Archives for category: US Education
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The Reason for Public Education

By dianeravitch
September 2, 2012 //
15

A reader explains why we maintain public schools. It is not about being college and career ready; it is not about global competition. It is this:

The reason for universal, free, and compulsory education is is simply this: the job requirements of a citizen in a democratic society are far and away more demanding than the job qualifications of a serf in a feudal society.

The age of emancipation from compulsory education may vary with circumstances, but the reason for establishing a norm of education in a democratic society remains the same.  It is one of those measures that democratic societies enact in the effort to maintain themselves as democratic societies.  Failing that, a government of, by, and for the people is far more likely to perish from the earth.

And nobody wants that, now do they?

Categories US Education

A Teacher Reviews Frank Bruni’s Article about the Parent Trigger

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2012 //
5

This retired teacher hasn’t seen the controversial movie about the parent trigger.

But he read Frank Bruni’s article and found it insulting to teachers.

He criticizes Bruni for accepting the “reformers” claims that unions and tenures are the bane of U.S. education.

And he points out that students in affluent suburbs get high test scores and have high graduation rates even though they have teachers who belong to unions and have tenure and seniority. He suggests that it is not unions and tenure that cause low performance in urban districts.

Read some of his other posts as well. He has a razor sharp wit and knows the score.

He makes so much sense that he makes you wonder why so many people don’t get it.

 

 

 

 

Categories Parent trigger, Poverty, Teacher Tenure, Unions, US Education

Finding the Genius in Every Child

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2012 //
6

Robert D. Shepherd previously wrote a post about why standardization fails. Now he asks whether we want to standardize for a certain outcome or whether we want an education that discovers the genius in every child:

Every child born today is the product of 3.8 billions years of evolution. Between his or her ears, is the most complex system known to us, and that system, the brain consists of highly interconnected subsystems of neural mechanisms for carrying out particular tasks. Years ago, some Japanese researchers won the Nobel Prize for mapping the neural system in fruit flies that functions ONLY to detect movement from left to right in the visual field. Marvin Minsky calls this complex of interconnected systems a “society of mind.”Early in the twentieth century, a psychologist named Charles Spearman posited a single intelligence factor, “G.” A couple decades ago, Howard Gardner made a name for himself by positing seven (later eight) “multiple intelligences.” But that’s all hocus pocus. The truth is that there are, quite literally, billions of intelligences in the brain–mechanisms that carry out very particular tasks more or less well, many of them sharing parts of the same machinery to carry out subroutines.Over that 3.8 billion years of evolution, these many intelligences were refined to a high degree. Creatures, like us, who reproduce sexually and mix up our genes, are born with different unique sets of mechanisms, and these are pruned and refined based on our experiences, for the neural machinery is extraordinarily plastic. In other words,

1. People are extraordinarily variable, and
2. All have propensities to become very good at some things and not at others

In EVERY child some of these subsystems are extraordinary and some are merely adequate.

In other words, there are no standardized children. Almost every new parent is surprised, even shocked, to learn that kids come into the world extraordinarily unique. They bring a lot of highly particular potential to the ball game. And every one of those children is capable, highly capable, in some ways and not in others.

What if, instead of schools having as their purpose turning out identically machined parts, they, instead, existed to find out what a given child is going to be good at doing? What if children were carefully, systematically, given opportunities to try out the enormous range of purposeful human activity until we identified each child’s GENIUS? What if we said to ourselves, presented with a particular child, “I know that this little person is the product of 3.8 billion years of evolution, that he or she has gifts conferred by that history of fitness trials, and it is my responsibility to discover what those are?”

I heard an Indian elder, whose name, unfortunately, I forget, speak about this once. He said, “Look at the kids. Really look at them. You can see who the leaders are and who the followers.” This insight can and should be generalized.

Now, before you dismiss this as a preposterous idea, consider this fact: A child can be born with, say, perfect pitch and go through our entire K-12 education system without anyone ever discovering this about that child.

