This is the first
half of an essay that appeared in the Winter, 2015 issue of The American
Scholar. Some of you have read it already, but for those of you who haven't, I
reprint it here. I will post the second half in about one week.
***
During the first
wave of what would become the 30-year school reform movement that shapes
education policy to this day, I visited good public school classrooms across
the United States, wanting to compare the rhetoric of reform, which tended to
be abstract and focused on crisis, with the daily efforts of teachers and
students who were making public education work.
I identified
teachers, principals, and superintendents who knew about local schools; college
professors who taught teachers; parents and community activists who were
involved in education. What’s going on in your area that seems promising? I
asked. What are teachers talking about? Who do parents hold in esteem? In all,
I interviewed and often observed in action more than 60 teachers and 25
administrators in 30-some schools. I also met many students and parents from
the communities I visited. What soon became evident—and is still true today—was
an intellectual and social richness that was rarely discussed in the public
sphere or in the media. I tried to capture this travelogue of educational
achievement in a book published in 1995 called Possible Lives: The
Promise of Education in America. Twenty years later, I want to consider
school reform in light of the lessons learned during that journey, and
relearned in later conversations with some of these same teachers.
***
For all of the
features that schools share, life inside a classroom is profoundly affected by
the immediate life outside it, by the particular communities in which a school
is embedded. Visiting a one-room schoolhouse in rural Montana or a crowded high
school in Chicago, you will find much in the routines and the curriculum that
holds steady—the grammar of schooling, as historians David Tyack and Larry
Cuban called it in Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School
Reform (1995). Yet within that grammar lie differences: in topics of
discussion, in the illustrations that teachers use, in how the language sounds,
and in the worries of the day pressing in from the neighborhood. These
differences, the differences of place, make each school distinct from every
other.
During my travels,
I watched as third-graders in Calexico, a California-Mexico border town, gave
reports on current events in Spanish and in English. They followed the
journalist’s central questions—who, what, why, when, where, and how—exploring
the significance of the depleted ozone layer, of smog in nearby industrial
Mexicali, of changes in the local school board.
In Chicago,
12th-graders discussed Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, trying to
make sense of the characters’ different perspectives, offering provisional
explanations of important occurrences in the novel. They were gaining a sense
of the power of speculation, of moving an inquiry forward by wading into
uncertain waters.
On Baltimore’s
West Side, first-graders combined literature and science by reading a fanciful
story about hermit crabs and then conducting an experiment—resulting from a
student’s question—to understand the environment in which the crabs thrive.
In small towns in
the Mississippi Delta, middle school children played games with physical
representations of algebraic operations, part of civil rights activist Bob
Moses’s Algebra Project, a curriculum as well as a social movement that still
helps prepare children, regardless of academic background, for algebra, which
Moses believes is an important pathway to opportunity.
And in a one-room
schoolhouse in Polaris, Montana, students kept a naturalist’s journal on the
willows in the creek behind the school. At one point the teacher bent over an
older student who was working on sketches and measurements. The teacher pointed
to one detailed drawing and asked his student why he thought the willows grew
in such dense clusters, rather than long and snaky up a tree. The boy had
fished these creeks for years, the teacher later explained, and “I just wanted
him to take a different look at what he already knows.”
The teachers in
these varied classrooms shared a belief in their students’ ability to become
engaged by ideas and to develop as thoughtful, intellectually adventurous
people. They saw the subjects they taught—whether science, literature, or
math—as bountiful resources that would foster their students’ development.
To update Possible
Lives, I spoke to each of these teachers again about 10 years after my
visit and found that all of them shared a deep concern about the potential
effect of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 on the classrooms they
had worked so hard to create. No Child Left Behind and the Obama
administration’s 2009 Race to the Top initiative are built on the assumption
that our public schools are in crisis, and that the best way to improve them is
by using standardized tests (up to now only in reading and math) to rate student
achievement and teacher effectiveness. Learning is defined as a rise in a
standardized test score and teaching as the set of activities that lead to that
score, with the curriculum tightly linked to the tests. This system
demonstrates a technocratic neatness, but it doesn’t measure what goes on in
the classrooms I visited. A teacher can prep students for a standardized test,
get a bump in scores, and yet not be providing a very good education.
