School Reform Fails the Test: Part 1

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.

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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.

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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.

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            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.

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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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The Threats to School Reform …are within its own program

This commentary of mine appeared in Valerie Strauss's blog The Answer Sheet, a part of washingtonpost.com.

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Here’s an all-too-familiar storyline about reform, from education to agricultural development: The reform has run its course, has not achieved its goals, and the reformers and other analysts speculate in policy briefs or opinion pages about what went wrong. The interesting thing is that the reform’s flaws were usually evident from the beginning. As someone who has lived through several periods of educational reform and has studied schools and taught for a long time, I see characteristics of the current reform movement, as powerful as it is, that could lead to unintended and undesirable consequences. But when reform is going strong it can become a closed ideological system, deaf to the cautionary tale.
I have six areas of concern.

Tone Down the Rhetoric. In the manifesto “How to Fix Our Schools” published on October 10 in this newspaper, New York City’s chancellor, Joel Klein and 15 colleagues wrote: “It’s time for all the adults – superintendants, educators, elected officials, labor unions, and parents alike – to start acting like we are responsible for the future of our children.” The collective “we” is used here, but it’s pretty clear rhetorically that the signatories believe that they are already on the side of the angels. Anyone who is not on board with their reforms is acting out of self interest.

This is not the way to foster the unified effort called for in the sentence.
Reformers have been masterful at characterizing anyone who differs from their approach as “traditionalists” who want to maintain the status quo, putting their own retrograde professional interests ahead of the good of children. Teachers unions are the arch-villain in this Manichean tale of good and evil, and schools of education are right behind. I’m reminded of the toxic rhetoric of patriotism that characterized the 2008 presidential campaign. So, if I may, in the interest of the children, I suggest a less adversarial language. Many of the people on the receiving end of it have spent a lifetime working for the same goals voiced by the reformers, and the reformers need their expertise.

There is another language issue, and that’s the unrelenting characterization of public schools as failures. To be sure, this crisis rhetoric predates the current reformers, going back to the 1983 document “A Nation at Risk.” Since then, the language of crisis and failure has intensified. Crisis talk can give rise to action, but heard consistently enough and long enough, such rhetoric can also lead to despair and paralysis.

There is a crisis in American education, and it involves mostly poor children, and thus it is a moral as well as educational outrage. But it is just not accurate to characterize public education itself as being in a thirty-year crisis.

I can’t tell you how many professional people I meet who, upon finding out what I do, erupt with damning statements about public schools: they are a catastrophe, we are doomed, the situation is hopeless. What is telling is that they are not speaking from experience; they don’t have kids, or their kids are in private school, or are grown. They are voicing the new common sense. Unless you’re in the free market camp of the reform movement, this reaction is not good news, for it suggests hopelessness and withdrawal from support for public education.

The Problem with “Cleaning House.” Some districts are so dysfunctional that clearing them out seems the best option. But the history of reform in education – and other domains as well – reveals the shortsightedness of such action. In even the most beleaguered school district there are good teachers and administrators, and their skills and local wisdom are tossed out in the clean sweep. And in most communities there are grass roots movements to improve the schools, and they are typically ignored. Finally, this approach predictably is going to piss people off, not only those who are part of the problem, but many others in the community as well. No one likes to be pushed around – as the voters in Washington D.C. just demonstrated. Clean sweep reform shakes things up and attracts the media, which might be useful. But these tactics can generate more heat than light. Though it is tedious and calls for great skill, a more targeted and discriminating approach that builds on what is good has a better chance of long-term success.

Careful of the Big Idea. Reformers are often driven by a big idea, a grand process or structure that will transform the status quo. Not too long ago, the big idea in education reform was turning large schools into small ones. For NCLB it was a system of high-stakes tests that would drive achievement. One appealing big idea today is charter schools. The problem with the big idea approach to school reform is that large-scale educational problems have more than one cause and thus require more than one solution.

The mother of big ideas in contemporary school reform is the belief that we can capture dynamic phenomena like learning or teaching with a few numerical measures. This is the logical fallacy of reification, and the last century of psychological science is filled with unfortunate examples, as Stephen J. Gould trenchantly observed in The Mismeasure of Man.

Though most reformers acknowledge the problems with NCLB, they continue to try to build a better technocratic mousetrap, not questioning the assumptions behind their use of testing and accountability systems. We’re seeing all this play out with currently popular “value-added” methods of evaluating teachers as reformers ignore the concerns raised by statisticians and measurement experts.

