A Good Man or an International Competitor?

Here’s a thoughtful article that raises questions about what our goals are – and should be – as we educate our children. It was written by William J. Mathis, managing director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the former superintendent of schools for the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union in Brandon, Vermont. He has published or presented research on finance, assessment, school vouchers, cost-effectiveness, education reform, history, special education, and Constitutional issues. His current work focuses on the financial, programmatic, and “Adequate Yearly Progress” components of the federal “No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.” Mathis was a National Superintendent of the Year finalist and was also the Vermont Superintendent of the Year in 2002.

A Good Man or an International Competitor?

By William J. Mathis
It causes a case of the bad recollection shivers when I hear the president refer to education as the means of effectively “competing” in the global economy. When he describes the “Race to the Top’s” competition as a major and successful reform, the shivers escalate to shudders.

This bad karma comes from when I was school superintending. I was doing one of my obligatory “community forum” power-point presentations showing our standardized test scores when I uttered the damning phrase, “If we are to be economically competitive in the twenty-first century, we have to have high test scores.”

A mother’s hand shot-up as she exclaimed, “But I don’t want my son to be an international competitor in the twenty-first century global work force! I want him to be a good man!”

The room fell silent. She gathered herself, and pushed on, “I want him to hold a good job, carry his own weight and to get along with others. I want him to give a little more to his community than what he got. I want him to love, be loved and be a good husband. I want him to be happy.”

And, of course, she was right.

When we think about what we want for our children (or for our world), most of us will give answers more like the mother’s than an economist’s. Of course we want them to find good jobs and be successful, but these are not the more important qualities we value for our children. We want our children to be thoughtful, caring and accomplished because these are good things, not because this will contribute to international competitiveness. Remedying the balance of trade is not a child-rearing concept. Yet, in some strange way, international economic competition, translated as test score competition, has become the ascendant rationale for schooling in the United States.

In a recent edition of Education Week, Susanna Loeb, Dan Goldhaber and Michael Goldstein (here ) talk about the hindrances of outdated regulations, bureaucracies and poor teaching skills. If these problems could be swept away and better “performance accountability measures” put in place then the “engine” could drive toward improved learning outcomes. They see “differentiated opportunities and rewards, innovation, ambition and excellence” as the things that build educator spirit. They talk about efficiency.

On the same page, Alfie Kohn (here) points to the underfunding and inferior learning resources we provide for our poor and our children of color. He points to our poverty gap, which is the largest and most resistant to cure among economically developed nations. The test-based “pedagogy of poverty” assures an inferior education for our neediest. He talks about denied opportunity.

Then, on the facing page, Angela Beeley (here), a “Mad as Hell” teacher, vigorously says she is teaching molested, beaten, neglected, hungry and homeless children. Accountability systems don’t address these needs, and efficiency is not a relevant term. Why do Wall Street crooks walk while teachers are denied basic human dignity and blamed for the failings of society? She talks about caring, frustration and pride.

The notion that education’s main purpose is international economic competitiveness came to prominence with the 1983 Nation at Risk report. Starting in 1989, Goals 2000 symbolically ushered in the test based accountability model, and No Child Left Behind subsequently solidified a uniform national approach. An array of major philanthropies dumped billions of strings-attached dollars to advance market-based and privatization reforms.

No reasonable observer would say these reform pushes have not had a substantial effect. NCLB is still the law of the land, schools are being publicly labeled as “failing,” and forty states have some form of charter school law. Voucher and neovoucher policies, as well as merit-pay and union-bashing laws, are popping up like mushrooms.

Yet, the most puzzling question is why the market model reforms have shown so little success over these 28 years. The achievement gap has stopped closing and, based on measures of higher-order skills at the eighth grade, the gap is getting wider. Charter schools, accountability mechanisms, take-over strategies and privatization efforts have shown, at best, weak and mixed effects.

Part of the answer is the cold fact, as Kohn points out, that needy schools have been systematically deprived compared to those with more affluent populations. About 70 state cost studies, which examined the cost of providing an adequate education, have documented these simple truths. Contrary to utopian claims that schools can do it all without resources, test scores and get-tough accountability schemes do not cure failed communities and broken homes.

Then, there’s the core issue. Parents and citizens have a broader vision of schools. Parents stubbornly hold on to the quaint notion that the development of their children into good men and women is more important than being international marketplace competitors. We should take heed of the parent rebellions in such market-model, charter school strong-holds as Newark (here), New Orleans (here) and Harlem (here). Gloucester, MA (here), and Mission Viejo, CA (here) also see parents taking to the streets to protest the stripping of resources and the seizing of control of their public schools.

In the real world, if an idea doesn’t work very well after a bunch of tries, that’s a good reason to stop doing it. In the ideological world, meagre results or outright failure does little to shake the underlying belief. Instead, the ideologues say the failure is because their solution was not implemented with enough fervor and force. Or maybe they cling to the one outlier study that supports their view while ignoring the larger overall body of quality research. Perhaps they rely on think tanks peddling pseudo research to advance predetermined ends. In any case, success will come if we only bear down and beat the dead horse harder.