Organizing schools
and creating curricula based on an assumption of wholesale failure make going
to school a regimented and punitive experience. If we determine success
primarily by a test score, we miss those considerable intellectual achievements
that aren’t easily quantifiable. If we think about education largely in
relation to economic competitiveness, then we ignore the social, moral, and
aesthetic dimensions of teaching and learning. You will be hard pressed to find
in federal education policy discussions of achievement that include curiosity,
reflection, creativity, aesthetics, pleasure, or a willingness to take a
chance, to blunder. Our understanding of teaching and learning, and of the
intellectual and social development of children, becomes terribly narrow in the
process.
***
School
reform is hardly a new phenomenon, and the harshest criticism of schools tends
to coincide with periods of social change or economic transformation. The early
decades of the 20th century—a time of rapid industrialization and mass
immigration from central and southern Europe—saw a blistering attack,
reminiscent of our own time. The Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 triggered
another assault, with particular concern over math and science education. And
during the 1980s, as postwar American global economic preeminence was being challenged,
we saw a flurry of reports on the sorry state of education, the most notable of
which, A Nation at Risk (1983), warned of “a rising tide of
mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”
Public education,
a vast, ambitious, loosely coupled system of schools, is one of our country’s
defining institutions. It is also flawed, in some respects deeply so. Unequal
funding, fractious school politics, bureaucratic inertia, uneven curricula,
uninspired pedagogy, and the social ills that seep into the classroom all limit
the potential of our schools. The critics are right to be worried. The problem
is that the criticism, fueled as it is by broader cultural anxieties, is often
sweeping and indiscriminate. Critics blame the schools for problems that have
many causes. And some remedies themselves create difficulties. Policymakers and
educators face a challenge: how to target the problems without diminishing the
achievements in our schools or undermining their purpose. The current school reform
movement fails this challenge.
Back when I was
visiting schools for Possible Lives, critics were presenting
charts of declining scores on SATs but overlooking the demographic and economic
factors that contributed to these numbers—for example, more low-income and
immigrant students were taking the tests (arguably an egalitarian development).
Comparing our test scores with those of other countries, the critics also
failed to consider the social, economic, and cultural differences. (Students in
our nation’s affluent districts fare much better in international comparisons.)
The proposed remedies included not only new curricula and tests to measure the
mastery of these courses of study, but also more time in school, more rigorous
teacher education and credentialing, and market-based options like school
choice and vouchers. And the primary goal of reform was always presented as an
economic one: to prepare our young people for the world of work and to protect
our nation’s position in the global economy.
Since then, the
reform effort has spread and grown more intense, and it continues to focus on
public school failure. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top have
dramatically increased the influence of the federal government on public
schools. Both programs require states to establish standardized testing
programs, and federal funding often depends on the test results. If schools
don’t meet certain performance criteria, they are subject to sanction and even
closure. Race to the Top added a competitive grant program to the federal
effort, requiring states to lift limits on charter schools and tie teacher
evaluations to students’ test scores in order to be eligible for a significant
one-time award of federal funds. Some philanthropies have also supported the
reform agenda, and private advocacy groups have championed causes ranging from
charter schools to alternative approaches to teacher credentialing to, most
recently, overturning teacher tenure and union protections.
Not all those who
identify themselves as reformers would subscribe to the redefinition of
teaching and learning that concerns me, and some of those reformers are raising
among their peers the same issues I am. But a dominant account does emerge from
many influential reform reports and organizations, and it is supported by the
U.S. Department of Education.