One more manifestation of this way of thinking is the attempt to develop quantitative models of teacher effectiveness. In a nutshell, the approach attempts to pinpoint specific teaching behaviors and qualities and correlate them with a numerical measure of student achievement. There’s another logical problem here, the reductive fallacy –the attempt to explain a complex phenomenon by reducing it to its basic components. Even if researchers are able to specify a wide range of behaviors and qualities, the further problem is that it’s likely, given the history of such attempts, that the result will be a small number of significant correlations with the measure of achievement – which itself might be flawed. We’ll end up with a thin composite of good teaching. We just witnessed with NCLB the way high-stakes testing can narrow what gets taught; a reductive model of teacher effectiveness could lead to a corresponding narrowing of teaching itself.

Focus on Instruction. It is characteristic of contemporary school reform to focus on organizational structure and broad testing and accountability systems, but change at that level is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reform. As Debbie Meier, the maven of the original small schools movement, once said: You can have crappy small schools too. What goes on in the classroom makes all the difference.

It could be argued that standardized tests give us a window onto learning, but it is a pretty narrow window, distant from the cognitive give and take of instruction. And it could also be said that aforementioned measures of teacher effectiveness will bring characteristics of good teachers to the fore. Even if they work, these methods won’t help us think about curriculum, the organization of the classroom, what we want students to do intellectually, how we address academic underpreperation, and so on. Instruction is the gigantic missing element in reform, and without it, all the structural changes in the world won’t get us very far.

Privileging Youth Over Experience. Reformers have a tendency to downplay the value of experience and to celebrate the new. You will rarely see a career public school teacher featured in reform media, but will see young teachers in KIPP schools or Teach for America volunteers.

Furthermore, ask yourself, when in a reform document have you found reference to the rich Western tradition of educational thought, from Plato through Horace Mann and W.E.B. DuBois to the twentieth century treasure trove of research on learning. It seems that the reform movement’s managerial-technocratic orientation has an anti-intellectual streak to it.

I greatly admire the young people who sign up for Teach for America or work diligently in schools like KIPP. I began my career in education via an earlier alternative program, Teacher Corps, so I know the exhilaration and challenge. But I also know how green I was, and how the wisdom of veteran teachers saved me from big blunders.

What I’m concerned about is the way young teachers are used in reform publicity, what they symbolize. The message is not simply the accurate one that we need to attract bright and committed young people to teaching, but that the new and the alternative will save our schools.

In what other profession would such an appeal be made? Can you imagine proposals to staff hospitals with biology majors or the courts with pre-law graduates?

Merit pay could be related to experience, though many merit pay schemes link pay to test scores. The original Race to the Top proposal did mention professional development and career trajectories, though I haven’t read much more since. This cult of the new is interwoven with the reformers’ attempts to remove seniority and to not consider teachers’ academic credentials. However these issues play out in management-union negotiations, reformers are going to have to develop ways to draw on experience and expertise, not with add-on rewards but as central to the reform enterprise.

Don’t Downplay Poverty. Low socioeconomic status does not condemn a child to low achievement. This fact has led some reformers to downplay – and in some cases dismiss – the harmful effect poverty can have on the lives of children in school. To raise the issue of poverty is to risk being accused of making excuses or of harboring “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

I grew up poor and have worked a fair amount of my life with low-income students. To be poor affects everything from health to housing – which weighs mightily on children. There is also the extraordinary gap in educational resources. While a poor kid is trying to work through an outdated textbook at the kitchen table, his affluent peer across town is being tutored in algebra in her own room. Only someone who hasn’t been poor could say that all this can be overcome by school. It is telling that The Harlem Children’s Zone, a rightfully celebrated crown jewel of reform, incorporates health and social services with schooling.

Reformers slip into either/or thinking here. They are right to insist that schools provide poor kids with a top-flight education, but to insist on excellence does not require negating the brutal realities of being poor in America.

If education involves children’s psychological and social as well as cognitive well-being, then we have to address poverty, and the reformers have an unprecedented bully pulpit from which to do it. Wealth and income gaps are widening in the U.S., and no less a figure than Warren Buffet observed that we’re in the middle of class warfare, and the rich are winning.

Which is all the more reason to get school reform right this time.

Race to the Top of What?, Part II

The results of the first round of competition for Race to the Top funds came in last week, and my home state of California wasn’t one of the lucky 16. This failure has caused much consternation. After all, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan paid special attention to California, and Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislature engaged in serious political wrangling to clear the way: we removed our cap on charter schools and removed the firewall between teacher evaluation and student test scores. Secretary Duncan praised these moves. Yet we didn’t make the cut. Some states that didn’t go as far (like New York and Kentucky) were among the early winners. God knows how the decision was made, though that will be revealed in April – presumably not April 1. So California policy makers are trying to decipher the tea leaves to gear up for the next competition.

It was interesting to read the commentaries that followed the decision. Lots of puzzling and head-scratching – both in California and elsewhere – and some finger pointing: mostly at teachers unions and recalcitrant districts that didn’t sign onto the state’s plan. But I didn’t read any commentaries that raised more basic questions.

