deserved the honor. A wave of incredulity rippled through the staff as we tried to resign ourselves to this obviously cruel, unfair reality. For Dante, the news was devastating.

Even before the “giant federal wrecking ball” (to borrow leading education policy analyst Diane Ravitch’s phrasing) known as education reform, evidence from diverse fields had demonstrated a scientific concept known as Campbell’s Law: the more we base social decision-making on a specific quantitative measure, the more likely it is that that measure will become distorted, ultimately corrupting the processes it’s intended to monitor.

Just so, in the two decades since Congress reauthorized the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), researchers have collected a mountain of data showing that in the long run, attaching high-stakes, or punishments, to student standardized test scores does not improve educational outcomes. Instead, it results in a host ofperverse consequences, with poor, minority, and disabled kids like Dante experiencing the greatest harms. This last point makes a lot of sense when you consider that standardized testing was first developed by eugenicists looking to organize people into racist taxonomies based on perceived ability.

But despite these serious problems — and the persistent, bipartisan unpopularity of the high-stakes testing regime inaugurated by NCLB — our current, Obama-era iteration of the ESEA (the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA) still requires states to impose inappropriate test-based accountability on students and school communities.

When we sort children into “proficient” and “failing” categories based on test scores, we’re not solving the opportunity gaps that show up in public education; we’re creating new ones. No one is helped, and many people are hurt, when we give students, teachers, and schools an impossible assignment and then sanction them for failing to complete it. Looking forward to the ESEA’s now overdue reauthorization, it’s high time we built accountability systems that nurture the humanity and potential of all kids — rather than placing artificial roadblocks in their way.

Please open the link and read the article in full. FYI, in addition to referring to NCLB as a “giant wrecking ball,” I have also called it the “Death Star of American education.” If left without modifications, it would have caused the closure of almost every school in the nation. No national legisislature ever passed such a dumb law.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Education Industry, Failure, Fraud, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Peter Greene: On Rick Hess’s Claim That Choice Is Not “An Attack on Public Education”

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2023 //
10

Peter Greene was a teacher in Pennsylvania for 39 years. He is now a regular writer at Forbes and a super star blogger. This column appeared on his blog. He responded to Rick Hess’s claim that school choice is not an attack on public education but part of a long history of trying to improve them. From my perspective, it’s hard to understand how public schools improve by defunding them and replacing them with religious schools, low-quality private schools, home schooling, and cyber charters.

This is what Peter Greene wrote:

Rick Hess (American Enterprise Institute) is one of those occupants of the reformy camp that I take seriously, even when I think he’s wrong. So when he raises the question of whether or not school choice is an “attack” on public education, I think it’s a question worth talking about, because I think the answer is a little bit complicated. So let me walk through his recent piece on that very question bit by bit.

After an intro suggesting that choice expansion flows directly from the pandemic while ascribing opposition to choice to a shadowy cabal that flows from teachers unions, Hess gets to his point, which is that seeing choice as an anti-public school is “misleading and misguided.”

Hess puts choice in the context of a century’s worth of public school fixer-uppers, “a barrage of reforms.” He offers a list–“compulsory attendance, district consolidation, larger schools, smaller schools, magnet schools, standards, test-based accountability, merit pay, and more.”

Some of these ideas were good. Some weren’t. But in hindsight, it’s pretty clear that they weren’t “attacks” on public education; rather, they were attempts to improve it.

I disagree. Some of these ideas were offered with sincere hope for the best. But I’m going to single out the standards movement and test-based accountability for special recognition here.

If you weren’t teaching during the rise of No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and Race To The Top, I’m not sure if I can really capture for you the dawning sense of horror, frustration and futility among teachers at the time.

Word came down that new regulations required us to get test scores up– a little bit per year for starters, then ramping up to an impossible climb, until somehow every single student would be above average. If not, there would be penalties, maybe the complete dismantling and rebuilding of the district, perhaps as a privately-run charter school. “This is not possible,” educators said. “All will learn all,” replied the Powers That Be. “Don’t you believe that students can learn? And which child do you propose to leave behind.”

Then there were the tests themselves. Not very good, and with results coming back with so little detail–and so very late in the game–that they were less than no help at all. “Well, if we just teach the standards, the tests scores will follow,” said some optimistic educators. That didn’t happen. Schools rejiggered curriculum, pulled students away from untested material like art and recess so that they could be double-whammied with test prep.

“Maybe Obama will fix it,” we hoped. He did not. He doubled down. And 2014–the year for 100%–came closer and closer, the year when anyone dealing with educational reality knew that every district in the country would be either a) failing or B) cheating.

And through those years, one at a time or in small groups, teachers arrived at an unpleasant conclusion.

They are setting us up for failure. They want us to fail.

Why would they want that? The rhetoric had already been around on the far right, back all the way to Milton Friedman and on through his intellectual spawn– public education should be dismantled. There was a new push for vouchers and especially charter schools, and that coincided with rising noise about “failing” public schools. There was very little “let’s expand the educational ecosystem” and an awful lot of “we must help students escape failing public schools.” The constant refrain of “school choice will force public schools to improve because competition” was also an omnipresent crock, a slap in the face to educators who were already working their butts off and resented the suggestion that they were either incompetent or lazy. And that thread runs all the way up guys like Christopher Rufo arguing that to get to universals school choice, you have to get to universal distrust of public schools.

Maybe school choice wasn’t in and of itself an attack on public education, but it certainly seemed as if attacking public education was a means of promoting school choice.

