Where Comparisons Between the Movie "Lincoln" and Education Reform Go Haywire

I was at a meeting last evening where three panelists and a moderator had some things to say on the subject of "Is Education for Democracy At Risk?"  It was sponsored by Citizens for Public Schools in Boston and held at the Brookline Public Library.  With such a topic on the agenda, I was eager to see if there was any movement toward action in the "talk-and-compromise" groups that participated, which included FairTest, the Brookline teachers' union, SOS (remember them?), and the academic community, as represented by an academic from teacher education who is also a former State Board of Ed member.  The headliner was Deborah Meier.  It was advertised thusly:

Come listen and join in a discussion of democracy and the future of public education: What can we do to stop the privatization of our public schools and empower parents, teachers and our communities to ensure all our students have the opportunity to learn?

When the moderator is a member of MA's Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, how far could this discussion go?  Not far, it proved.  There was, of course, the obligatory mention that is common at such events for the need to speak truth to power, as if power cared a whit about what any of us has to say.  I saw a couple of people shift in their seats--could it be a sign that they are interested in demanding change, rather than endless talk?  Would it be a sign there were others interested in nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to reclaim our schools?

There was a brief presentation on the goings-on at SOS, the containment vessel for all those teachers threatening to actually erupt to do something to save themselves and their children from further test and punish abuse.  In case you want to know, SOS is electing a Board of Directors that will, I suppose, direct, something.  Perhaps another meeting to update the platform planks?

In her brief remarks, I heard Deborah Meier almost get the point of recommending some action, when she pulled up short to declare her hope that the truth we carry will prevail.  Really?  Because truth is morally preferable to a lie, should we really be hopeful that the oppressive power brokers who live by the lie will be impressed by the truth that they scuttled in order to put in place the test-and-punish system they call accountability?

I heard about the new use for the term "collaboration."  Seems that it is code for recruiting teachers to be peer evaluators so that the responsibility of firing the low scoring teachers will be on the backs of their colleagues.  Thus, teachers become divided and the liability for the system become dispersed when these insane and immoral actions end up in the courts of law.

I heard a good deal about how the new Hollywood blockbuster, Lincoln, should inspire all of us to compromise as Lincoln did.  Having seen the movie the day before, I had a slightly different take.  Yes, Lincoln compromised, hemmed and hawed, and almost lied for the larger cause of getting a constitutional amendment to end slavery.  But it bears remembering that the Civil War was fought to preserve the Union and to stop slavery, and it was not fought with a list of platform planks or talking points or wishful thoughts.

When will it be time, then, dear colleagues, for unions and protest groups and intellectuals and community orgs and teacher educators to fight, to declare war to stop the spread of high-stakes testing and the abuses that go with it?  When will we stop compromising and wishing for truth to prevail, rather than waging war to restore the possibility of democracy in our schools and communities?  When will we stop pretending that more compromise will lead anywhere except deeper into the corrupt and anti-democratic assessment and evaluation system that our teachers and children now suffer under daily?

If there is a lesson to be learned from Lincoln in your further deliberations on how much test scores should weigh on the backs of our teachers and student, it is this: slavery was not acceptable in 50% of the states, nor 35%, nor 25%, or even 10%.  Slavery was unacceptable, period.  The moral high ground is not won by declaration--it is won through sacrifice.

USA: The Federal Republic of One Test Fits All?

As Arne runs back and forth from meetings with his oligarch handlers, Broad and Gates, to meetings with urban superintendents to give them their instructions, meetings all closed to the news media, we can only assume that big things are getting done. At the top of the list for Gates, Broad, and the Waltons are demands for national testing, pay-per-score for teachers, corporate charter schools, year-round schools for poor kids, a cheap version of growth models to make it impossible to compare charters with public schools, CEO school governance with ability to hire and fire, and a shortened high school for most that is heavy on sci-tech and end of course exams.

