This is an interview
Michael Katz and I did via email with Valerie Strauss, an education reporter
for the Washington Post. It appeared in her "Answer
Sheet" column on August 28, 2013. [link]
* * *
Valerie Strauss: Tell us why you
wrote Public Education Under Siege.
Michael Katz and Mike Rose: Well,
maybe the best way to answer that question is with an example from the
news. At the end of July, the Walton
Family Foundation (the philanthropist arm of Walmart) donated $20 million to
Teach for America to recruit and train close to 4000 teachers to work in
underresourced schools across the country.
The largest percentage of these recruits will be coming to Los Angeles,
where one of us lives. If the past is
prologue, most of the new TFA crew will work in L.A. charter schools. There’s a lot about this story that is good
news, right? The Walton Foundation is
spending its fortune and shining its considerable spotlight on education, and
Los Angeles will get at least 500 sharp, idealistic young people in its
schools. This scenario fits well in the
current mainstream school reform agenda.
But the story also raises for us a
host of questions about contemporary reform, and we produced Public
Education Under Siege as a kind of sourcebook to use in exploring those
questions.
VS: So, what are those questions?
MK and MR: One set of questions has
to do with teaching itself: What does it involve? What does it take to nurture it and do it—and
how can we determine when it is done well?
A related set of questions has to do with understanding and sensibility
about race and class, for many young teachers—like those TFA recruits—will be
working in communities quite unfamiliar to them. Race, class, and the economic and social
history of schools matter. The TFA story
raises yet another question for us: What do underresourced schools in
low-income communities need? They
certainly need teachers and principals who can commit to them, come to know
them well and stay with them, for turnover and instability plague them. Because so many of their students carry big
burdens, these schools also need multiple integrated services: health care,
legal aid, social work, and so on.
Finally, we believe in the old journalist’s dictum: follow the
money. Private philanthropies are more
deeply involved in public education than ever before—and that could be a
blessing, especially in these budget cutting times—but are there agendas behind
the money? The Walton Foundation has a
record of support for charter schools and school vouchers, and the corporation
financing the foundation is strongly anti-union. If the influx of TFA recruits enter charter
schools, that de facto further strengthens charters and, as well, directly or
indirectly displaces local teachers, some of whom are highly qualified—exactly
the teachers school reformers desire. So
a private foundation is directly influencing public education policy and
practice.
What we did in Public Education
Under Siege was enlist people who have thought long and hard about issues
like these and had them write short, accessible articles that lay out the
fuller policy deliberations we should be having, deliberations that include the
nature of teaching and learning; race, class, and inequality; the goals of
education in a democracy; teachers unions, school governance, and parent
involvement; school finance; education and the criminal justice system; and the
role of private philanthropy in public education.
VS: Why aren’t these issues part of
the school reform discussion?
MK and MR: Well, there’s political
reasons, certainly. There is such
reluctance to bring up issues of race or class, for example. You’re accused of playing the race card or of
engaging in class warfare—and the discussion stalls there.
Also, there are a lot of people and
moving parts in contemporary school reform, and some of the conservative
players have agendas, like vouchers and privatization, that can benefit from
narrowly defining public school accountability.
But we also think that the core
ideas driving mainstream reform—a faith in market-based solutions, a belief in
technical fixes, like high stakes testing, a down-playing, even disregard, for
teacher education and experience—put powerful blinders on reformers, many of
whom are well intentioned and do care abut the awful education received by poor
kids. The market-technocratic
orientation can make it hard to appreciate, let alone understand, history,
culture, and social context as well as the intricacies of teaching and
classroom life.
VS: How did this set of beliefs
take hold, even among some liberals who previously had recognized that the
public education system should be run as a civic institution rather than a
business?
MK and MR: Multiple reasons,
really. In general, in American politics
there’s been a shift toward the Right going on since the Reagan
presidency. And even before that,
there’s been a growing attraction toward market-based solutions to public
policy problems. This embrace of market
models, and along with it a technological orientation to social issues, has
become increasingly bi-partisan. It’s
the new wisdom.
Partly, this move toward market
solutions has been guided by a long-term and, frankly, masterful effort by
conservatives, libertarians, and free-marketers to craft arguments, taking
points, narratives, and policy briefs in support of this market
orientation. And schools have been in
their sights for a long time.
And partly, there’s legitimate
frustration that we all share with the poor education a lot of kids receive,
typically the most vulnerable children in our society. Mainstream reformers are looking for new
solutions, and the kinds of market-oriented, technocratic solutions we’ve been
discussing have the appeal of the new and the spirit of the times behind
them. We get their frustration, but
think that some of their solutions create more problems than they solve.
VS: Speaking of solutions, do any
of the writers in the book have any ideas about what needs to be done instead?
MK and MR: Yes, absolutely. Different writers have different goals, and
we think all are important.
In same instances, they want to
demonstrate through data, classroom illustrations, or historical and social
analysis why a particular aspect of reform is wrong-headed or could have bad
unintended consequences. For example,
the problems with over-reliance on standardized test scores as a measure of
student achievement, or the limitations of “Value Added” methods of assessing
teacher effectiveness, or the way “choice” can contribute to resegregation.
In other cases, the writers argue
that mainstream reformers don’t go far enough in implementing the goals they
espouse. Reformers want to reduce the
achievement gap, for example, but downplay the role of poverty in academic
achievement, thereby limiting the kinds of interventions they create. Or reformers embrace a civil rights rhetoric
but don’t honor the call of the Civil Rights Movement for economic justice as
well as educational access and equity.
And in yet other cases, the writers
want to shine a light on issues that are rarely if ever discussed in mainstream
school reform, such as the role the increased criminalizing of students has on
achievement, or the negative effect our lack of informed national language
policy has on English Language Learners.
A number of the writers present
alternative solutions to the problems that plague our schools and, more
generally, offer alternative visions of reform.
There are discussions of a fuller set of goals for education in a
democracy—the civic, social, intellectual, and moral, as well as economic,
human capital goal that dominates current educational policy. And we get to see classrooms in which this
fuller purpose plays out. We get to see
examples, both in a regular public school and a charter school, of leadership
that resists the test-driven pressures of the time and creates rich learning
environments for poor kids. Several
writers offer a different vision of teacher development and assessment, ones
closer to the actual work that teachers do.
And several writers offer different models of teacher unionization. There are also discussions—based on community
work in New York and Los Angeles—of organizing parents, assisting them in
gaining a voice in their schools. And
there is an argument for raising again the truly big issue blocking educational
equality: school finance reform.
At times it feels like the current
reform movement is a runaway train—a very well-fueled, fast-moving, powerful
one. But there are increasing counter-voices
to it, from local anti-testing movements to broader national
organizations. We need to create a
coherent, compelling alternative vision, a different story that includes both
critique and exemplar. We hope that the
writers in this book collectively contribute to that story.
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