Alfie Kohn in The Nation

In view of the blatantly skewed flurry of recent high-class commentary villifying teachers and presenting false dichotomies in the debate over who should be the next Secretary of Education (for example comments by Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and David Brooks of the New York Times), the following Alfie Kohn commentary published in the December 29 issue of The Nation is most welcome.

Note: Happily, most of the readers' comments spurred by the Brooks column linked above were quite negative. It seems people are figuring out that the "real reform" these guys are advancing - and boy should they be embarrassed - actually IS the archaic and destructive status quo.

By Alfie Kohn

If we taught babies to talk as most skills are taught in school, they would memorize lists of sounds in a predetermined order and practice them alone in a closet. -- Linda Darling-Hammond

Progressives are in short supply on the president-elect's list of cabinet nominees. When he turns his attention to the Education Department, what are the chances he'll choose someone who is educationally progressive?

In fact, just such a person is said to be in the running and, perhaps for that very reason, has been singled out for scorn in Washington Post and Chicago Tribune editorials, a New York Times column by David Brooks and a New Republic article, all published almost simultaneously this month. The thrust of the articles, using eerily similar language, is that we must reject the "forces of the status quo" which are "allied with the teachers' unions" and choose someone who represents "serious education reform."

To decode how that last word is being used here, recall its meaning in the context of welfare (under Clinton) or environmental laws (under Reagan and Bush). For Republicans education "reform" typically includes support for vouchers and other forms of privatization. But groups with names like Democrats for Education Reform--along with many mainstream publications--are disconcertingly allied with conservatives in just about every other respect. To be a school "reformer" is to support:

§ A heavy reliance on fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests to evaluate students and schools, generally in place of more authentic forms of assessment;

§ The imposition of prescriptive, top-down teaching stand-ards and curriculum mandates;

§ A disproportionate emphasis on rote learning--memorizing facts and practicing skills--particularly for poor kids;

§ A behaviorist model of motivation in which rewards (notably money) and punishments are used on teachers and students to compel compliance or raise test scores;

§ A corporate sensibility and an economic rationale for schooling, the point being to prepare children to "compete" as future employees; and

§ Charter schools, many run by for-profit companies. Notice that these features are already pervasive, which means "reform" actually signals more of the same--or, perhaps, intensification of the status quo with variations like one-size-fits-all national curriculum standards or longer school days (or years). Almost never questioned, meanwhile, are the core elements of traditional schooling, such as lectures, worksheets, quizzes, grades, homework, punitive discipline and competition. That would require real reform, which of course is off the table.

Sadly, all but one of the people reportedly being considered for Education secretary are reformers only in this Orwellian sense of the word. The exception is Linda Darling-Hammond, a former teacher, expert on teacher quality and professor of education at Stanford. The favored contenders include assorted governors and two corporate-style school chiefs: Arne Duncan, whose all-too-apt title is "chief executive officer" of Chicago Public Schools, and his counterpart in New York City, former CEO and high-powered lawyer Joel Klein.

Duncan, a basketball buddy of Obama's, has been called a "budding hero in the education business" by Bush's former Education secretary, Rod Paige. Just as the test-crazy nightmare of Paige's Houston served as a national model (when it should have been a cautionary tale) in 2001, so Duncan would bring to Washington an agenda based on Renaissance 2010, which Chicago education activist Michael Klonsky describes as a blend of "more standardized testing, closing neighborhood schools, militarization, and the privatization of school management."

Duncan's philosophy is shared by Klein, who is despised by educators and parents in his district perhaps more than any superintendent in the nation [see Lynnell Hancock, "School's Out," July 9, 2007]. In a survey of 62,000 New York City teachers this past summer, roughly 80 percent disapproved of his approach. Indeed, talk of his candidacy has prompted three separate anti-Klein petitions that rapidly collected thousands of signatures. One, at StopJoelKlein.org, describes his administration as "a public relations exercise camouflaging the systematic elimination of parental involvement; an obsessively test-driven culture; a growing atmosphere of fear, disillusionment, and intimidation experienced by professionals; and a flagrant manipulation of school data." (The only petition I know of to promote an Education secretary candidate is one for Darling-Hammond, at www.petitiononline.com/DHammond/petition.html.)

Duncan and Klein pride themselves on new programs that pay students for higher grades or scores. Both champion the practice of forcing low-scoring students to repeat a grade--a strategy that research overwhelmingly finds counterproductive. Coincidentally, Darling-Hammond wrote in 2001 about just such campaigns against "social promotion" in New York and Chicago, pointing out that politicians keep trotting out the same failed get-tough strategies "with no sense of irony or institutional memory." In that same essay, she also showed how earlier experiments with high-stakes testing have mostly served to increase the dropout rate.

Duncan and Klein, along with virulently antiprogressive DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, are celebrated by politicians and pundits. Darling-Hammond, meanwhile, tends to be the choice of people who understand how children learn. Consider her wry comment that introduces this article: it's impossible to imagine a comparable insight coming from any of the spreadsheet-oriented, pump-up-the-scores "reformers" (or, for that matter, from any previous Education secretary). Darling-Hammond knows how all the talk of "rigor" and "raising the bar" has produced sterile, scripted curriculums that have been imposed disproportionately on children of color. Her viewpoint is that of an educator, not a corporate manager.

Imagine--an educator running the Education Department.