A society, to be a society, needs SOME shared common culture, and it’s valuable, for that reason, to have some common, shared set of knowledge and skills transmitted from one generation to the next. But a pluralistic society also needs the astonishing variety of attributes that people are born with or are capable of developing.

No list, however well vetted, will represent the natural variety of ability and potential that exists in children. Nor will it represent the variety of abilities that the society actually needs in order to function well. It’s bad for kids and it’s bad for society as a whole when someone has the hubris to come up with THE LIST of what everyone needs to know.

Let me be clear about what I am NOT saying: I am NOT saying that school should be a place where kids “do their own thing.” What I am saying is that it should be a place that enables kids and their teachers to discover what kids, given their particular endowments, can do. I believe, strongly, that every child has some genius among those TRULY multiple intelligences.

It would take a lot of re-envisioning to come up with a workable model of schooling that would do that properly and rigorously. And it wouldn’t look anything like what we are now doing.

Finally, to get to the specific question. The revolutionaries who founded the United States recognized that any system that awards people based upon the accidents of their birth rather than based upon their talents, whatever their birth, wastes a lot of human potential. They were committed to the idea that everyone deserved a chance to follow his or her genius, whatever the conditions of his or her birth. That’s why many of them were also committed to the idea universal education and why it is in the interest of all of us to end disparity of educational opportunity. The founders had this crazy idea that no one was disposable, that everyone had gifts to bestow on his or her fellows that would flower in the right circumstances. Any rigidly enforced system of standards treated as a curriculum is not going to enable the achievement of the founders’ vision because while everyone else’s children are toiling through the checklist of standardized skills attainment, the children of the elite will be having extraordinarily varied experiences enabling them to find and follow their bliss (what they care about and have the potential to do well).

If that’s the society that we want, the Morlochs and the Eloi, then uniform national standards treated as curricula, the same in every school, for every student, is the way to go.

That works for folks who think that there are the few gifted who are destined to rule and the great mass of interchangeable worker bees who need to be as identical and predictable as possible. It doesn’t work for people who believe in pluralistic democracy.
Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Common Core, Curriculum, Education Reform, Students, US Education

Will the Real President Obama Please Stand Up? UPDATE

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2012 //
23

Josh Greenman of the New York Daily News writes today that President Obama has been terrific on education reform issues: he has challenged teachers’ unions, pushed for merit pay, encouraged the expansion of charter schools, and used billions of dollars in stimulus funds (via Race to the Top) to promote an agenda that either President Bush would envy. In its editorials, the Daily News has stridently defended charters, testing, and accountability, and has led the charge against the teachers’ union. The billionaire owner of the Daily News, Mort Zuckerman, is on the board of the Broad Foundation, which avidly promotes school closings and privatization.

So imagine Josh’s disappointment that the President is now kowtowing to those teachers unions and saying that more money will solve the problems. He writes, “So count me disappointed that Obama is campaigning for reelection with education rhetoric that is ripped right out of a dusty old Democratic Party playbook.” Wow. A Democratic President actually sounding like a Democrat on education.

Josh wonders why the President doesn’t stick up for his strong testing-and-accountabiilty and school choice agenda. Why doesn’t he boldly admit that his program is not all that different from Romney’s? (There are two big issues where they differ: Romney supports vouchers, Obama doesn’t; Obama wants to help students with their crushing student loans, Romney doesn’t.) UPDATE: (One other major difference: Romney thinks anyone should be allowed to teach, without any certification or standards, and you can bet that he will continue the Republican assault on teachers’ unions.)

Josh implies that the President is reaching out to teachers and their unions and supporters of public education because–guess what?–it is an election year. With a few more eloquent speeches, maybe he can persuade them that his agenda has some resemblance to the traditional Democratic view that schools should have adequate resources, that teachers have a right to bargain collectively, that the federal government has a responsibility to promote equity (not competition), and that school choice is the rightwing plan to privatize the public schools.

