Alfie Kohn here chastises the New York Times Book Review for adding its
heft to the conventional wisdom: that our schools are “mediocre”
and need to find some other nation to emulate; that test scores
define success in school and in life; that test scores determine a
nation’s economic prospects; that children must be treated like
“hamsters in a cage” so they cram in enough facts to get those
all-important test scores; and that the only reason to go to school
is to make more money one day. These are what he calls “recycled
assumptions.” They are what I call the stale conventional wisdom.
These ideas are the underpinnings of No Child Left Behind and Race
to the Top. They are ruining the lives of children and teachers.
Left in place, they will turn education into a commodity that one
buys at Walmart or on the Internet, absent any human interaction.
That way: an ugly, soulless future. Alfie Kohn makes this
prediction: “Food for thought? Listen — I’ll gladly eat the front
page of the New York Times Book
Review if it ever features a book that challenges
these premises.” Inasmuch as I have a book that will be published
on September 17, inasmuch as it challenges the dead ideas of the
past generation, I hope he has that repast.
Bruce Baker brilliantly explains how absurd the reformy policies are in both Philadelphia and Tennessee.
In Philadelphia, teachers are being blamed for a massive deficit that was in fact caused by historic state budget cuts.
In Tennessee, the reform plan is to tie teachers’ licenses to test scores, even though only 1/3 teach tested subjects.
Baker explains:
“The true reformy brilliance here is that these changes, with little doubt, will cause the best teachers from around the region and even from Finland, Shanghai and Singapore to flock to Tennessee to teach…at least for as long as they don’t roll a 1 and lose their license (pack your dice!). In fact, it is a well understood reformy truth that the “best teachers” would be willing to take a much lower salary if they only knew they would be evaluated based on a highly unstable metric that is significantly beyond their direct control. That’s just the reformy truth! [a reformy truth commonly validated via survey questions of new teachers worded as “don’t you think great teachers should be rewarded?” and “Wouldn’t you rather be a teacher in a system that rewards great teachers?”]
“No money needed here. Salaries… not a problem. Resource-Free Reformyness solves all!
“All that aside, what do we know about the great state of Tennessee?
“Tennessee is persistently among the lowest spending states in the country on its public education system.
“Tennessee is not only one of the lowest spenders, but Tennessee spends less as a share of gross state product than most other states.
“Tennessee has one of the largest income gaps between public school enrolled and private school enrolled children, and has among the higher shares of private school enrolled children.
“Tennessee has relatively non-competitive teacher wages with respect to non-teacher wages.”
Let see if Tennessee races to the top as it sheds teachers.
A teacher wrote this comment about school “reform”:
One thing I loved about teaching when I first began, 24 years ago, was the degree of inspiration and creativity I could bring to my lesson plans. It made teaching and being a teacher exciting for me. My excitement was the motivation, it was infectious to the students and learning was the natural by-product.
Now, everything is highly structured and scripted. We are told the objectives, and given a highly methodical method of lesson design and expected to do it, regardless of whether it makes sense with the content. Talk about boring “cookie-cutter”!
This is classic organizational theory (a business model) where everyone is seen as a machine that can be tweaked to increase production. We are not seen as experts or professionals, just workers who couldn’t tie our own shoes without the supervisor’s policy detailing the method.
I for one wish this corporate-management/student-consumer mentality would leave the public school system. Teachers are not like assembly-line workers putting together a widgit, and learning is not a product that can be pre-packaged and sold at market.
If there is a watch list at the U.S. Department of Education, surely Anthony Cody must be on it, along with me.
Anthony has been one of the most articulate critics of Arne Duncan and Bill Gates and the whole corporate reform agenda.
Just when I think he can’t outdo his last column, he proves me wrong.
This time, he explains his efforts to engage with Arne Duncan and how Duncan brushed him off.
He writes:
I actively sought a dialogue with the Arne Duncan and the Department of Education way back in November of 2009, when I wrote an open letter to President Obama, and started a Facebook group called Teachers’ Letters to Obama. In December of that same year I sent a packet of more than 100 letters to Secretary Duncan and the White House. In return I got a short note from a staffer at the DoEd, and no response at all from the White House. Eventually, the Teachers’ Letters group got a short phone conference with Secretary Duncan, and he followed up with a short personal call as well. But that was a very frustrating and aborted sort of dialogue, where the main emphasis on the part of Department of Education was to convince us all that we were somehow incapable of accurately perceiving their policies and their real-world consequences. Widespread frustration with this sort of response, and with administration policies, led to more than 6000 of us gathering in front of the White House at the Save Our Schools March in the summer of 2011.
Anthony never gave up trying, and was unable to break through the administration’s stony insistence that they know what they are doing, and their minds are closed.
Anthony is a teacher, and he believes in education, so he keeps reaching out. I think even Anthony now realizes that this administration has no intention of changing course, no matter what the evidence.
