Modern education reform started in 1965, when the passage of the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act signaled that policy elites had chosen the politically expedient over the morally responsible. In doing so, the root causes of poverty and racism were buried beneath a mountain of misplaced blame labeled school accountability. The segment below this post from The Mismeasure of Education explains what I mean.
Beginning with ESEA, unequal student achievement became the proxy for deep inequalities that go all the way back to slavery, but instead of addressing the resulting poverty that is always mirrored in test scores, Lyndon Johnson and the Congress chose to travel the low and easy political road of pretending to fix schools, which quickly turned into a blame game that got everyone outside of schools off the hook for a deep and unacknowledged societal shame that was unequaled in the Western world.
Now fifty years later nothing has changed except that American businessmen have turned five decades of inept schooling interventions into an education industry that generates major revenue streams worth billions of dollars, which effectively cut channels that direct the flow of our society's children based on the whims of capitalists without conscience.
The recent passage of the reauthorization of ESEA shows that education reform has become much like the permanent "war on terror:" never-ending, misdirected, and arrogantly uninterested in the long term outcomes. The shame of the nation, as Kozol called our great moral failing, just got more shameful.
Background reading below from The Mismeasure of Education, which offers an explication of the educational events of the 1960s.
The Modern
Testing Era Begins
As noted earlier, education has not always been the chosen
road to opportunity and upward mobility.
The case had to be made, and the solution had to be sold, and James
Conant was instrumental toward establishing education as the means to that
end. Between the New Deal and the early
1960s, policy makers at the national level consciously chose to focus efforts
to establish social and economic equity through increasing access to education
(Kantor & Lowe, 1994), rather than the more expensive and politically
unpopular route of wealth redistribution, job creation, guaranteed minimum
income levels, and programs to disrupt segregated living patterns and
inadequate health care provisions. Progressives in the U. S. had advocated
during the 1930s for the kind of social and economic development efforts that
became institutionalized in the social democracies of Western Europe and
Scandinavia after World War II, and the “movement to
expand government control of the market and to alter its distributional
patterns seemed likely to succeed even in the United States” (p. 6). Following World War II, however, the GI
Bill, the rhetorical messaging of leaders like Conant, and successes within the
labor movement had, in effect, reduced the perceived need for direct government
structural intervention in social equity efforts. The NAACP’s focus, too, on
school desegregation as the primary civil rights agenda added to the impetus
already taking hold:
By the
late 1950s and early 1960s, the political space for active state intervention
in the market had thus shrunken considerably. Although the Civil Rights
movement sought to put full employment planning and income redistribution back
on the public agenda, these policies generated little support from the middle
class or from blue collar workers who received benefits mainly through the
private sector. Consequently, when policy makers in the Kennedy and Johnson
administrations began to formulate poverty policy, they ruled out active
government intervention to create jobs and redistribute income because without
widespread popular support they did not think they could win approval for such
measures in Congress (p. 7).
Even though the federal
strategy of increasing educational opportunities with large infusions of cash
was able to buy Southern support, finally, for the desegregation of schools, it
set a precedent for future generations policy elites who continue to espouse
the belief that “education is the civil rights issue of our generation” (Lewin,
2012, para 5). This expression has taken on a deep sense irony in recent years,
since federal education funding sets a high priority on the unlimited spread of
charter schools, which have a clear segregative effect (Frankenberg,
Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2010; Miron, Urschel, Mathis, & Tornquist, 2010)
on public schools, even in areas where schools were intensely segregated
already.