Well, it is good to hear the rhetoric. That’s a change. We can always hope that he means it. But that, of course, would mean ditching Race to the Top and all that absurd rightwing rhetoric about how schools can fix poverty, all by themselves.

Categories Obama, Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, Unions, US Education, Vouchers

What We Can Learn from the New PDK/Gallup Poll

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2012 //
2

The annual Phi Delta Kappa-Gallup poll on education was released today.

The sponsors characterize public opinion as split, which is true for many issues.

We must see this poll in the context of an unprecedented, well-funded campaign to demonize public schools and their teachers over at least the past two years, and by some reckoning, even longer.

The media has parroted endlessly the assertion that our public schools are failures, they are (as Bill Gates memorably said to the nation’s governors in 2005) “obsolete,” and “the system is broken.” How many times have you heard those phrases? How many television specials have you seen claiming that our education system is disastrous? And along comes “Waiting for ‘Superman'” with its propagandistic attack on public education in cities and suburbs alike and its appeal for privatization. Add to that Arne Duncan’s faithful parroting of the claims of the critics.

That is the context, and it is remarkable that Americans continue to believe in the schools they know best and to understand what their most critical need is.

Here are the salient findings:

1. Americans have a low opinion of American education (how could they not, given the bombardment of criticism?): only 18% give it an A or B. And here is the real accomplishment of the corporate reformers: Those who judge American education as a D or F have increased from 22% to 30% in the past 20 years. Actually, their success in smearing U.S. education is even greater, because in 2002, before the implementation of NCLB, only 16% judged the nation’s schools so harshly. So the reform campaign has doubled the proportion of Americans who think the nation’s schools deserve a D or F.

2. When asked to evaluate the schools in their own community, 48% give them an A or B, which is the highest rating in 20 years.

3. When asked to evaluate the school their oldest child attends, an astonishing 77% give it an A or B. This is the highest rating in 20 years. Only 6% give it a D or F. This question elicits the views of informed consumers, the people who refer to a real school, not the hypothetical school system that is lambasted every other day in the national press or condemned as “obsolete” by Bill Gates.

4. When asked whether they have trust and confidence in teachers, 71% said yes. Americans continue to respect and admire teachers, despite the nonstop public bashing of them in the media.

5. When asked whether standardized test scores should be used to evaluate teachers, opinion split 52-47 in favor. Considering that the public has heard nonstop endorsements of this bad idea from President Obama, Secretary Duncan, and most other political figures–and very limited dissent–it is surprising that opinion is almost equally divided. How did so many Americans manage to figure out that this idea is problematic at best?

6. When people were asked to describe the teachers who had the greatest influence in their lives, they used words like caring, compassionate, motivating, and inspiring. Interesting that few remembered the teachers who raised their test scores.

7. There has been a big change in what the public sees as the biggest problems facing the schools today. Ten years ago, the biggest concerns were about discipline (fighting, gangs, drugs, lack of discipline, overcrowding). Today, the biggest problem that the public sees, by far, is lack of financial support. 35% chose that option. Among public school parents, it was 43%. Concerns about discipline almost faded away in comparison to concerns about the lack of financial support for the schools.

8. On the subject of vouchers, there was a surprising increase in the proportion who would support “allowing students to choose a private school at public expense.” It increased from 34% to 44%, which is a big jump. I recommend that future questioning ask about support to allow students “to choose a private or religious school at public expense.” That would be closer to the reality of voucher programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, D.C., Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana.

9. On the subject of charters, public opinion dipped, from an approval rating of 70% in 2011 to 66% in 2012. It will be interesting to see where this number goes as the public begins to understand more about charters in their own communities.

10. A question about the parent trigger was so vacuous as to be misleading. The question was “Some states are considering laws that allow parents to petition to remove the leadership and staff at failing schools. Do you favor or oppose such laws?” 70% favor, 76% of public school parents favor. This is a misleading question, however, as the parent trigger is not a matter of simply allowing parents to sign a petition, but of allowing parents to take control of a public school and hand it over to private management. My guess is that the public doesn’t know much about the parent trigger concept and hasn’t heard a discussion about the pros and cons. So, I don’t put much stock in the response–after all, why shouldn’t parents have the right to sign a petition to change the staff at their school? It does show how clever the corporate reformers are in framing issues that advance privatization and doing it in ways that are deceptive and alluring.

