The Assault on Teacher Ed

by Mike Rose (cross posted from his blog)

As the current education reform movement took shape in the 1990s, public schools were in the crosshairs. Then teachers. Then their unions. And though teacher education programs have long been a target of criticism, now they are in the center of the scope. A recent report from the National Council of Teacher Quality, a group advocating for alternative ways to train teachers, calls teacher education programs “an industry of mediocrity,” and opinion page writers gleefully assail them. The former executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, began his recent demolition with the old chestnut “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t teach, teach teaching.” If you worked in an ed school, you knew you’d better take cover.

Teacher education programs are widely varied by size, region, student body, nature and focus of curriculum, talent of instructional staff, status within home institution, balance of coursework and practice, relation with local district, and more. Some are excellent, some are good and experimenting with ways to get better, some are weak in some ways but decent in others, some are marginal and poorly run. The language of the criticism, at least the most public language, doesn’t allow for this variability. Nor does the dismissive rhetorical stance of the critic, that is the tone and attitude running through the language.

Reading these reports, I thought of the concerns about such language and stance I expressed in Possible Lives, a documentary of good teaching across the United States and a defense of public education. In essence, the assault further contributes to the problem it addresses by reducing the nature of the problem and providing one-dimensional solutions to it.

I reprint below a few paragraphs from the preface and introduction to Possible Lives. Whenever I write “public schools” or “public education” substitute “teacher ed programs,” and you’ll have an elaboration of my concerns:

“During the 1980s and ‘90s, a trend was developing in the national discussion of public education, a tendency to condemn it as a failure and, in some cases, to seek private, market-based alternatives to it. This tendency blended with broad claims about the schools’ responsibility for our economic woes and social problems. One result was despair and retreat from the public school. Another was the search for large-scale, single-shot solutions like vouchers, or charter schools, or high-stakes testing. This way of thinking about public schools and their problems has intensified, heard in legislative debate on educational issues, on talk radio, in newspaper and magazine commentaries. “We can all agree,” writes a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard, “that American public schools are a joke.” This is our new common sense.

Now, God knows, there is a lot wrong with our schools. This book is not a defense of the status quo. The reader will gain sharp perspective on the ills of public education from the teachers and students in the classrooms we visit. It is necessary for a citizenry to assess the performance of its public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. For that fact, before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its variables and intricacies, its goals and purpose. We would also want to ask why we’re evaluating. To what end?

The sweeping rhetoric of public school failure does not help us here. It excludes the important, challenging work done in schools daily across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. It constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination. The classrooms in Possible Lives, replete with details of teaching and learning, are offered to spark our imagination and enrich our assessment.

A question that runs through Possible Lives is how we might develop a critique approach to public education. How to craft an approach and language that is critical without being reductive, that honors the best in our schools and draws from it broader lessons about ability, learning, and opportunity, that scrutinizes public institutions while affirming them.”

I’ll have more to say about teacher education in a future blog.  View Mike’s blog here.

Discussions on Poverty and Ed Reform on HuffPost Live

On June 7, 2013, I participated in a HuffPost Live segment called, "Get Rich Quick With Education Reform." Two articles that are critical of school reform, notably, charter schools, standardized testing and increasing attention on teacher accountability, inspired the segment (see below).  I was one of four panelists on the segment, and the only academic. Two of the panelists are writers for online magazines and the fourth panelist is a parent in New Orleans. The experience was interesting. From my perspective, the general discourse about school reform lacks important nuance and complexity and ignores larger structural issues. In other words, it is far easier to blame student underachievement solely on teachers rather than consider the impact of inequities relative to resources and mandatory standardized testing as a measurement of student learning and teacher effectiveness.  During the segment, one of the panelists who were critical of the reform, especially charter schools and teacher accountability, raised poverty as a significant factor in student learning. While research suggests that poverty (among other factors) significantly impacts student achievement, this correlation fails to contextualize how poverty impacts student learning and achievement. Thus, while the segment was ostensibly about the profit motive of school reform, the discussion focused mainly on the claims made by reformers to justify reform policies that call for more testing, testing preparation, and teacher accountability, rather than the relationship between these three reforms and growing education market.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/03/instead_of_a_war_on_teachers_how_about_one_on_poverty/

http://www.schoolbook.org/2013/06/03/anti-testing-supporters-feel-momentum

By Adrienne Dixson

One Resignation, Two New Leaders, Three Reasons to Be Troubled

Last week Teach For America (TFA) founder and CEO Wendy Kopp resigned, er, promoted herself out of her CEO position with TFA and to the char of the board, replacing education expert biographer Walter Isaacson (known recently for penning the life story of Apple CEO Steve Jobs).  Kopp will, according to the press release, also continue to serve as CEO of Teach For All – the international spin off version of the domestic TFA.  Replacing Kopp at the helm of TFA will be Matt Kramer (formerly the President) and Elisa Villanueva (formerly the Chief Operating Officer).

