Blinded by Reform... and a tribute to Ted Sizer

This is a commentary I published last week in Truthdig http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091021_blinded_by_reform/, and I reprint it here for those of you who haven’t seen it. Let me take this opportunity to put a plug in for Truthdig, a lively, Webbie award-winning magazine of politics and culture.

At the end I offer a short tribute to Ted Sizer, who died a short while ago.

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Blinded by Reform

It’s gotten lost in the splashier news, but big things are going on at the U.S. Department of Education.

Following on the unprecedented federal reach of No Child Left Behind, the Obama administration is extending further and putting serious money behind its education initiatives, inviting states and districts to compete for federal dollars. The department wants to increase the community college graduation rate. For K-12, it wants to stimulate the production of better state standards and tests, measure teacher effectiveness, turn around failing schools and increase the number of charter schools. Through a third initiative it wants to spark innovation and scale up the best of local academic programs.

This is a moment of real promise for American education, from kindergarten through college. It has even created the season’s oddest political couple: With the Department of Education’s blessing, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and the Rev. Al Sharpton are about to tour the country for educational reform.

Reform is in the air. But within many of these reforms are the seeds of their undoing.

For example, the Education Department is putting a lot of stock in charter schools as “engines of innovation”—in fact, it will not consider a state’s proposal if the state has a cap on charters. Yet a number of research studies—the most recent from Stanford—demonstrate that charter schools on average are no better or worse than the regular public schools around them. Some charters are sites of fresh ideas and robust education, but so are magnet schools, and career academies, and—we seem to have forgotten this—regular old schools with strong leadership and a critical mass of good teachers. But the reformers’ overvaluation of charter schools seems to dim their view of these varied manifestations of excellence.

Another example is the department’s attempt to link evaluation of teacher quality to student performance. (Merit pay could also follow.) And, again, the department will not consider a state’s proposal if the state outlaws such linkage of evaluation and student performance.

This linkage has a common-sense quality to it, especially what is called “value-added” analysis: that is, the degree to which a class’ test scores improve from the beginning of the school year to the end. Yet among experts in educational testing and measurement, there is a good deal of disagreement over the legitimacy of using these techniques to judge teacher quality. There are a host of factors that can affect scores: the non-random mix of students in a class, the students’ previous teachers, the lobbying of senior teachers for higher-scoring classes or the assignment of such classes to a principal’s favored teachers. There are also technical issues with the analysis of the test data. And there are significant conceptual concerns about exactly what the tests are measuring. In fact, the National Research Council, the prestigious, nonpartisan government agency, has just issued a statement reinforcing all of these concerns.

The Department of Education champions “evidence-based” and “data-driven” practice. Why, then, does the department espouse approaches that warrant scrutiny?

I think there are three interrelated reasons.

Given the immense pressure in politics for a quick result, there is a tendency in social policy toward single-shot, magic-bullet solutions, solutions that are marketable and have rhetorical panache but are simplified responses to complex problems. Charter schools will transform American education, or the linking of student test scores to teacher effectiveness will pressure teachers to change the way they teach and their expectations for what students can achieve.

This magic-bullet thinking is enabled by the paucity of schoolhouse-level knowledge of teaching and learning in the formation of educational policy. Not many policy analysts have taught school and, with few exceptions, those who have taught spent only a youthful year or two in the ranks. More troubling is something I have witnessed over the years: On-the-ground, intimate knowledge of teaching and learning is not valued, and is seen as an imprecise distraction from the consideration of broader economic and management principles that lead to systemic change. It’s like setting up a cardiology clinic without the advice of cardiologists.

The third element involves the rhetoric of reform. The advocates of the current model of test-based accountability have been very successful in depicting their critics as “anti-reform traditionalists,” as “special interests” or, the kiss of death, as members of the “education establishment.”

There is a lot to say about the accuracy of this depiction, for many who are tarred as establishment traditionalists have a long history of challenging traditional school practice and working to change it. But for now I want to focus on the way this demonizing rhetoric can jeopardize the work of the reformers themselves.

Take, for example, the concern expressed by teachers’ unions about linking student test scores to teacher evaluation. It is easy to characterize these concerns as special-interest pleading, but some of the evidence cited by the unions comes from researchers with no vested interest in teachers’ bread-and-butter issues. (One such researcher is a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.) When legitimate concerns about reform techniques are easily dismissed as “anti-reform,” then you have a closed policy system, one shielded from self-correction.

It is good news indeed that school reform has become a top national priority, that the ways schools are structured, children are taught and teachers evaluated have become issues worthy of federal attention. But for reforms to be effective and sustained, they need to be grounded on the best we know and examined carefully and from multiple perspectives.