11. In a series of questions about the Common Core standards, most people believe they are a good thing and that they will make the nation more competitive globally; about half think they will improve the quality of education while 40% think they will have no effect. These answers exemplify why polls of this kind must be viewed with caution. I am willing to bet that the majority of respondents has no idea what the Common Core standards are; and willing to bet that 98% have never read them.

In future versions of the poll, I hope that questions will be asked about for-profit schools, privatization, and vouchers for religious schools. These are big issues today, and the poll should ask about them.

My takeaway from the 2012 poll is that the corporate reform movement has succeeded in increasing support for vouchers, but that the American public continues to have a remarkably high opinion of the schools and teachers they know best despite the concerted efforts of the reformers to undermine those beliefs. This is an instance where evidence trumps ideology. The reformers have not yet been able to destroy the bonds between the American people and their community’s schools.

 

 

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Opinion Polling, Parent trigger, Parents, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, US Education, Vouchers

Most Charters Avoid Students with Special Needs

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2012 //
47

We have seen this story again and again. A lawsuit against the charters in New Orleans and the District of Columbia filed on behalf of children with disabilities. A charter school in Minneapolis that literally pushed out 40 children with special needs, part of a pattern in which the nation’s largest charter chain–the Gulen-affiliated schools–keep their test scores high by excluding students with disabilities. Study after study showing that charters take fewer children with disabilities. Even a federal study by the GAO documenting that charter schools have a smaller proportion of children with special needs, to which the relevant federal official responded with a yawn and a promise to look into it someday.

And now the AP has documented the widespread practice, in which charters take fewer students with special needs, take those with the mildest disabilities, and harm the public schools that are expected to educate a disproportionate share of the neediest, most expensive to educate children.

As this movement, this industry, continues to grow, aided by lavish federal and foundation funding, abetted by a thriving for-profit sector, we must ask the same questions again and again: What is the end game? Are charters becoming enclaves for those who want to avoid “those children”? Will we one day have a dual school system for haves and have-nots? Will our public school system become a dumping ground for those unwanted by the charters?

And why is the U.S. Department of Education not asking these questions?

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Special Education, U.S. Department of Education, US Education

A Parent’s Letter to Frank Bruni of the New York Times

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2012 //
33

I just received this comment. This parent should be invited to appear on NBC’s “Education Nation,” on Morning Joe, on Rachel Maddow, on CNN’s “Newsroom,” and on any other talk show, most of which put people on camera who have never been public school parents or teachers or principals. She is more knowledgeable than Michelle Rhee or Bill Gates or any of the other “reformers”:

Dear Dr. Ravitch,I was composing my own letter to Frank Bruni early this morning, and didn’t see your post until later. Thanks, as always, for your advocacy. Below is a copy of the letter I emailed to Mr. Bruni this morning.

Sincerely,
Rebecca Poyourow

Dear Mr. Bruni,

While I usually enjoy your opinion articles, I was dismayed by yesterday’s article on parent trigger laws. It seems to me that you do not know much about the issue and are relying for your talking points on the PR campaigns of the groups that support them, ironically not grass-roots parents’ groups but primarily astroturf groups with financial, policy, and personnel links reaching back to groups like ALEC (groups which you are certainly no fan of when it comes to their impact on other policy areas).

You seem to take for granted several ideas I would challenge you on: (1) that American public schools and teachers are failing, (2) that middle-class families should desert urban, public schools, (3) that charter schools are the answer to any problems in the current public educational system, and (4) that parent trigger laws would a helpful tool for remedying problems.

