Q&A with Valerie Strauss on Public Education Under Siege

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.

You can share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google reader through the "Share" function located at the top- left hand corner of blog. 

Reflections on Harriet Ball, Teaching, and Teacher Education

          

            Go to YouTube and type in “Harriet Ball.”  You’ll find three or four short clips on this wonderful Houston teacher, including a tribute (she died in 2011) from KIPP charter school founders Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin.  It seems that in 1992 when the young Feinberg and Levin—fresh Teach For America recruits—landed in Houston, ready, in Feinberg’s words, “to change the world by lunchtime,” they didn’t have an easy go of it.  As Feinberg put it, he lost control of his class by lunchtime and didn’t regain it until Christmas.

            Harriet Ball was teaching down the hall, and Feinberg and Levin found her, and had the good sense to latch on to her.  Of Levin, Ms. Ball says, “he was hungry.”  This short film is a sweet tribute, clearly heart-felt.  “She was one of the most remarkable teachers I ever met,” observes Levin.  The duo named the charter school they went on to found, the Knowledge Is Power Program, drawing on a line from one of her chants about the power of reading.  Today KIPP is the nation’s largest network of charter schools.

            This tribute sparks for me so many issues related to contemporary school reform: from the nature of teaching and the many qualities it takes to do it well to the incessant drumbeat of criticism directed at teachers and the institutions that educate them.  Harriet Ball is remembered for inspiring Feinberg and Levin to start KIPP, and for the songs and chants she devised to help her students learn the metric system, state capitals, and a lot else.  But if you view those clips of Ms. Ball and read what you can find written about her when she died, you get the sense of so much more: of someone with a keen intelligence about children, pedagogical creativity, humor, an in-her-bones understanding of race and social class, a deep commitment to those students in her charge and belief in their ability, and the kind of authority that emerges from all the above.  In general, education policy and mainstream reform do not address these qualities.  This is an unfortunate irony, given KIPP’s iconic status in school reform circles.

            One of the themes you will hear from various mainstream education reformers is that there is a “talent gap” in the teaching profession, that we need a better quality of students to go into teaching, and that education programs need to be more selective.  Of course I, and everybody I know in education, wants to recruit talented, hard-working young people into the profession, and I certainly have a list of things I’d like to see happen in teacher education—and in some education programs these are happening: a better blending of research and practice on how people learn, for example, or better methods of guidance and supervision as novice teachers move into classrooms. 

            What is worrisome is that in the drive for improvement, reformers can narrowly define “quality” as, for example, the pedigree of a prospective teacher’s undergraduate institution, or the selectivity of that teacher’s education program.  We need to throw a wide net in recruiting teachers, tapping a range of backgrounds and talents.  Those who advocate alternative teacher recruitment and training programs also want to cast a wide net, though their goal is often to recruit people from other professions and from business and management backgrounds.  This is certainly worth doing, but if you also want to draw in young people from low-income households, or who are the first in their families to attend college, or who represent a broad range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, then you need to draw from a broad range of institutions.

            Which takes me back to Harriet Ball.  The obituaries mention that she got her degree from Huston-Tillotson University, a small Historically Black College in Austin, Texas.  The website for Huston-Tillotson notes that in 2010, the university had a 90% acceptance rate—the lack of selectivity bemoaned by critics of our teaching force and of the schools that produce them.  But in fact a lot of very good teachers come from such institutions.  A while back, I went through two books that profile first-rate teaching: my Possible Lives and Karen Chenowith’s How It’s Being Done.  I also looked at the Council of Chief State School Officer’s National Teacher of the Year Program.  Only a handful of these top-flight teachers got their bachelors degrees from elite private institutions or from flagship public universities.  A number hailed from state universities.  And a considerable number came from small, local colleges with teacher education programs.  More recently, David Kirp found a similar pattern in the admirable district he chronicles in Improbable Scholars.

            One of the things that I witnessed as I travelled across the country to write Possible Lives was the significant role played by local small colleges in semi-rural and rural areas—in some cases, the colleges were tiny satellite campuses of a state college or university hundreds of miles away.  These schools had to be open to their communities to survive.  In turn, these institutions were often the only avenue available for locals to attend college and enter teaching.  Finances, family obligations, cultural norms—all sorts of factors made it nearly impossible for them to go away to college.  Similar factors sometimes come into play in urban settings where more choice appears possible, but might in fact not be.

            Recently, the National Council on Teacher Quality—an organization critical of teacher education programs—issued a report that, as its president said, was produced to reveal the “widespread malpractice” of such programs.  In a nutshell, the Council’s analysts relied primarily on syllabi, course descriptions, and other program materials from 1200 undergraduate and graduate programs and rated these programs on a scale of 0 to 4.  The analysis, therefore, was built mostly on one kind of information—that which could be gleaned from documents—and was further limited by the fact that many schools chose not to participate, given the Center’s anti-ed school orientation.  So the analysts, I presume, had to use what they could find on the Internet and other sources.  In the end, they were not able to rate a number of programs on all their categories, but did issue only four top ratings out of the 1200 and, on the other end, gave over 150 programs a zero rating and marked them with a “consumer alert” warning.  This alert, according to the Council president, would caution prospective students about attending these programs and warn district administrators about hiring the programs’ graduates.  The programs, therefore, would have to change or be driven out of business.

            There is so much to say about the conceptual and methodological problems with this report, and fortunately a lot of it is being said, as an Internet search reveals.  Of course, if a program is terrible, it should be put on notice, but one thing I kept thinking about as I read through the report was the arrogance in assuming that some analyst in Washington, D.C.—the location of the Center—could pass damning judgment on a program in, for example, East Tennessee or Central Oklahoma or Northern California without ever visiting it, interviewing faculty, students, and district administrators, or observing graduates of its program as they teach.

            Among its many flaws, the Center’s report represents the kind of narrowness in defining teaching and teacher education that concerned me earlier.

            How about this? What if all the philanthropies that supported the questionable report from the Council on Teacher Quality contributed an equal amount to a less partisan organization to study excellent teachers who come from modest backgrounds and attend their local (often less selective) colleges?  How did they get so good?  What did they bring with them and what did their programs nurture?  How can we recruit more like them?  And while we’re at it, let’s throw a few bucks of that philanthropic funding their way, for many find it hard to make ends meet, yet regularly spend their own money to make wondrous things happen in their classrooms.

You can share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google reader through the "Share" function located at the top- left hand corner of blog.