I focus here on Kramer’s role in the future of TFA as he, compared to Villanueva, has more experience as a leader of TFA as the former President.  Kramer began his leadership stint within TFA after serving at McKinsey & Company (business and finance consulting).  Additionally, Kramer serves as the lead of TFA’s lobbying arm Leadership for Educational Equity, which seeks to assist TFA alumnae with political campaigns via webhosting and donations.  And while Wendy Kopp certainly has no background in education (a point which made Steven Colbert break character exhibiting a chuckle) there are three concerns, (1) the rise of non-education “experts” in education policy; (2) the disposition of business minded individuals operating within democratic spaces; and (3) viewing human capital as replaceable cogs whether they do good or cause problems.

The rise of non-education “experts” in education policy is a point that has been exercised by others.  And, as stated, while the previous leadership of TFA was no closer to the classroom in terms of practicum, the new leadership is further away in terms of educational dispositions.  In other words, a business model treats individuals as numbers, units, and thus… as replaceable cogs, rather than celebrating individuality.  Workers are to submit and work relentlessly (a phrase TFA prides itself on) towards a prescribed goal…in the case of corporate education reform, that goal is increased test scores.  Moreover, requiring workers (in this case teachers) to work without regard to their own wellbeing requires a repertoire of others who can replace the fallen.  In fact, the founders of KIPP acknowledge that a teacher in their schools could not sustain the level of requirements demanded and thus rely on “fresh blood” provided by TFA (see, for example, Horn, 2011; and Lack, 2011).

Matt Kramer’s rise to the top of TFA highlights the ever increasingly changing goal of the organization.  That is, starting with the goal of filling vacant teaching positions with the “best and brightest” has now fully morphed into an organization that is proud to say that teaching is not the ends, rather, the means.  The goal is to produce corps members who, having pedagogical training only at the hands of TFA, teach for two years, leave as “education experts” who will then take over the reigns – or create them via charters or non-profits – of organizations that seek to further implement myopic educational reforms of “no excuses,” blaming teachers, and testing as an indication of learning and subsequent worth.  If you’ve only ever known one way of perceiving and engaging with the world you will continue to champion that way as appropriate.  As corps members rise through the proverbial ranks of education reform having accepted TFA’s business model, there will be less room for democratic spaces that treat teachers and students as humans within education.  TFA’s insistence on leading the education reform movement with business-minded frameworks will certainly only further exacerbate the subversion of democracy in education in favor of what is most efficient and profitable.

By T. Jameson Brewer

References

Horn, J. (2011). Corporatism, KIPP, and cultural eugenics. In P. E. Kovacs (Ed.), The Gates Foundation and the future of U.S. "Public" schools (pp. 80-103). New York, NY: Routledge.

Lack, B. (2011). Anti-democratic militaristic education: An overview and critical analysis of KIPP schools. In R. Ahlquist, P. C. Gorski & T. Montano (Eds.), Assault on kids: How hyper-accountability, corporatization, deficit ideologies, and Ruby Payne are destroying our schools (pp. 65-90). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Miracle schools, vouchers and all that educational flim-flam

is the title of this piece by Diane Ravitch. It appeared at the website of Nieman Watchdog of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, as part of the "Ask This" which is subtitled "Questions the Press Should Ask." Oh if only reporters and writers on education were knowledgeable enough about education to ask questions such as those posed by Ravitch, perhaps we could cut through all the misleading and inaccurate information, the attempts to manipulate the public discourse on education to exclude the voices of those - including both Ravitch (a personal friend) and myself - who say that our supposed pattern of educational "reform" is like the emperor's new clothes - there is no there there, as Gertrude Stein once opined of Oakland.

You should read Ravitch's piece. To whet your appetite, let me offer Diane's first paragraph here, and then explore a bit more below the fold:

Be skeptical of miracle schools. Sometimes their dramatic gains disappear in a year or two or three. Most such claims rely on cheating or gaming the system or on intensive test prep that involves teaching children how to answer test questions. These same children, having learned to take tests, may actually be very poorly educated, even in the subjects where their scores were rising.

Please keep reading.

Diane offers some very tough questions to consider. Understand that as an educational historian and as someone very involved in policy questions, the questions she poses are derived from the record, from extensive reading/research into the information that is actually available. For example:

When a charter school reports miraculous results, be sure to ask about the attrition rate. Some highly successful charters push out low-performing kids and their enrollment falls over the years (and the departing students are not replaced). Recently Arne Duncan hailed a “miracle” school in Chicago—Urban Prep—where all the students who graduated were accepted into college. But 150 students started and only 107 graduated. The 107 graduates had much lower test scores than the average for Chicago public school students. The school did a good job of getting the students into college (perhaps that was a miracle) but they were not better educated than students in the regular public schools.

In another instance, one of the “amazing” schools singled out by the 2010 documentary “Waiting for Superman” admits 140 students, but only 34 graduated. That’s a 75 per cent attrition rate. Some miracle.