Ohio Charter School Report Found False and Deceitful

This from The Think Tank Review Project of the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) and CU-Boulder's Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC), which provides the public, policy makers, and the press with sound reviews of selected think tank publications:

Miron demonstrates in his review that all of the report's main contentions
are wrong or misleading, but one claim drew particular criticism. The Buckeye
report contends that the state's largest school districts receive a net gain in
revenue on average for each student attending a charter school--and that
returning those charter students to the regular schools would actually cost the
districts in revenue per pupil. This contention, Miron says, is "ridiculously
false, deceitful, and patently misrepresent[s] how the funding of public schools
works."

Go here for more information. The Think Tank Review Project is a valuable resource, demonstrating that many of the studies and reports disseminated to the public by think tanks (with the aid of an uncritical media) are simply ideology masquerading as educational research.

What is Education?

It has been largely reduced to a maniacal, fear-driven focus on test scores. Let there be no doubt that the misuse of standardized testing serves the elites in control of the global economy very well. Test scores may go up a little here and there but the joy and quality and depth of learning do not. Potential is curtailed by standardization. Every child is different though all are of equal human worth.

Those in charge don't really see children. They see test scores. Data. Opportunity. We are in the Dark Ages of Education in the United States.

The rhetoric and framing of the 'failing schools' testing and accountability movement has been brilliantly deceptive garnish with no substance. A favorite quote by W.B. Yeats comes to mind. You know it already but I think it bears repeating in these difficult times:

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Kiss My Class: The School Reform Blues

I visited Professor Sherman Dorn's blog today and he has provided some links to NCLB/ed reform (deform?) songs. See his 11-15-08 post. Listen to the above-referenced song from Bill Wraga here. It's one I hadn't heard before.

Enjoy!

Don't Miss This - Send Stager's Message to Obama...

Bravo to Gary Stager. Read the entirety of his blogpost here where he notes:

Here is a most stunning principle of the school the Obama children and
Biden grandchildren will be attending:

(from Wikipedia) The school does not rank its students, as this conflicts
with the Quaker Testimony of Equality.

What? Not ranking students??? No winners or losers? No AYP? Where is the accountability in that?

Perhaps there are other ways of identifying educational accomplishment? You wouldn't think so if you listened to President-elect Obama speak
about public education.

Like Stager, I voted for Obama (gladly) but with an ache in my heart all the same. He seems to see only dimly if at all how deceptively Orwellian the big-business driven standards and accountability movement is. He wants to "fix" rather than expose the No Child Left Behind Act for the outrage that it really is, a law replete with absurdities and hypocrisies, a law that rests entirely on a bed of false assumptions and false premises. A law under which thousands of public schools have falsely been labeled failing so that unproven "market solutions" can kick in, punitive solutions which have funneled billions to corporate interests. He is not connecting the dots between disaster capitalism and the relentless attacks on public education, attacks cunningly framed in the language of civil rights.

Forgive the rant but one more thing before I finish this post. It appears that Obama is a fan of charter schools. In my book, charter schools that are publicly funded but run by business interests are NOT public schools. They are yet another form of corporate socialism and control of the masses by the wealthy elite.

How is it that we have a need for alternatives and "choice" where freedom and innovation are hailed and encouraged while our truly public schools have been held under the thumb of the most suffocating, oppressive, and punitive law imaginable, a law which guarantees their failure?

One of the tactics of those who seek the destruction of public education is to call our public schools "government schools". Ah yes...and just WHO is controlling our government? Corporations! There is no more zealous supporter of NCLB and high-stakes testing than the Business Roundtable. Government is not the problem when we have a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. And a well-informed citizenry as opposed to a citizenry misinformed by the corporate-owned and controlled media.

Margaret Spellings Undaunted By Results of New Study

WASHINGTON, DC - According to a groundbreaking new $2 million study by the U.S. Department of Education, Ed Secretary Margaret Spellings will not realize her dream of all students being on grade level (an average) or beyond by 2014. Not by 2014, not ever. By any reasonable definition of the term, it was found that nationally about half of all students will always fall somewhere in a spectrum below average.

"These results are astounding," said officials. "Academic achievement actually falls along a continuum, like other human attributes."

Asked to comment, Spellings said, "I'm not into playing numbers games. Not once in all my travels have I met a parent who didn't want their child on grade level now—let alone by 2014. I know I do, and I'm sure every parent in the nation agrees."

In an entirely separate but equally compelling study on merit pay, researchers found that in the area of public education, a majority of highly paid politicians do not know what they are talking about. While the disastrous policymaking that results does not affect their pay, the consequences for children, teachers, and schools are devastating. More about merit pay to follow...

More Hypocrisy from Rhee and Fenty

In this morning's Washington Post:

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A.Rhee are discussing a dramatic expansion of their effort to remove ineffective teachers by restoring the District's power to create nonunionized charter schools and seeking federal legislation declaring the school system in a "state of emergency," a move that would eliminate the need to bargain with the Washington Teachers' Union.

About that STATE OF EMERGENCY dear Rhee and Fenty:

Indeed there is one! When the ed reform bigwigs who posture as messiahs for poor children while wagging fingers of blame at teachers and public education say it's time for the nation to declare a "state of emergency" about the condition of childhood itself among our nation's millions of children living in poverty, living amid violence, abuse, and neglect, living without adequate health care, then we may finally get some "reforms" that will make a difference in the lives of children.

A reminder that our nation is number one in childhood poverty among the wealthy nations and next to last in overall child well-being.

You say poverty is no excuse. No, it isn't. It's a grinding reality.