I don’t for minute want to deny that California (as do the other states) desperately needs the money. And I wish we were still eligible. But this whole “race” business, this fevered competition pitting state against state is public policy madness, a pretty unenlightened way to think about the public good.

Hardly anyone in the mainstream media is pointing out that Race to the Top itself is flawed policy filled with contradiction. The Department of Education stresses the importance of “research-based” and “data-driven” education policy. Yet so much of what it champions – and has been promulgating through the carrot of Race to the Top dollars – is not built on a solid research base. Take charter schools, which the Department characterizes as “engines of innovation.” A number of research studies demonstrates the kind of variability one finds in many public school districts: there’s some good charters, some bad ones, and lots that fall in between. (See Jeffrey Henig’s wonderful Spin Cycle for a balanced summary.)

Or consider the politically popular proposal to link teacher evaluation to student test scores. Again, the research complicates this seemingly straightforward move. As I’ve pointed out in previous blogs, research from a number of sources (including an economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors) raises doubts about both the technical aspects as well as the practical outcomes of evaluating teachers through student scores.

Another discordant feature of Race to the Top (and of NCLB before it) is the way it stresses the importance of good teaching while disparaging, even insulting, the current teaching force. The initiative embodies a terribly reductive model of teacher motivation and development, a one-dimensional, punitive one: teachers don’t try hard enough and the way we’ll make them try harder is to tie their professional awards to test scores.

Hand-in-glove with the above is the absence in Race to the Top language of much deep, on-the-ground knowledge of classrooms, of teaching and learning. The thin understanding of the act of teaching and the teaching profession is a case in point.

So, no wonder the results of the Department’s March 4th announcement are confusing. You’ve got a contradictory, flawed policy embodied in a high-prize competition. The Department of Education noted that the decisions were based on a complex point system. Perhaps it will be released in April. That release might clarify the confusion about the awards. Or it might reveal an elaborate machinery of compliance. And remember, it was an elaborate and contradictory machinery of a different sort that characterized NCLB.

Bottom Line: It’s just so disheartening. School boards are faced with further reducing the number of days in school or closing schools to make their budgets. Teachers are getting laid off. Tuition rates are going up in colleges, and colleges are cutting classes. And here we are with our local policy makers arranging and rearranging the bits and pieces of reform around an uncertain racetrack, getting ready for one more sprint to the top.

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.

***

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.

***

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.

A New Book: Why School?

I just had a new book come out, Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us. The book is a series of thirteen interrelated essays with an introduction and conclusion. In it, I try to bring the topics of my work over the last thirty years to bear on educational policy in our time.

Below, I reprint the Preface and Table of Contents.

I would sure appreciate it if you spread the word. 

Preface
Introduction: Why School?

1. In Search of a Fresh Language of Schooling
2. Finding Our Way: The Experience of Education
3. No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education
4. Business Goes to School
5. Reflections on Intelligence in the Workplace and the Schoolhouse
6. On Values, Work, and Opportunity
7. Standards, Teaching, Learning
8. Remediation at the University
9. Re-mediating Remediation
10. Politics and Knowledge
11. Soldiers in the Classroom
12. A Language of Hope
13. Finding the Public Good Through the Details of Classroom Life

Conclusion: The Journey Back and Forward

Preface

Why School? comes from a professional lifetime in classrooms, creating and running educational programs, teaching and researching, writing and thinking about education and human development. It offers a series of appeals for big-hearted social policy and an embrace of the ideals of democratic education – from the way we define and structure opportunity to the way we respond to a child adding a column of numbers. Collectively, the chapters provide a bountiful vision of human potential, illustrated through the schoolhouse, the work place, and the community.

We need such appeals, I think, because we have lost our way.

We live in an anxious age and seek our grounding, our assurances in ways that don’t satisfy our longing—that, in fact, make things worse. We’ve lost hope in the public sphere and grab at private solutions, which undercut the sharing of obligation and risk and keep us scrambling for individual advantage. We’ve narrowed the purpose of schooling to economic competitiveness, our kids becoming economic indicators. We’ve reduced our definition of human development and achievement – that miraculous growth of intelligence, sensibility, and the discovery of the world – to a test score. Though we pride ourselves as a nation of opportunity and a second chance, our social policies have become terribly ungenerous. We rush to embrace the new – in work, in goods, in the language we use to describe our problems—yet long for tradition, for craft, for the touch of earth, wood, another hand.

We do live in uncertain and unsettling times, but one can imagine all sorts of responses, and we have been taking—and have been led to take—those that are fear-based, inhumane, less than noble. We yearn for more and as a society deserve better. This yearning was one of the forces that drove the election of Barack Obama.

My hope is that the contents of this book in some small way contribute to a reinvigorated discussion of why we educate in America, maybe through a particular story, maybe because of information I can provide from my own teaching and research, maybe from a perspective that provides a different way to see.