There is a sacrosanct principle that has informed the actions of the U.S. Department of Education throughout its 33-year history: federalism. That is, a recognition that the federal government has limited authority, and that states and localities have the primary responsibility for education. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind was a direct assault on federalism because it asserted the power of Congress and the Department of Education to tell states and localities how to measure “progress” and how to reform schools. Since no one in either Congress or the Department of Education knows how to reform schools, this was a bad but costly joke. And not funny.
Arne Duncan made the assault on federalism more intense by promulgating Race to the Top. RTTT offered a huge financial lure to states willing to abandon their authority and accept Duncan’s untried “remedies.” Most were hungry enough to do so, because in a time of financial crisis, money talks.
Duncan’s worst idea was evaluating teachers by test scores. Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that the teachers in affluent districts get big gains and look effective while those who teach needy students do not get big gains and look like ineffective teachers. Duncan doesn’t care. He has his idee fixe and he is sticking to it, regardless of how many teachers-of-the-year get fired.
Now he has found a new way to undermine federalism. Frustrated by California’s stubborn refusal to join Duncan’s Race to Oblivion, he was able to find a group of superintendents (mostly trained by the unaccredited Broad Academy) who want federal money. So Duncan has bypassed the state, the entity that has legal jurisdiction over these districts, and has formed a direct relationship between the federal government and the coalition called CORE (California Office to Reform Education).
Read this post to learn more about this special “partnership” that cut the state out of the transaction. You will see familiar names, well known in corporate reform circles. They are eager to do what Duncan wants them to do, while ignoring the state of which they are part, which has wisely steered clear of Duncan’s mandates.
The saddest part of all this is that Duncan was a failure in Chicago, yet now he has brought his failed ideas to become national policy. After eight years of his “leadership,” what will be left of American public education? Who will want to teach?
A few days ago, Georgia announced that it was dropping out of PARCC, the Common Core testing consortium funded by the U.S. Department of Education. State officials said the state could not afford the technology or the cost.
The U.S. Department of Education was swift to respond. It wrote Georgia to warn that it is withholding $10 million from the state’s Race to the Top funding. Maybe the timing was a coincidence. Maybe not.
The state says it needs more time to fix its educator evaluation system before it can be implemented, but the Feds insist that Georgia must start evaluating teachers and principals based on test scores without further delay.
Now for a dose of reality. Research does not support any part of Race to the Top. Research shows that tying educator evaluations to test scores produces narrowing the curriculum, gaming the system, teaching to the test, cheating, and score inflation. The most “effective” teachers teach the most affluent students in the most affluent schools. The least “effective” teach the poorest. Research shows that over 100 years of trying, merit pay has Never worked. Teachers are doing the best they know how; they are not holding back and hoping for a bonus or a biscuit.
Race to the Top will someday be remembered in the history books as a Grand Detour, when ideologues gained control of federal policy and used an economic crisis to dangle money in front of the states so they would agree to implement failed policies.
All of this will change, but not until there is wiser leadership in Washington, wise enough to banish Race to the Top and recover a common sense approach to education reform based on what children and schools need, not what misguided politicians demand.
A comment from a reader who has seen the results of No Child Left Behind:
“1) The system is broken from top to bottom. The vast majority of people making these decisions have not set foot into a classroom since they graduated from college.
2) An administrator makes any where from double to four times as much money as the teachers who work 50+ hours a week teaching, prepping, and grading.
3) Common Core, NCLB, Race to the Top, and any other program designed to “make education better” are nothing more than band-aids that only slow the bleeding. We need to completely reconstruct our education system from the bottom up and focus more on the individual needs of every child through curriculums designed to highlight the creative exceptionalism of each child.
4) Cutting money from the public system to then allow room for vouchers should be a red flag to any citizen with an ounce of common sense – we’re not addressing the issue of horrible school reforms of the past, but instead we’re aiding in the speed of how fast our public system will die. If every child deserves a quality education, why aren’t we evaluating our current system and finding ways to completely reconstruct it in a way that it is successful.
5) For everyone on this board who has attacked educators and their apparent “lazy” behaviors, it is obvious that you have no idea what is happening inside the classrooms now. Since “A Nation at Risk”, teachers have been slowly stripped of their ability to do what it is that they are overpaid to do: teach. Instead, they have been forced into a world of teaching to a test that barely covers the amount of practical knowledge students need. I am an English Teacher at a community college here in NC, and every semester in my 2-3 freshman comp classes I see the results of NCLB. I have 30 18-21-year-olds who can’t write a complete sentence. I have never blamed a single high school teacher, middle school teacher, nor have I blamed any elementary teacher for this lack of skill. 15 years ago when I entered the profession, the quality was much higher even for a community college. I have witnessed the slow decline of intelligence, and it has nothing to do with the teachers, but the resources that these teachers are losing. You want to support the cut in funding? Fine. Let’s divert the money that administration is getting into better programs, let’s re-envision how education works and construct a system that allows for the money we are dealt, and let’s face the facts: “bad” teachers make up less than 5% of the working population. The rest of the teachers out there are fighting to keep this sinking ship afloat.