The national standards (testing) debate hasn't happened yet, and I expect that it won't happen before the plan becomes part of a mega-bill that gets introduced with demands for an up or down vote tomorrow. Duncan, so far, has not kept a poker face on this one, offering such ignorant comparisons of our somewhat decentralized systems with such national systems as France and Germany. When we consider that France, for all its glory, is four-fifths the size of Texas, we get an idea of how big a federal system of education would be in the U. S. and how difficult it could be to turn the ship if we were to discover that we were headed for a rocky shore. And speaking of shores, would we, as David Berliner has asked, expect children who grow up in the Arizona desert to give as much attention to learning about saltwater marshes as children who live on the Jersey Shore? Would we, too, be smart to put all our eggs into a Soviet-style testing basket that would effect the end of experimentation, novelty, and the possibility of change that a fifty state system keeps alive? In diversity there is strength--but only if we are, indeed, committed to democratic governance, rather than rule by the oligarchs.

Yesterday Deborah Meier had a few things to say about the national standards non-debate in her response to Diane Ravitch in Education Week. Put your feet up for just a minute and read this:

The Power of Big Money & Big State Over Knowledge

Dear Diane,

But let’s not postpone our discussion about national standards for too long. It mostly boils down to my fear about official ideologies and centralized power over ideas. Plus, our old disagreement about intellectual “neutrality” and objectivity.

I found your analysis of Obama’s education policy intriguing: pro-spending, but largely along lines Chicago, NYC, et al have pioneered.

My disagreements are deep-seated. I want a public system of schooling that has local bases and biases—where we don’t all have to agree on what “social justice” teaching means. It’s a risk—but democracy rests on that risk. The messiness of different standards is, to me, a blessing that creates escape hatches for trying something different—within broad limits.

The power of Big Money and the Big State over knowledge and its distribution is immense—including in schooling. My early image of charters was precisely that they might be counter-powers, not so different than what in Boston we called Pilots and in NYC Alternative schools: mom-and-pop ventures, built around a few people with interesting ideas and a constituency that wants to join them in carrying it out. In the case of Pilots and Alternatives, they came under the jurisdiction of local labor-management; charters depend on an arrangement with the State.

But somehow we’ve gotten the worst of both private entrepreneurs and public bureaucrats. Transparency has never been harder to find, whether in our highly centralized urban systems or our continuously enlarging charter sector. There are no serious checks and balances, and lots of private “edu-chains” supported by public funds. There is no “public.” Thus, with virtually no public input, NYC’s mayor is allowed to close neighborhood schools and replace them with charters. Parents meanwhile try to figure out how to manipulate a bewildering array of choices while schools are “empowered” to restrict entrance only to high test-scorers, good writers, whatever. In the name of “fairness and equity” we have more selectivity along racial, class, and ability lines, more (white) gifted classes, and fewer than ever minorities in the prestigious high schools. And flat test scores and rising dropout rates.

The big business mindset, so destructive nationwide, is being offered a free hand in our schools. Schools are “delivery” systems, teachers are deliverers of curriculum, principals are CEOs. It’s an intensification of the old factory-model for new technology factories. Local empowerment in today’s schools usually means more power to the principal and less for the line workers, students, or parents—now seen as obstructers of progress.

We’re told the AIG exec bonuses weren’t tied to performance, but school teachers' salaries should be. And Eli Broad, long associated with AIG, is giving advice to our schools? (See Mike Klonsky’s Small Talk, March 17.)

Garbage in, garbage out is an adage from the early years of computers. At their best, as Walter Stroup so clearly lays out in "What Bernie Madoff Can Teach Us About Accountability in Education" in Education Week this week. Even respected tests are insensitive to schooling—by design. Stroup's succinct piece is a must-read. To make matters worse, when the stakes are high enough you can rely on doctored books. It’s called Campbell’s Law. It reminds me of the old Soviet system—with five-year goals that were met on paper, but rarely in reality. In the end, the Russian people turned the tide in WWII, but only after the State’s vaunted economic power was exposed as a lie. We’ll someday face a similar fate re. education’s cooked data.

You can’t make an omelet, as the expression went in the 1930s, without breaking eggs (meaning people). Making a “revolution” in a labor-intensive field is hard to do without abandoning democracy. Well-intentioned reformers have always seen resistors as obstacles that can best be dealt with by sending them to the “rubber rooms” or their equivalent. It’s a process which views organized teachers and organized parents as obstacles. Temps who move in and out every 2-5 years have many advantages—no retirement pay, for example, and they are less prone to loyalty to a union.