In this climate, there is the real possibility that public education will become controlled by private oligarchs who hold a narrow view of the purposes of education. Yet, there are also glimmerings of a rebirth of the democratic ethos and a new commitment to all our children. The question is in the balance; will a phoenix rise from the ashes or we will just have ashes?

Originally published by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado on May 11, 2011.

Sam Chaltain’s Three Most Important Questions in Education

Writer and education activist Sam Chaltain works with schools, school districts, and public and private sector companies to help them create healthy, high-functioning learning environments. He spoke recently at a TED conference about the three most important questions we need to be asking if we want to create schools worthy of the 21st century and our ongoing commitment to a democratic society. They are: How do people learn best? What are the skills of a free people? What, in the end, does it mean to be free?

Chaltain was previously National Director of the Forum for Education & Democracy, an education advocacy organization, and the founding director of the Five Freedoms Project, a national program that helps K-12 educators create more democratic learning communities.

TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design, and has since broadened its areas of interest.

Click on the video to watch the talk. It runs about 18 minutes.

‘Failing schools’ fallacy: Low test scores aren’t signs of nation’s economic decline

Here’s a recent article by Diane Ravitch on the link, or lack of one, between the performance of American students on standardized international tests and global competitiveness. Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a historian of education. In addition, she is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. She shares a blog called Bridging Differences with Deborah Meier, hosted by Education Week. She also blogs for Politico.com/arena and the Huffington Post. Her articles have appeared in many newspapers and magazines. She is the author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” Here is a recent article from The Daily, a recently launched iPad-based publication.

‘Failing schools’ fallacy: Low test scores aren’t signs of nation’s economic decline

By Diane Ravitch

If you follow the news in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Indiana and other states where conservative governors are proposing sweeping changes in education, you probably think our public schools are terrible. These states are adopting “reforms” that include more testing, more privately managed charter schools, more voucher programs and systems that evaluate teachers based on their students’ test scores.
These are policies championed by the leaders of the current school reform movement, many of whom hail from Wall Street and the high-tech sector, as well as billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad. The central claim of the movement is that American schools are falling behind those of other nations, and that woeful test scores predict future economic decline. Thus it is a national priority to get test scores up.
President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, reacted with alarm to the results of the latest international assessment of student performance in December. Duncan said they were a “wake-up call” to the nation.
To counter what it thinks is educational decline, the Obama administration launched a program called “Race to the Top,” which promotes more privately managed schools, evaluates teachers based on student test scores, encourages merit pay, and includes a variety of other unproven strategies intended to boost test scores.
But are our public schools really in free-fall? It is a fact that American students recently scored in the middle among 65 nations that participated in tests of reading, mathematics and science.
What the president doesn’t seem to know is that our students have taken part in these international assessments since the 1960s, and we have typically been in the bottom quartile.
When the first international math test was administered to students in eighth grade and 12th grade in 1964, our eighth-graders came in next to last and our seniors were dead last. In the first international test of science in the early 1970s, our seniors scored last. In additional tests of mathematics and science in the 1980s and ’90s, American students seldom surpassed the international average.
Using the logic of today’s reformers, American education has “failed” consistently for the past 50 years. But wait — Obama said in his State of the Union address this year that we should ignore the “naysayers” because “America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world. No workers are more productive than ours. No country has more successful companies, or grants more patents to inventors and entrepreneurs. We’re the home to the world’s best colleges and universities, where more students come to study than any place on earth.”
As the China-born, China-educated scholar Yong Zhao, now at the University of Oregon, has pointed out, there is no logical connection between international test scores and the success of our economy. Our scores have been poor to middling for 50 years, yet we have the greatest economy in the world.
Obama rightly said that we must encourage innovation, creativity and imagination in our schools. But the course his administration is pushing — and pushing hard — is to emphasize testing even more than George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. As more states evaluate teachers by their students’ scores, teachers will feel pressure to teach to the tests, to devote more time to preparing for the tests, and to decrease the time spent on non-tested subjects. Some teachers and administrators will cheat. And some states will lower their standards to raise scores.
This is great news for the testing industry, but not for our nation’s students and teachers.
Instead of promoting innovation, creativity and imagination, the current obsession with raising test scores discourages these things. Students are learning to pick the right answer and being penalized for thinking differently. Subjects that spark students’ imagination, like the arts, are being squeezed out of the school week. And some districts plan to develop standardized tests for all subjects, which are guaranteed to do damage to students’ ability to think creatively.
All this in the name of beating other nations on scores—which has little bearing on our success as a nation.
Yes, our schools need to improve. But they should pursue proven strategies, under which schools, families and communities work together to make sure that children arrive in school ready to learn. Our schools need experienced teachers and a curriculum with more time for in-depth study of history, science, civics and other subjects that prepare students for the duties of citizenship. After all, that’s the primary purpose of public education: to sustain our democracy.
Diane Ravitch is the author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” This article was originally published by The Daily on Saturday, April 30, 2011.