For the record, I am a parent with two children in my neighborhood public school in Philadelphia. Our school manages to hold together and serve well a coalition of low-income, blue-collar, and middle-class families with striking racial as well as socioeconomic diversity in a Philadelphia neighborhood–61% of our students are economically disadvantaged, 45% white, 45% black, 5% Latino, and 5% multiracial and other designations. We are not a rich school and cannot stage fundraisers such as the ones held by the Upper West Side public schools in NYC profiled in the NYT earlier this summer. In fact, we (and all public schools in PA) were hit hard by the education budget cuts enacted when a wave of extremist state legislators came into our state government in 2010. $1 billion has been cut from public education statewide in PA, and it has impacted our school heavily, raising class sizes while stripping the school of necessary teaching and support personnel, contracting the curriculum (music and language teachers were cut last year, and the school had no money previously for an art teacher), and leaving kids behind academically without the tutoring previously provided.

Yet our school remains strong, continuing to make AYP and to attract neighborhood parents, primarily because of the cross-class coalition using the school. Even if we haven’t raised $1 million for our school, many parents volunteer, run after-school clubs, and try to solicit community resources to help the school provide what has been eliminated because of cuts at the state level. The reward is that our children get to attend an integrated, academically sound public school in our city neighborhood that is open to all. We are part of a growing movement in several cities (including NYC) that has parents choosing to invest their time and energy in public schools, not only for their own families’ good but to strengthen the fabric of their neighborhoods and cities.

Which brings me back to your op-ed. I am a public school parent–not a teacher and not a union employee. I find the representations of the state of public education in the U.S. promulgated by films such as “Won’t Back Down” and “Waiting for Superman” to be harmful and inaccurate depictions of the current dilemmas faced by public school students, parents, and teachers.

Private schools have done a good sales job over the last decade or so, feeding the cultural panic among middle-class parents, creating anxieties in them that they cannot use the public schools and must purchase high-priced private schooling, tutoring, etc. at any price if their children are to succeed in life academically and economically. However, it is the class and educational background of parents that is the most critical variable in children’s success. While many currently make the claim (which you echo) that U.S. public schools are way behind other countries, when socioeconomic class is taken into account, American students do as well or better than the countries we say we wish to emulate. It is poverty that is our greatest problem. Middle-class children who attend urban public schools, even those in schools with very low average scores, do fine. If we want to solve the educational crisis that does exist for kids from low-income families, then creating jobs, stable health care, and an economic security net for their families is one key–and finding ways to create schools integrated by race and socioeconomic background is another–and providing appropriate funding, early childhood education, and smaller classes is a third.

The voucher, charter school, and parent trigger movements aim in precisely the opposite direction by draining public schools of funds desperately needed in this climate of scarcity and creating a two-tier system of schools, segregating kids even further by race, class, English language learner status, and disability. Indeed as the CREDO study by Stanford University shows, charter schools do not provide better educational opportunities; many provide worse. The people behind the push for parent trigger laws are not idealistic parents but chain charter operators hoping to expand their profits at the public expense–and their right-wing backers hoping to undermine our understanding of education as a public good. I hope you do some research on this topic and reconsider your opinion.

Sincerely,
Rebecca Poyourow (a usually appreciative reader)
Categories Budget Cuts, Parent trigger, Parents, Pennsylvania, US Education

What Is the Public Purpose of Public Education?

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2012 //
15

In case you have forgotten how to answer that question;

In case you are befuddled by the nonstop attacks on public schools and those who teach in them;

In case you don’t remember the history of education in the past fifty years:

Please read this statement on “The Public Purpose of Public Education” by Jan Resseger.

It is one of the best, most concise summaries of the issues facing public education and our society today.

Please share it with your elected officials.

Please share it with those who are responsible for our schools today.

Categories US Education

The Charter School Threat to American Society

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2012 //
50

If charter schools served the neediest children, if they recruited the students who had dropped out, if they made an effort to collaborate with public schools in a joint undertaking, they would have a valued place in American education.

But in the current context, they have been turned into a battering ram to compete with public schools and skim the ablest students.