NYC's Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have a vision that requires a series of changes, one quickly following another, close control over data, and little or no discussion so that by the time they’ve “finished” we have no idea what they have wrought—or why. The old reality on the ground has simply disappeared.

A decade of the current bipartisan theory of change, which Obama seems to have bought into, has produced almost no positive results—even in test scores and graduation rates—although claims are made. In NYC class, race and “ability” segregation is one byproduct. The demise of neighborhoods is another. Neighborhood schools are first ignored and then dismantled without community approval. You and I, with our unreasonable hope for schools that put intellectual power in the hands of “the people” are not on the winning side, Diane.

I listened, last week, to some Finnish educators describing what they’ve accomplished by taking the exact opposite path—during approximately the same decade. They have no standardized test (although they do sampling) and have gone from mediocre to No. 1 in math and science. They don’t start formal reading or math teaching until kids are 7 years old, but they’re at the top internationally by age 10! (They provide a classy system of child care starting at age 4.) And they have maintained schools as sites for local community-building. Granted they have a more homogeneous population, more supports for children and families, and, like Singapore, they are the size of NYC. But unlike Singapore they are also a democracy, which should be of special interest to us.

Forgive me for being doom and gloom this week.

Deb

Meier and Klonsky on Duncan

Interview transcript from Democracy Now:

As chief executive officer of the Chicago public school system, the third largest in the country, Education Secretary-designate Arne Duncan expanded charter schools and launched a performance pay plan for teachers. Duncan was seen as a compromise pick between progressive and conservative education advocates. We speak to Michael Klonsky, professor of education and longtime school reform activist in Chicago, and Deborah Meier, a well-known teacher, writer and public advocate. [includes rush transcript]

Michael Klonsky, professor of education and a longtime school reform activist in Chicago. He is the director of the Small Schools Workshop and author of Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society.

Deborah Meier, spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer and public advocate. She is currently senior scholar at the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University.

Rush Transcript

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JUAN GONZALEZ: On Tuesday, President-elect Obama announced Chicago School Superintendent Arne Duncan as his nominee for Secretary of Education. Obama formally named him at a news conference at a Chicago school, where he outlined some of the challenges ahead.

PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA: If we want to out-compete the world tomorrow, then we’re going to have to out-educate the world today. Unfortunately, when our high school dropout rate is one of the highest in the industrialized world, when a third of all fourth graders can’t do basic math, when more and more Americans are getting priced out of attending college, we’re falling far short of that goal.

JUAN GONZALEZ: As chief executive officer of the Chicago public school system, the third largest in the country, Arne Duncan expanded charter schools and launched a performance pay plan for teachers. In 2006, he called on Congress to double funding for the No Child Left Behind Act. At the news conference Tuesday, Obama praised Duncan as a reformer.

PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA: When it comes to school reform, Arne is the most hands-on of hands-on practitioners. For Arne, school reform isn’t just a theory in a book; it’s the cause of his life.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Duncan served as Obama’s education adviser during his presidential campaign and helped shape his education platform. After Obama formally named him, Duncan outlined part of the vision for the coming four years.

ARNE DUNCAN: Our children have just one chance to get a quality education, and they need and deserve the absolute best. While there are no simple answers, I know from experience that when you focus on basics, like reading and math, and when you embrace innovative new approaches and when you create a professional climate to attract great teachers, you can create great schools.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Klonsky is a professor of education and a longtime school reform activist in Chicago. He is the director of the Small Schools Workshop and author of Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society. He is joining us from Washington, D.C.—from actually Chicago.

We’re also joined on Skype by Deborah Meier, spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer and public advocate. She is currently senior scholar at the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University.

Let’s begin with Michael Klonsky in Chicago. Your assessment of Arne Duncan as the next Education Secretary?