I have no doubt that there are people who believe that education would work better if handled by the free market (I think their belief is magical, misguided and wrong, but I do believe it’s sincere). I believe there are technocrats who believe that standards, tests and data would improve education (ditto).

But to be a public school educator on the receiving end of all this (and more) absolutely felt like an attack. The irony is that when reformsters eventually figured out that the attack-filled rhetoric wasn’t helping and they dialed it back, the attacks themselves had become more real.

But let’s get back to Hess.

Public education can encompass a lot of approaches, and it can be organized in many different ways. Rather than blindly insist that “defending public schooling” requires clinging to outdated policies from decades (or centuries) past, we would do better to clarify principles, examine particulars, and then debate proposals.

All of this language is doing a lot of work, but as far as it goes, Hess and I probably agree more than we disagree. But the disagree part comes in the very next paragraph.

Indeed, the pandemic was a stark reminder that there are lots of ways to deliver schooling, including innovations such as learning pods, microschools, virtual tutors, and education savings accounts.

Learning pods and microschools are okay if you’re wealthy. As policy ideas in the vein of the DeVosian, “Well, your voucher may not be enough to get into a good private school, but you can always start a microschool,” they suck. I don’t think there are more than a hundred people in the country who came out of the pandemic thinking virtual education is a great idea. And education savings accounts are just vouchers with extra super-powers and porcine lip gloss. And none of these are really new ideas. They also all suffer from the same issue, which is the notion that any school choice system must be done free market style. We can do a great choice system without the free market at all (but that’s a post for another day).

Hess identifies one of the issues as the fuzziness of the word “public.” On this point, I think he gets some things wrong.

Choice opponents assert that public schools are “public” because they’re funded by public tax dollars.

No, that’s choicers. It’s been part of the charter school argument that charter schools are public schools because they are funded with public dollars. This pro-public ed writer (I’m not anti-choice, but I am anti-most-of-the-versions-of-choice-with-which-we’ve-been-presented) would say that public schools are public because they the public funds them, owns them, and operates them via representatives. Furthermore, they are public schools because they have a responsibility to the public to serve all students.

You can argue, as Hess and others do, that districts regularly hire outside firms to handle certain functions and occasionally outsource the teaching of certain students with exceptional special needs. But in all those cases, the responsibility for the management of those outside contracts rests with the public school district. A charter or private voucher-fed school carries no such responsibility. A public school district cannot, as can charters and voucher schools may, simply show parents the door and say, “Good luck. Your child is not our problem.” Do all public systems meet that responsibility as well as they ought to? Absolutely not. But at least the responsibility exists. A parent who thinks the public system is short-changing their child can (and often will) sue the district. They have no such option in a choice system, as such systems are currently conceived.

Hess is correct in calling public education “a pretty expansive category.” But it hinges on far more than whose money is being used.

In fact, I’d argue that it is the responsibility portion that is the big difference in the brand of choice being pushed by many these days. Our public system is based, however imperfectly, on the notion that we bear a collective responsibility for educating the young. Modern choice, particularly the current version sold under the culture warrior parental right brand, is about saying that getting a child an education is the responsibility of the parents, and that’s it. Yes, many choicers are also trying to privatize the ownership and provision of education, but it is the privatizing of responsibility for a child’s education that is perhaps the most profound and fundamental shift.

More importantly, simply calling something “public” doesn’t make it a good thing. While the phrase “public schooling” is suffused with happy notions of inclusivity and fairness, “public” isn’t a magic word.

Ain’t it that truth. Public education has a wide variety of issues–though some of those are the direct result of reformster attempts to “fix” things (see above re: standards and testing). But I’ve never argued that I’m against modern school choice and ed reform because public schools are perfect the way they are and everything else sucks. My most fundamental issue is that public schools have some serious issues, and modern ed reform and school choice don’t solve any of them (yes, that is also another long post). They just weaken public school’s ability to work on them while blowing through a giant pile of taxpayer money.

The point isn’t to play word games but to understand that things are less clear-cut than defenders of the status quo are prone to acknowledge. There are many ways to provide and serve the aims of public education.

After all these decades in the ed biz, I’m inclined to assert, repeatedly, that everything in education is less clear-cut that the vast majority of people acknowledge. Some folks on my side of the aisle are quick to infer nefarious and/or greedy motives when, sincere ideology is sufficient explanation (much as some folks in the choice camp assume that the only reason someone would stick up for public ed is because she’s on the union payroll). Some choicers are simply ignorant of how any of this school stuff works. Some are up against a particularly dysfunctional local version of public education. Some are anti-democrats for whom this is just one issue of many, one more way in which the government steals their money to spend it on Those People. Some want to recapture education for a particularly conservative version of christianist religion. Some want to social engineer their way to a more efficient society. Some are serious people, and some are not.

In short, the choicer and reformster camp contains a great variety of individuals.

Are some of those individuals interested promoting school choice as a way of making public education better? Is it possible to make public education better by incorporating some choice ideas? I believe that latter is true, and I swear I’m going to post about it in the not too distant future, and as for the former, well… yes, but.

But for all the variety in the choicer camp, they mostly adhere to two flawed premises– that a choice landscape should rest on a bedrock of free market mechanics and that the resulting system shouldn’t cost a cent more than the current one. As long as we start with those premises, school choice must be a zero sum game, and even if all the people who have spent the past four decades trying to tear public ed down so that choice will look better–even if all those people shut up, the zero sum game feature seems guaranteed to turn school choice into an attack on public education.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Home Schooling, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, School Choice, Vouchers
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