***
A core assumption
underlying No Child Left Behind is that substandard academic achievement is the
result of educators’ low expectations and lack of effort. The standardized
tests mandated by the act, its framers contended, hold administrators and
teachers accountable—there can be no excuses for a student’s poor performance.
It’s true that some teachers don’t expect much of the young people in their
charge, particularly students from low-income backgrounds and underrepresented
racial and ethnic groups. But because we know that so many factors contribute
to student achievement, the strongest of which is parental income, the low
expectations of some teachers cannot possibly account for all the disparities
in academic performance. The act’s assumptions also reveal a pretty simplified
notion of what motivates a teacher: raise your expectations or you’ll be
punished—what a friend of mine calls the caveman theory of motivation. An even
more simplistic theory of cognitive and behavioral change suggests that threats
will lead to a change in beliefs about students, whether these beliefs come
from prejudice or from pity. Still, No Child Left Behind’s focus on vulnerable
students was important, and the law did jolt some low-performing schools into
improving their students’ mastery of the basic math and reading skills measured
by the tests.
But the use of
such tests and the high stakes attached to them also led to other results that
any student of organizational behavior could have predicted. A number of
education officials manipulated the system by lowering the cutoff test scores
for proficiency, or withheld from testing students who would perform poorly, or
occasionally fudged the results. A dramatic example is the recent case of
cheating in Atlanta, where school personnel all the way up to the
superintendent were indicted.
Studies of what
went on in classrooms are equally troubling and predictable. The high-stakes
tests led many administrators and teachers to increase math and reading test
preparation and reduce time spent on science, history, and geography. The arts
were, in some cases, drastically reduced or eliminated. Aspects of math and
reading that didn’t directly relate to the tests were also eliminated, even
though they could have led to broader understanding and appreciation of these
subjects.
Not long ago, a
teacher I’ll call Priscilla contacted me with a typical story. She has been
teaching for 30 years in an elementary school in a low-income community north
of Los Angeles. The school’s test scores were not adequate last year, so the
principal, under immense pressure from the school district, mandated for all
teachers a regimented curriculum focused on basic math and literacy skills. The
principal directed the teachers not to change or augment this curriculum. So
now Priscilla cannot draw on her cabinets full of materials collected over the
years to enliven or individualize instruction. The time spent on the new
curriculum has meant trims in science and social studies. Art and music have
been cut entirely. “There is no joy here,” she told me, “only admonishment.”
It makes sense to
concentrate on the basics of math and reading, for they are central to success
in school, and an unacceptable number of students don’t master them. And a
score on a standardized test seems like a straightforward measure of mastery.
But in addition to the kinds of manipulation I discussed, there are a host of
procedural and technical problems in developing, scoring, and interpreting such
tests. Test outcomes depend on the statistical models used, and scores can
fluctuate and be marred by error—thus there is a debate among testing experts
about what, finally, can be deduced from the scores about a student’s or a
school’s achievement. Similar debates surround the currently popular use of
“value-added” methods to determine a teacher’s effectiveness.
A further issue is
that a test that includes, say, the writing of an essay, a music recital, or
the performance of an experiment embodies different notions of learning and
achievement than do the typical tasks on standardized tests: multiple choice
items, matching, fill-ins. I have given both kinds of tests. Both have value,
but they represent knowledge in different ways and require different kinds of
teaching.
The nature of a
school’s response to high-stakes pressure is especially pertinent for those
less affluent students at the center of reform. When teachers in schools like
Priscilla’s concentrate on standardized tests, students might improve their
scores but receive an inadequate education. A troubling pattern in American
schooling thereby continues: poor kids get a lower-tier education focused on
skills and routine while students in more affluent districts get a robust and
engaging school experience.
It’s important to
consider how far removed standardized tests are from the cognitive give and
take of the classroom. That’s one reason for the debate about whether a test
score—which is, finally, a statistical abstraction—accurately measures
learning. Some reform leaders, including Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of
education, are now trying to dial down the emphasis on testing. But because
tests are easy to use and have an aura of objectivity, they are likely to
remain central in the reform agenda.