If you think you can do a better job, get the damn degree and do the job yourself. Other wise, let the people who have been trained to do this job do their job.
In this post that appeared on Valerie Strauss’ “Answer Sheet” at the Washington Post, David Lee Finkle takes on what passes for education “reform” these days.
Finkle is a cartoonist and middle school teacher in Florida.
Finkle takes on the myth that American schools are failing and points out that they are far more rigorous than ever.
The federal government’s obsession with test scores is not improving education. To the contrary, it is ruining real education and demoralizing teachers.
He concludes:
“We have a choice in this country. Keep listening to the story told by the “reformers” and end up with test-score mills even worse than the ones we have now, or listen to teachers who want a public education system that isn’t an industrial factory spitting out test takers but that offers schools that are places for deep thinking, learning, creativity, play, wonder, engagement, hard work, and intense fun.”
Which will it be?
You decide.
The Los Angeles Times published a first-rate editorial about the disastrous federal micromanagement spawned by NCLB. It also takes the Obama administration to the woodshed for its own misguided micromanagement of the nation’s public schools.
It says: “The nation is ripe for rebellion against the rigid law and the Obama administration’s further efforts to micromanage how schools are run.”
It adds:
“Passed in 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act used the leverage of federal education funding to push states into doing more for their disadvantaged, black and Latino students, whose academic achievement was appallingly low. Although public schools fall under state rather than federal purview, the rationale behind the interference was that because Congress provided some funding, it had an interest in making sure that the money was achieving its aims. That’s fair enough.
“Unfortunately, the punitive law ushered in a regimen of intensive testing and harsh sanctions against schools that failed to meet improvement markers that were extremely difficult to achieve, sometimes meaningless and often counterproductive. Later, the Obama administration added more layers of interference by pushing its own favored reforms — such as a common curriculum for all states and the inclusion of test scores as a substantial factor in teacher evaluations — in some cases in return for waivers on the No Child Left Behind requirements.”
The federal government was wrong to make scores on standardized tests the measure of all things. It was a colossal error. We didn’t need NCLB to tell us that poor and minority kids were not getting the same test scores as their advantaged peers. We knew that from state scores and SAT scores and multiple other sources. The issue was what to do about it. Congress decided that measuring the gap was reform. however, none of their “remedies”–enacted without any evidence–was effective. Twelve years after the law was enacted, none of the law’s so-called remedies has worked.
The fact is that no one–repeat, NO ONE–in Congress or the U.S. Department of Education (then or now) knows how to reform the nation’s public schools. Secretary Rod Paige didn’t, nor did Secretary Margaret Spellings. Certainly Secretary of Education Arne Duncan doesn’t. His Renaissance 2010 plan in Chicago was a much-hyped failure that has left the wreckage of lives and communities in its wake. Why was he allowed to turn Renaissance 2010 into Race to the Top?
The one-size-fits-all NCLB is wrong for most schools, and Race to the Top heaps on more punishments while blaming teachers for low test scores. This law and this program, and the thinking behind them, have diverted the public’s attention from the root causes of poor academic performance, which include poverty, segregation, and under-resourced schools. Instead of confronting root causes, our elites confront the failure of the NCLB regime of high-stakes testing by demanding more of the same and making the stakes higher for teachers and principals.
Kudos to the Los Angeles Times for recognizing that the federal government has overstepped the bounds of federalism, has imposed impossible mandates, and is out of its league.
The dilemma in framing the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is that Congress can’t see beyond the narrow and punitive mindset of NCLB. It is locked into stale thinking. It refuses to see the disastrous consequences of both NCLB and Race to the Top.
Future historians will puzzle out why the Obama administration threw away the chance to bring a fresh vision to federal education policy and why it chose to tighten the screws on the nation’s schools and teachers and why it chose to lend its prestige and funding to the privatization movement.
In the future, I believe, the period that began in 2001 and continues to this day will be remembered as the “Bush-Obama era” in education. It will be recalled as a time when a liberal Democratic president watched in silence as states attacked the teaching profession, lowered standards for entry into teaching, enacted laws to end collective bargaining, authorized privatization with federal funding and encouragement, and passed laws permitting vouchers for private and religious schools.
A reader posted this comment:
“Listening to President Obama’s speech about Trayvon Martin in which he said regarding young black men,”And is there more that we can do to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them?” the thought struck me:
“How about not closing their schools and undermining their neighborhoods; how about providing them with an education like the one you want for your children; how about trying to do something about the poverty that they endure? How about standing with the people who helped to elect you with their votes and their belief in you rather than with the 1% whom you seem now to identify with in deeds if not in words.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 