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Ted Sizer, the founder of The Coalition of Essential Schools and the author of a lot of wonderful books, like Horace’s Compromise, died last week. Ted was a smart and articulate advocate for the kind of schooling I hope this blog represents. And, boy, do we need his voice now.

I have a photograph of Ted pinned to the bulletin board over my desk. It was autumn, 1994, and we are caught in mid-step on a dirt path among the trees by Ted’s home in Central Massachusetts. It was during a time when I was having big trouble with some writing, and Ted had invited me to spend a day with him, his wife Nancy, and Debbie Meier away from everything in rural Massachusetts. It was an offer typical of Ted.

The leaves are golden brown, and the foliage along the roadside is thick and rises up into the trees. The sun is falling onto the path and along our bodies in uneven stripes. We’re looking into the camera and smiling. I’m caught in some half-awkward gesture with my hands, like I’m fumbling a small watermelon. Ted has his hands in his pockets, urbane, head cocked, that nice smile. I think all of us who knew Ted will remember his smile.

I’ve been reading the notes and letters I’ve received from Ted over the years. Some of the correspondence is in a thick but elegant marks-a-lot script; some are typed; all, in some way, encourage and assure. It’s finally the assurance that comes to mind of when I think back over my friendship with Ted Sizer. The way he had of encouraging and confirming. It was the spirit behind the Coalition of Essential Schools. It was the quality that made his critique humane and powerful. It’s certainly what I think of when I look up from my desk and see those two guys walking under the trees.

EXCERPT FROM WHY SCHOOL?: A STUDENT IN A COMMUNITY COLLEGE BASIC SKILLS PROGRAM

Here is a passage from Why School?, a portrait of a man with a disability in a community college basic skills program. I hope you like it.

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Food wrappers and sheets of newspaper were blowing in the wet wind across the empty campus. It was late in the day, getting dark fast, and every once in a while I’d look outside the library – which was pretty empty too – and imagine the drizzly walk to the car, parked far away.

Anthony was sitting by me, and I was helping him read a flyer on the dangers of cocaine. He wanted to give it to his daughter. Anthony was enrolled in a basic skills program, one of several special programs at this urban community college. Anthony was in his late-thirties, had some degree of brain damage from a childhood injury, worked custodial jobs most of his life. He could barely read or write, but was an informed, articulate guy, listening to FM radio current affairs shows while he worked, watching public television at home. He had educated himself through the sources available to him, compensating for the damage done.

The librarian was about to go off shift, so we gathered up our things – Anthony carried a big backpack – and headed past her desk to the exit. The wind pushed back on the door as I pushed forward, and I remember thinking how dreary the place was, dark and cold. At that moment I wanted so much to be home.

Just then a man in a coat and tie came up quickly behind us. “Hey man,” he said to Anthony, “you look good. You lose some weight?” Anthony beamed, said that he had dropped a few pounds and that things were going o.k. The guy gave Anthony a cupping slap on the shoulder, then pulled his coat up and walked head down across the campus.

“Who was that?,” I asked, ducking with Anthony back inside the entryway to the library. He was one of the deans, Anthony said, but, well, he was once his parole officer, too. He’s seen Anthony come a long way. Anthony pulled on the straps of his backpack, settling the weight more evenly across his shoulders. “I like being here,” he said in his soft, clear voice. “I know it can’t happen by osmosis. But this is where it’s at.”

I’ve thought about this moment off and on for twenty years. I couldn’t wait to get home, and Anthony was right at home. Fresh from reading something for his daughter, feeling the clasp on his shoulder of both his past and his future, for Anthony a new life was emerging on the threshold of a chilly night on a deserted campus.

These few minutes remind me of how humbling work with human beings can be. How we’ll always miss things. How easily we get distracted – my own memories of cold urban landscapes overwhelmed the moment.

But I also hold onto this experience with Anthony for it contains so many lessons about development, about resilience and learning, about the power of hope and a second chance. It reminds us too of the importance of staying close to the ground, of finding out what people are thinking, of trying our best – flawed though it will be – to understand the world as they see it… and to be ready to revise our understanding. This often means taking another line of sight on what seems familiar, seeing things in a new light.

And if we linger with Anthony a while longer, either in the doorway or back inside at a library table, we might get the chance to reflect on the basic question of what school is for, the purpose of education. What brought Anthony back to the classroom after all those years? To help his economic prospects, certainly. Anthony wanted to trade in his mop and pail for decent pay and a few benefits. But we also get a glimpse as to why else he’s here. To be able to better guide his daughter. To be more proficient in reading about the events swirling around him – to add reading along with radio and television to his means of examining the world. To create a new life for himself, nurture this emerging sense of who he can become.