***
Priscilla’s story
is emblematic not only of the mechanical and restrictive pedagogy that is
frequently forced on teachers in a test-driven environment, but also of the
attitude toward teachers. They live in a bipolar world, praised as central to
students’ achievement and yet routinely condemned as the cause of low
performance.
When the
standardized test score is the measure of a teacher’s effectiveness, other
indicators of competence are discounted. One factor is seniority—which reformers
believe, not without reason, overly constrains an administrator’s hiring
decisions. Another is post-baccalaureate degrees and certifications in
education, a field many reformers hold in contempt. Several studies do report
low correlation between experience (defined as years in the profession) and
students’ test scores. Other studies find a similarly low correlation between
students’ scores and teachers’ post-baccalaureate degrees and certifications.
These studies lead to an absolute claim that neither experience nor schooling
beyond the bachelor’s degree makes any difference.
What a remarkable
assertion. Can you think of any other kind of work—from hair styling to
neurosurgery—where we don’t value experience and training? If reformers had a
better understanding of teaching, they might wonder whether something was amiss
with the studies, which tend to deal in simple averages and define experience
or training in crude ways. Experience, for example, is typically defined as
years on the job, yet years in service, considered alone, don’t mean that much.
A dictionary definition of experience—“activity that includes training,
observation of practice, and personal participation and knowledge gained from
this”—indicates the connection to competence. The teachers in Possible
Lives had attended workshops and conferences, participated in
professional networks, or taken classes. They experimented with their curricula
and searched out ideas and materials to incorporate into their work. What
people do with their time on the job becomes the foundation of
expertise.
More generally,
the qualities of good work—study and experimentation, the accumulation of
knowledge, and refinement of skill—are thinly represented in descriptions of
teacher quality, overshadowed by the simplified language of testing. In a
similar vein, the long history of Western thought on education—from Plato to
Septima Clark—is rarely if ever mentioned in the reform literature. History as
well as experience and inquiry are replaced with a metric.
These attitudes
toward experience are rooted in the technocratic-managerial ideology that
drives many kinds of policy, from health care to urban planning to agriculture:
the devaluing of local, craft, and experiential knowledge and the elevating of
systems thinking, of finding the large economic, social, or organizational
levers to pull in order to initiate change. A professor of management tells a
University of California class of aspiring principals that the more they know
about the particulars of instruction, the less effective they’ll be, for that
nitty-gritty knowledge will blur their perception of the problem and the
application of universal principles of management—as fitting for a hospital or
a manufacturing plant as a school.
This dismissal of
classroom knowledge fits with the trendy discourse of innovation and creative
disruption, a discourse that runs throughout education reform, asserting that
it will take entrepreneurial outsiders to change the system. I understand the
impulse here, because getting something fresh through large school
bureaucracies can be maddening. But creative disruption is predicated on the
belief that anything new must be better, and it relies on a reductive model of
organizational and technological change. One of the celebrated technologies in
the disrupters’ armory is the computer, which clearly allows wonderful things
to happen in education. But online charter schools have a troubled record, and
higher education’s much ballyhooed massive open online courses, or MOOCs,
are proving to be much more limited in their usefulness or success than
predicted. The computer’s potential is realized only when people who are wise
about teaching and learning program it, and when it is integrated into a strong
curriculum taught by someone who is savvy about its use.
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As usual, Mike, you cut right to the heart of the matter: No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core and the tests built thereup, distort education. As you write "A teacher can prep students for a standardized test, get a bump in scores, and yet not be providing a very good education." The real purpose of tests should be to providing feedback. The way we do standardized tests does not provide meaningful feedback, and tends to narrow the educational experience to what can be easily tested. That does not even consider how poorly many items are constructed, or that we ignore what we know about human development in insisting all students perform at the same level at the same age. Thanks again for your astute comments.
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