The
Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) came one year after the passage
of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and President Lyndon Johnson promoted ESEA as
a hard-to-ignore financial incentive aimed to make palatable the
non-discrimination requirements of the Civil Rights Act for Southern
segregationists. Johnson hoped that the
ESEA funds offered to states and cities that agreed to desegregate would
finally break the back of Southern apartheid, which had remained largely
undisturbed despite the 1954 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Brown v Topeka
Board of Education decision. The plan
was hugely successful, so much so that apartheid education largely disappeared
in 17 Southern states by the late 1960s (Orfield, from Mondale & Patton,
2001). Distrustful, however, of the Southern political establishment in general
and Lyndon Johnson in particular, Senator Robert Kennedy did not want to see
the draining away of millions of Title I dollars before they could ever reach
the malignantly and impoverished minority children for whom Title I was
intended (Lagemann, 2000). Kennedy, in
fact, argued for standardized procedures and uniform data gathering, and he called for a “good faith administration effort to hold educators
responsive to their constituencies and to make educational achievement the
touchstone of success in judging ESEA” (Mathison, 2009, p. 6). At a Senate
hearing in 1965, Kennedy went so far as to propose “some testing system that
would be established [by] which the people at the local community would know
periodically as to what progress had been made” (Barone, 2007, p. 4). In advocating program evaluations for the original
ESEA Title I programs, Kennedy unwittingly served to inspire the program
accountability movement in education (p. 10).
Robert Kennedy’s efforts to find out if
poor children were actually learning to read were complicated by new federal
budgeting requirements for implementing cost-benefit analyses aimed to increase
efficiency in federal spending by identifying the most successful
programs. Satisfying either aim would
have been difficult for a single evaluation scheme, but satisfying both proved
entirely too much. Further complicating
efforts, as Ellen Lagemann (2000) has pointed out, were state fears and
resentment related to potential federal control or state embarrassment for poor
results. All of these concerns were on the table as a new national assessment
was being developed, field tested, and administered in 1969. It was called the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP), and today it is known as America’s Report
Card. More will be said about NAEP in
Part IV, particularly as it relates to the use of arbitrary and unrealistic
norming in order to then use the low test results for political purposes.
Another
seminal event that unwittingly contributed to the growth of the educational
accountability by testing is known today as the Coleman Report (Coleman, et al,
1966). The mandate for the Coleman report came from the Civil Rights Act of
1964, which required a research study be conducted within two years of passage
to identify where educational resources in public educational institutions were
lacking due to “race, color, religion, or national origin” (Lagemann, 2000, p.
193). Almost overnight, previous education program evaluation criteria based on
resource inputs shifted to program outputs as the mandate for tracking
education program effectiveness was written into federal legislation.
While everyone, including James Coleman,
expected to find large differences in achievement based on large differences in
resources between the 600,000 children that his study included in 4,000 black
and white schools, the findings confounded expectations. As Coleman scholar, Gerald Grant (2009)
points out, Coleman found discrepancies in spending between black and white
schools to be less than expected, due to infusions of cash by Southern states
in hopes of maintaining the “separate but equal” apartheid systems. But even where resource differences were
large, Coleman found these disparities in black schools influenced student
achievement differences much less than “who you went to school with:”
Simply
put, Coleman found that the achievement of both poor and rich children was
depressed by attending a school where most children came from low-income
families. More important to the goal of
achieving equal educational opportunity, he found that the achievement of poor
children was raised by attending a predominantly middle-class school, while the
achievement of affluent children in the school was not harmed. This was true even if per-pupil expenditures
were the same at both schools. No
research over the past forty years has overturned Coleman’s finding . . . (p.
159).
Coleman and
his team (1966) found, too, that non-Asian minority children are more affected
by social composition than are white children, and that “if a minority pupil
from a home without much educational strength is put with schoolmates with
strong educational backgrounds, his achievement is likely to increase” (p.
22). Though this finding is commonly
cited in analyses and interpretations of the Coleman study, the dynamics that
shape this social fact are most often attributed to the social capital that
accrues for various reasons when poor children go to school with middle class
children. Coleman, however, clearly
introduces a race element beyond socioeconomic status that is related to the
effects of oppression and demoralization that is rarely cited. Therefore, we include this rather lengthy
quote below, which if attended to by policy makers, would doubtless create an
added urgency to dust off long-neglected integration plans. Notice that Coleman remains loyal to and
supportive of the charge given him under Section 402 of Civil Rights Act of
1964 to provide data related to “the lack of equal educational opportunity for
individuals by reason of race, color, religion or national origin . . .”, even
though his investigations have led him to findings that even Coleman could not
have predicted:
This analysis has concentrated on
the educational opportunities offered by the schools in terms of the student
body composition, facilities, curriculums, and teachers. This emphasis, while entirely appropriate as
a response to the legislation for the survey, nevertheless neglects important
factors in the variability between individual pupils within the same school:
this variability is roughly four times as large as the variability between
schools. For example, a pupil attitude factor, which appears to
have a stronger relationship to achievement than do all the “school” factors
together, is the extent to which an individual feels that he has some control
over his own destiny [italics added].