Where will this lead? Will we have a dual school system in ten years, with one system (the charters) for the motivated and able students, and the other system (the public schools) for those who didn’t get into a charter?

Many years ago, Harold Noah–an economist at Teachers College, Columbia –described how the Soviet system eventually reproduced the same class inequities that existed in its schools before the Revolution. How certain schools were set aside for this elite and that elite, and eventually it became impossible to see what had changed.

Are we reverting to the dual system in American education that existed pre-1954? Will there be charter schools in gated communities to keep out the others? And charter schools to skim off the cream in poor communities? And impoverished public schools, overwhelmed by the students with the greatest needs?

A regular reader writes:

Enrollment-skimming, not whether charters provide a better education or get higher test scores, is the fundamental threat posed by charters.

Charters — by definition — populate their student body via enrollment.  This means that all of the students in a charter have parents who were sufficiently concerned/functional to pursue/complete the charter application.

In the low-SES areas — where virtually all charters are located — many parents are too unconcerned/dysfunctional to pursue/complete a charter application.  The result: Many/most of the children of the concerned/functional parents go to the charters while all of the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents go to the neighborhood schools.

This passive enroll-by-application segregation operates independently of and in addtion to any affirmative discrimination by the charters against the “problem” students (i.e., ESL, LD, behavior problems) in either the application or the expulsion stages.

This passive enroll-by-application segregation practiced by the charters is, in many ways, analogous to the racial segregation practiced by southern school systems before Brown v. Bd. of Ed.

In the case of the racially-segregated schools, the govt created white schools so the white parents could avoid sending their white children to school with the children of black parents.  In the case of charters, the govt creates charters so the concerned/functional (albeit low-income) parents can avoid sending their children to school with the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents.

The charter segregation is not as morally reprehensible as the racial segregation, but poses similar threats to society.  The charter schools, like the racially-segregated schools, result in a large group of disadvantaged students (the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents like the children of the black parents) being educated in separate schools that are theoretically equal to the charter/white schools but are, in fact, inferior to the charter/white schools.

Society is still paying a high price for its failure adequately to educate generations of black students in the segregated schools.  If we continue the charter experiments, society will pay a similar high price for its failure adequately to education generations of children of unconcerned/dysfunctional low-income/inner-city parents in the neighborhood public schools.

Clearly, the socially-responsible approach is to operate a unitary school system while addressing the problems (i.e., misbehavior, low reading levels) posed by the children of unconcerned/dysfunctional parents via school reforms specifically targeting those problems (i.e. improved discipline, improved reading programs) in that unitary school system.

Categories Charter Schools, US Education

Who Else Is Rolling Over in His Grave?

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2012 //
48

A reader, noting the plan to privatize 40% of the schools in Philadelphia, had this to say:

WILLIAM PENN is rolling over in his grave, I’m sure.

It occurred to me that :

John Dewey must be rolling over in his grave as he sees our national leaders using standardized tests to impose rankings and ratings on students, teachers, principals, and schools, while many abandon the arts to reach their targets.

Horace Mann must be rolling over in his grave as he sees corporations descending on the schools to make a profit and to privatize as many as possible.

Henry Barnard must be rolling over in his grave as he sees a Democratic governor in his home state of Connecticut handing public schools over to private managers and calling it “reform.”

Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in his grave as he sees Bobby Jindal giving public funds to voucher students to attend religious schools in Louisiana.

Lyndon B. Johnson must be ruling over in his grave as he sees his beloved Elementary and Secondary Education Act, meant to equalize resources and help poor kids, turned into a club to impose testing and privately managed schools.

Martin Luther King, Jr. must be rolling over in his grave as he sees Wall Street hedge fund managers and billionaires say that they are leading the civil rights movement of our day, as they attack unions and privatize public schools.

Who else is rolling in their grave?

Categories Connecticut, Philadelphia, Poverty, Privatization, Race to the Top, US Education, Vouchers
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