Won't Step Up: Idealism, Evidence, and Entertainment

The most interesting thing about the recent box-office bomb of Won’t Back Down wasn't just how big-money ideologues backed such a dog of a movie, but that audiences handed a resounding “two thumbs down” to this attempt to alter the time-tested teacher-as-hero formula that has been so profitable to Hollywood over the years.

In the 1980s and 90s, movies about troubled schools had a common theme:  get tough on students.  Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me and Dangerous Minds, for instance, reflected the common wisdom that charismatic educators could force those unruly urban (and usually minority) kids to shape up, allowing the US to compete with Japan in the global economy.

But the heroic teacher myth has recently been flipped to the teacher-as-villain, as indicated by a new crop of films that pounce on teachers for not improving the inner cities.  Recent Hollywood movies such as Won’t Back Down and Bad Teacher are buttressed by documentaries like Waiting for Superman, The Lottery and The Cartel in promoting the notion that education failure is due primarily to bad schools and, more specifically, to those who teach in them.  In this narrative, without finding ways of identifying, sanctioning, and firing ineffective teachers (who all happen to work at schools with lots of disadvantaged kids), the US will be unable to compete with India and China in the new global economy.  

This embrace of teacher effectiveness and rejection of student disadvantage as the primary factor influencing student outcomes has become something of a theme with the self-described “reform” crowd, as when Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels made the amazing claim that “Teacher quality has been found to be twenty times more important than any other factor, including poverty, in determining which kids succeed.”  The “Rhee-formers” believe that good teaching trumps the “demographic determinism” of bad background factors.

Improving teacher quality is, of course, a laudable goal.  But what does the evidence actually tell us? 

Going back at least to the Coleman Report of the mid-1960s, researchers have consistently found that non-school factors are the primary — if not overwhelming — consideration in predicting student outcomes (see, e.g. here, here, here, here, here).  Decades of research suggest that school-factors may explain perhaps one-third of the variance in student achievement, while teaching itself may influence one-fifth, at best.  And it’s not at all clear that exceptional teaching has the sustained impact over time that we might wish.  Great teaching can make a difference, and it does for many students.  But for many more, the environment soon re-asserts itself.

Certainly, it’s much easier for policymakers to mandate better teaching than it is to mandate better parenting.  We can’t legislate that all parents care about their child’s education, take prenatal vitamins, or limit exposure to lead… and that wouldn’t make for a very good movie.

But what we see in Won’t Back Down is a willful disregard of evidence in favor of Rhee-formist idealism — the appeal of simplistic solutions to complex problems.  This is not to say that we shouldn’t try to improve the educational experiences of poor kids.  But idealism and ideological desire cannot counter data.  Without a foundation in facts, any reforms are likely to go the way of the many other efforts that are based on good intentions and ideological assumptions, but which ignore evidence.  (Recall the Gates Foundation’s expensive and ineffective foray into smaller schools.)  There will be little overall impact on academic outcomes from reforms that neglect the primary problems… outside of schools.

Divorced from evidence, idealism may make for a good movie, but it is not the best strategy for improving educational outcomes. 

By: Christopher Lubienski 

Welcome (back) to the Education Policy Blog!

Welcome to the Education Policy Blog, hosted by the Forum on the Future of Public Education. We at the Forum see this blog as a space for deeper discussions of the issues that frequently get bogged down in political posturing, to the detriment of improving the education options of students.  

The Forum was established to bring the illumination of empirical evidence to debates where issues are often obscured in the ideological fog.  Too often, evidence is neglected or misrepresented in the service of politically-driven agendas.  We value solid, research-based evidence that offers insights on advocacy-based policies.  

In particular, we are interested in a particular set of reforms and policies, including those around incentivist reforms, privatization, meritocracy and equitable access to higher education, and, of course, the use of research in policymaking.

For this effort, the Forum has brought together a stellar set of scholars who can bring a broad set of evidence-informed perspectives on these issues.  In doing this, our goal is not to promote a particular position or agenda, but to create informed discussions and deeper understandings of key topics in education policy.  

In seeking to promote engaging and illuminating dialogue on these crucial education issues of the day, we welcome your comments, and ask only that participants be respectful of others participating in this forum.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Christopher Lubienski
Director of the Forum on the Future of Public Education

Let There Be Competition

By: Bekisizwe Ndimande

John Stossel, host of Stossel show on Fox Business Network appeared on the O’ Reilly Factor taunting Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers, who went on strike earlier this year, for being confused about their demands. He blamed them for being responsible for the failing public schools. Perhaps Mr. Stossel doesn’t know that successful schools depend not just on teachers, but on adequate resources as well. He went on to say that the best way to reform education is through competition.

Markets in education is a dangerous discourse. An abundance of research shows that contrary to improving education, markets and competition, in the long term, perpetuate existing inequalities. Telling parents to compete for best schools for their children in choice programs like voucher plans, may sound appealing, but typically has detrimental effect on the public good. What would happen to the children of the parents who are unable to engage effectively in this competition? To compete, people would need the tools to help them win the competition. As a result, there are several drawbacks that can preclude marginalized parents from winning in this competition. For instance, research has shown that parents who have all the resources, including time, money, and correct information, are better situated to navigate good schools for their children. Consider a single parent mother who juggles three jobs a day, taking a subway to all these jobs, and does not have friends or colleagues with whom she can share good information about local schools. How is this parent expected to compete successfully in schools choice? The mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, together with Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, do not send their children to the CPS system. Their children attend the prestigious Lab School at the University of Chicago. Perhaps this is the reason the Mayor and the Secretary do not find it urgent to increase resources to CPS schools and listen to the demands of the teachers so that these schools too can provide good education as is possible in the Lab School.  

CPS teachers had legitimate grievances and they ought to be commended for their courage in these times of attack on public education and unionized labor. The recent events in Wisconsin did not deter their courage. One of the teachers’ demands was to untie salary from students’ scores. They are also against the high stakes testing, as one of the placards read: “I want to teach to the students not to the test.” They want students to become critical thinkers who can make informed decisions in this democracy. In a quest to raise test scores, the Mayor seems to be fixed on the increase in the length of hours students are kept in classrooms without recognizing that the tests are racially and culturally biased in a way that disenfranchise students in poverty contexts. They also do not necessarily measure what teachers are teaching or what students are learning. One might ask whether the length of the school day can be so simply related to the scores on a standardized test.

Teachers in CPS may have not gotten all their demands met, but the act of engaging in the strike is a partial victory itself. They remind us that in a democracy test scores and competition are not the answer if we want all students to succeed. CPS teachers know that there is something wrong if education has to produce winners and losers.