MICHAEL KLONSKY: Yes. Hi. You know, I think people on the left and progressive educators and school activists aren’t really thrilled about the pick of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. I think part of the reason, though, is that he’s—I think he’s been too closely associated over the years with the Daley machine here in Chicago and with the No Child Left Behind policies coming out of the present Department of Education.

But I think Arne Duncan has the potential to be a good Secretary of Education, and I think he has some real positives going for him. So I kind of have a—I kind of see this whole thing as contested territory, and I don’t think we should—like most of Obama’s picks, I don’t think we should be dependent too much on, you know, this issue of this individual heading the department.

But I think—you know, I’ve had a lot of struggle and a lot of issues with Duncan over the years, and I think my main criticism is his relationship too much with the Daley machine and with No Child Left Behind and the fact that he is one of the people responsible for bringing in this wave of privatization and ownership society politics here in Chicago.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Michael, the way that this has been portrayed over the last few weeks in several of the national publications was this raging battle and pressure from educators, the more progressive ones supporting Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor out at Stanford and involved in school reform, the more conservative pressing for someone like Joel Klein, the chancellor here at the New York City schools. And Obama appears to have chosen a centrist candidate, in effect, to basically to avoid major criticism from both sides. Is that assessment accurate, in your view?

MICHAEL KLONSKY: Yeah, I think it is. I think Duncan was kind of a safe pick, a middle ground pick, somewhere in between the most—more conservative union-busting types like Klein and—but I think that’s pretty typical of the way cabinet picks and the way Obama’s choices have been being made so far.

AMY GOODMAN: Deborah Meier, you’re a well-known school reform activist, currently a senior scholar at the Steinhardt School of Education at NYU. What are your thoughts on Arne Duncan and where you want to see education going in this country?

DEBORAH MEIER: Well, first of all, can you hear me?

AMY GOODMAN: We can. We can hear you. And for those people who are watching on TV, they can see you, as well. Just look directly into the lens of the Skype, as opposed to our picture.

DEBORAH MEIER: Alright. This is a new age. We spent an hour last night trying to make this thing work, and I don’t know that we quite got it right.

So, first of all, I think we’re—it’s not two sides. It’s sort of a—it’s different views about the purpose of education, and there are different views about how human beings learn well. And I think there’s a very predominant view right now that gets—has been called by the name of reform and that has nothing to do with red and blue. It’s a kind of market view of education, though. And I think there are a lot of people on the red side who are more close to my views and a lot of people of the blue side who are more close to Arne Duncan’s views. And that part does worry me, maybe even more than it does Klonsky, my friend Mike Klonsky, because it’s—I think we need a different discussion about what the point of education is.

And I was thinking about the data there is about how few kids graduate, even graduate. After all, less than half or half graduate, at best, from Chicago schools, and that’s excluding the number who never make it into high school in Chicago. But even those who graduate, how few manage to get to four-year schools or get a B.A. I think it’s three or four percent. And it’s that they’re not prepared for the kind of intellectual flexibility, the kind of tough-minded intellectual perseverance, really asking questions, thinking critically, that I think is essential for a democratic society. And I suspect it’s even going to be good for the economy, partly because politics and the economy overlap so much, as we can see these days.

But I think we’ve bought into, and Arne Duncan has bought into, the worst parts of the business mentality or the business model. I think there are things we can learn from the business world, but accountability is not one of them. And I think we’ve bought into some of the shoddiest accountability mindset, in which everybody is forced to lie. You know, high-stakes numbers means you play with the numbers. There’s something, I think, in sociology called Campbell’s Law: the higher the stakes, the more corrupt the data. And Obama, I think, quotes data about Chicago’s success, which I can’t expect him to be an expert on, but I’m enough of an expert to tell you it’s nonsense. And the test scores, NAEP test scores, which are the only test scores that are consistent around the nation, which shows no progress in the last seven, eight years in Chicago.

If you remember, we were preceded by another miracle worker in Chicago, Vallas, who is now producing miracles in New Orleans. And that’s—we had one after another superintendent comes in and produces a miracle, just as the previous Secretary of Education before Spellings, Rod Paige, came in from Houston claiming that there was a Houston miracle and, before that, there was a Texas miracle. And closer look at the data turned out to simply say it was somewhere between shoddy bookkeeping and lies. And I’ve engaged in that myself in the school business, because it’s so easy to do when we have such a narrow way of looking at school accountability.