Or try the brief paragraph before what I just quoted:

Whenever a district has a dramatic increase in test scores, look for cheating, gaming the system, intensive investment in test prep. Testing is NOT instruction. It is meant to assess instruction, not to substitute for it.

Take this points one at a time

cheating - explore the recent USA Today examination of test results in DC public schools under Michelle Rhee

gaming - the so-called Texas miracle on their state tests, given in tenth grade, was accomplished by holding back lower performing kids in 9th grade. Some were held back several times until they dropped out, and if they said they MIGHT get a GED, they were listed at having transferred to an alternative educational program, not as dropouts. Or perhaps after having been held back one year they were skipped to 11th on the grounds they had made so much progress. In either case, they were not tested. All this was documented BEFORE No Child Left Behind was passed into law, and people in Congress cannot say they were unaware. Walt Haney of Lynch College of Education at Boston College wrote about it, as did others, and a number of us passed on the literature to key people in Congress. Yet somehow Rod Paige won a superintendent's award and got promoted to Secretary of Education, in part because of a claimed 90% graduation rate in Houston schools, when in reality only a bit over 40% of those entering 7th grade graduated with their cohorts.

intensive investment in test prep - these seems to be the pattern in a number of charter schools and some public schools claiming significant gains. But what evidence there is that the "gains" on tests are not maintained in subsequent grades, and students as they ascend the educational grades arrive less and less prepared to do the kind of work necessary to be successful even in a high school course of students, to say nothing of what is necessary in colleges, which is why post-secondary institutions have had to expand the number of places in remediation courses.

Ravitch remind us - at least those of us who have been paying attention - that improving pass rates on state tests may mean merely that states are manipulating their cut scores. It is possible to pass some state tests with less than half the questions answered correctly. Since all that are published are scaled scores, converted from raw scores, unless one can see the conversion formula, the scaled scores are subject to manipulation for all kinds of reasons, including the state (or school district for district wide tests) wanting to be able to show "success" or to avoid the politically unacceptable prospect of large numbers of students not being promoted or not graduating from high school.

Not all "studies" are peer-reviewed by independent scholars. Some are not even rigorous, as Ravitch points out about the claim by Carolyn Hoxby that students who spent 9 years in a NYC charter could close the achievement gap differential between, say, Harlem in inner city NY and Scarsdale, perhaps the wealthiest of the New York suburbs. As Ravitch writes:

The press gave that study huge attention and credibility, but no one noticed that there were very few students who had attended a charter in NYC for nine years or that Hoxby did not provide a number for the students who had closed the gap. It appears that her study was an extrapolation, and it was an extrapolation based on NYC and NY state’s inflated and unreliable test scores (see above). When NYC’s charter scores are reported, they range widely from very abysmal (a six per cent pass rate) to exceptional (100 per cent pass rate).

Ravitch also reminds us of the wisdom of the words spoken by Hal Holbrook in "All the President's Men" - Follow the Money. In the case of education, we have the likes of Philip Anschutz, a billionaire who advocates for free market solutions (and for whom, I might mention, Michael Bennet worked before becoming Superintendent in Denver, and then a US Senator, and now apparently the successor in waiting to Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education). He was a funder of "Waiting for Superman" as was a man "previously CEO of a string of for-profit postsecondary institutions." Similarly, the so-called Democrats for Education Reform has a board full of Wall St. hedge fund managers and big real estate moguls. Ravitch suggests asking why they are so interested in charters, and how they are connected with other 'reform' groups such as" Education Reform Now, Stand for Children, the state CAN organizations (e.g., ConnCAN), and a host of other groups promoting privatization and de-professionalization?" She also reminds us, as she did in her book, about the influence of the 'billionaire boys' club" of foundations such as Gates, Broad and Walton.

No high performing nations, as Ravitch reminds us, are pursuing the kinds of approaches we are seeing advocated by such groups and foundations, and unfortunately by the Obama administration. She challenges the administration with a number of questions, on continuing Bush administration accountability problems, on school choice, on merit pay (which lacks any supportive research base in education or in industry, and has clearly been shown to have no effect on test scores, which of course are the measurement of choice of the so-called reformers). Given the President's recent remarks at Bell Multicultural High School in the District, in response to a question from a student, it is worth noting this question from Ravitch:

Why does the president publicly say he is against standardized testing at the same time that his administration is demanding more emphasis on standardized testing?

Read Ravitch. Perhaps pass on the article to the editors, editorialists, and reporters dealing with education at your publication of choice.

Ravitch concludes her piece with simple statement:

Principles for reporters: Be skeptical; don’t believe in miracles; follow the money.

Perhaps were these principles followed, we might actually be able to have a meaningful public discussion on how to address the real needs and issues confronting our schools and our students.


Perhaps were these principles followed, we might actually be able to have a meaningful public discussion on how to address the real needs and issues confronting our schools and our students.