I mean, kids who graduate our high school need to be kids who have learned to play with ideas—and that starts in kindergarten—who learn to ask uncomfortable questions, who are in the presence of adults who are used to asking uncomfortable questions and persevering.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Debbie Meier, I’d like to ask you whether you were surprised both—in terms of the teachers union, both Randi Weingarten, the head of the AFT, and the head of the Chicago Teachers Union both praised Duncan as somebody who at least is accessible and willing to hear them out.

DEBORAH MEIER: I think they’re being politically smart, which I don’t have to be. And maybe they see something in these people that I don’t know about. I mean, they’re both possible, that I’m wrong, and there’s a possibility that they’re being political. Are you still seeing me? Hello?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: We see you just fine.

DEBORAH MEIER: OK, OK. My screen went off.

So, part of that is, once you’ve posed the issue as being union lackeys or reformers—and the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, a variety of magazines, as you mentioned earlier, have said there are two sides: unions lackeys, people who want to—who are worrying—you know, who are dependent upon the union, and on the other side are real reformers. I think it made it hard for the union to speak for its own membership on this question.

And the history of reform has almost nothing to do—I shouldn’t say that. There has always been a struggle between these two wings in reform. But they have posed me as an anti-reformer, as though there are—since I’m not for market-style reforms, this testing mania, this narrow focus on prepping kids for a small selection of skills, that makes me a dupe of the union and an anti-reformer and someone who doesn’t care for the future of the economy or democracy. I think it’s been posed that way for so many years now.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to Michael Klonsky for a minute, again, speaking to us from Chicago, where Arne Duncan is head of the schools there, now been picked as Education Secretary nominee by President-elect Obama. He’s a strong supporter of No Child Left Behind Act, called in 2006 for a doubling of the funds for it. What are your thoughts on that? And for people who really don’t follow education policy issues, what’s your assessment of No Child Left Behind?

MICHAEL KLONSKY: Well, I don’t think Duncan is really a strong supporter of No Child Left Behind. I remember when President Bush came out to Chicago and kind of cut a deal with Mayor Daley and got some kind of a tentative support for No Child. But I think Duncan has been pushing more for, like most big city superintendents, pushing more for kind of a loose application of No Child’s most punitive aspects. In other words, he’s been trying to get waivers for Chicago. He’s been trying to get rid of the—I mean, he’s really rejected the idea of moving kids out of schools. And so, I have to give him that.

Look, I think the real point is that we have an opportunity here to do something that the Bush administration has stopped us from doing. We need to put public back in public education. And I think Duncan, once he’s kind of liberated from Chicago, I think could be a person who could do that. I think he’s got to use the bully pulpit of the Department of Education to really promote support for urban public schools and for teachers. And I think we’ve got to get rid of No Child Left Behind’s approach, which has been to really turn the Department of Education into a cash cow for politically aligned companies and that have gone into the education business.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Michael Klonsky. I want to thank you for being with us, professor of education and director of the Small Schools Workshop and author of Small Schools. Deborah Meier, longtime school reform activist, now at the Steinhardt School of Education at NYU.

Deborah Meier on KIPP

From March 2008:

A Lesson from KIPP
March 2008

Dear friends,

I’m just back from an 8-day sojourn in the Midwest. It ended up with 2 days in Grinnell, Iowa, which in turn ended up with a panel that left me feeling elated.

Four young(ish) people, graduates of Grinnell, described their life as public school teachers in D.C., Denver, St. Paul and Detroit. They insisted they are in it for the long haul and that while they found it often frustrating, teaching was also wonderful. I found myself drawn in, intrigued, in short—learning from them.

One of the speakers was working in a KIPP school. It’s a middle school model much praised for its impact on test scores. It is built upon many of the characteristics of the “military school” model. Tough love. No talking unless called on (including in the halls), uniforms, rote forms of “good manners,” and rewards and punishments for living by the rule. Some of you might guess that it’s not been my favorite model. So I was not prepared for his enthusiasm. But at the end he told a wonderful story, and it reminded me of why I’m still such an enthusiastic “democrat.” He told us that he had, at one point, considered leaving KIPP for another school. He and some friends had begun to explore what happened to many successful KIPP graduates in high school. They were sad, but not entirely surprised, to see how many of them fell apart later on without the tight structure and scaffolding that KIPP provided. They had learned to do things the KIPP-way but had not built in ways to handle more open-settings. Of course they were particularly disappointed at how poorly the kids’ writing held-up. Following this disturbing data, they—unlike too many of us—decided to visit some schools where they heard there was amazing work going on in writing (the panelist was an English teacher). They were surprised by the lack of “elementary discipline” (gum chewing, loud voices, no lining up, hats, etc.) at the school they had come to learn from. How could they learn this way, they asked themselves? But the kids were fluent and competent writers and readers, enjoyed a good argument, related well to adults and each other—in ways KIPP students didn’t. It gave them pause to think.

The good news? They raised it within KIPP and were heard; it got everyone to do some fresh thinking. Already, he says, his school has begun to re-examine some of their approaches to schooling.

KIPP wasn’t started by experienced teachers or education experts (both founders were Teacher for America graduates)—but they were firm “believers” in the power of knowledge to transform children’s lives. So they responded to issues raised about the school’s impact. If they can learn as they go, who knows where the KIPP experiment will go? But it depends on teachers who are committed to learning from their own teaching and exploring beyond the accepted boundaries.

There’s a lesson here for us all.

It’s one reason why the most impressive data we used at the schools I’m most familiar with were the results of interviews with alumnae conducted years after they left us. But even that only helps us if we’re open to hearing what they say. For the possibility—however unlikely—that we may be wrong about this or that has to be uncomfortably confronted—over and over. Sometimes it’s small things and sometimes it’s the big ones. It’s this that I hope good schools do for both their kids and their staff—because this habit of what I call “skepticism” is what democracy rests on. The “data” that are the most powerful are not all the proxy data—like test scores—which we have been inundated with. What we need to be listening to are the real experiences of our students and our graduates, and over time their impact upon the larger world as well.

More another time about the other three panelists—whose tales were equally compelling if less unexpected. Although… In its detail nothing turns out to be quite the way one “expected.” Not to mention the marvelous three days spent at the North Dakota Study Group (in northern Illinois), my two days spent visiting Chicago schools, and my cancelled speech at the University of Northern Illinois.

Deborah

p.s. I’m still having trouble locating kindergartens that contain any of the following: paint, clay, living things (plants or animals), water, or blocks. I had one success.

© 2008 Deborah Meier

Deborah Meier Gets Real in Mother Jones Interview

Here is a crisp excerpt from that interview:

MJ: What education changes do you think we'll see after the 2008 presidential election?

DM: Things will be worse with McCain and better with Obama, but I don't know how much better. Because it's all bipartisan. If you define yourself as someone fixing education, there's nothing short-range you can do to fix education directly. It's labor intensive. You have to change the way people act. You have to convince people, and change people. Mindset changes are not happening from change in legislation. Like desegregation. We legally got rid of legal segregation, but schools are still segregated. You can demand people have better math understanding, but it depends how you interpret math understanding, and what you want it for, and if you think everybody can and should have that.

MJ: You don't sound like a big fan of federal education legislation.

DM: I'm not in favor. [Federal legislation] can do something about poverty and resources for schools. And the president can play a psychological role. When the president is a dummy, putting down smart people, it makes it harder for kids to know he is serious. I don't want pedagogy and curriculum decided on the federal level. Bush was a dumbing-down model about what it means to be an educated person. Another way the president can play a role in education is by modeling it, by not telling lies and not making up history. But directly, the federal government can do something about resources for more well-educated teachers, more leisure time for kids and families, and time for teachers to think. If we want to leap forward, we need to rethink what schools are like as institutions. If you walk into a school, do you taste and smell education? Is it a place that respects education, or is it a factory looking for higher test scores?

MJ: How is Bush tied to the legacy of education as it stands today?