. . . The responses of pupils, except for Orientals, have far less
conviction than whites that they can affect their own environments and
futures. When they do, however, their
achievement is higher than that of whites who lack that conviction.
Furthermore,
while this characteristic shows little relationship to most school factors, it
is related, for Negroes, to the proportion of whites in the schools. Those Negroes in schools with a higher
proportion of whites have a greater sense of control. This finding suggests that the direction such
an attitude takes may be associated with the pupul’s school expererience as
well as the experience in the larger community (p. 23).
Coleman found hope, then, strongly correlated with the
presence of a sense of autonomy, which is more easily demonstrated, measured,
and retained where racial and economic mixing prevails, rather than in racially
and economically segregated environments—whether that segregation is sustained
by antiquated beliefs, legal maneuvering, or by outdated school assessment
practices. And it was this “pupil
attitude factor” of hope that had a greater effect on achievement than all
other school effects examined in the Coleman study, which remains the largest
research undertaking of its kind in U. S. educational history.
The Coleman findings on
socioeconomic status and school achievement echoed the findings of another
large, longitudinal study a few years earlier, whose similar results on the
topic were similarly ignored (for similar reasons, we may assume). The federal research project in 1960, Project
Talent, involved detailed questionnaires in over 1,300 high schools and a
series of tests for 440,000 students that included achievement, attitudinal,
interest, and aptitude tests, surveys, and questionnaires. Instruments were
administered in 1960 when students were 9th graders and again in
1963 when they were seniors. By 1973, it
is clear that Washington’s elite had digested the implications of these
studies, as expressed here by fiscal and monetary expert, Alice Rivlin (1973):
The most general
result of these statistical studies [the Coleman Study and the Project Talent
study] has been the finding that variables reflecting the socioeconomic
characteristics of students and their families explain most of the variation in
test scores, and variables reflecting school characteristics or resource inputs
explain very little.
These results should
not be exaggerated—they do not prove that "schools don't matter"—but
they certainly provide a basis for considerable skepticism about using test
scores as measures of the output of the education industry as such. Test score
changes may primarily reflect changes in the school population and the way it
is mixed, rather than the productivity of school resources themselves (p. 424).
Lagemann (2000) recounts the drama
surrounding the release of the Coleman Report’s initial findings in 1966, and
the subsequent “firestorm” set off within the Johnson Administration, which
knew that Coleman’s findings could sabotage the Administration’s strategy of
using the federal purse to buy Southern support to end apartheid schooling in
the South, as set forth by ESEA the year before. Johnson knew that Republicans, already
resistant to more federal spending, would seize and exploit the counterintuitive
fact that spending levels were clearly not the prime factor in performance
discrepancies. Coleman’s findings, too,
offered a swipe at a core component of the American secular faith in education
and educational opportunity as “the chief instrument for redressing the
inequalities of American life” (Kantor, 1991, p. 50).
This lofty notion had, indeed, fed the
Jeffersonian belief, later transferred to Horace Mann, that education may
provide solutions to social problems that were thought to be the result of the
poor’s own shortcomings. Blaming the
poor for their poverty is as traditional as our Calvinist forefathers of
Puritan New England, who viewed the socioeconomically unfit as having earned
their lack of status through their own moral failings (Rippa, 1996). These shortcomings, in turn, might signal the
column of the celestial tally sheet to which all souls had been added who were
not part of the Elect, or God’s elite.
From this early theological base, there eventually grew the Protestant
economic catechism of the Gilded Age, with ample doses thrown in of Social
Darwinism, which “held that responsibility for poverty lay not with the
business cycle or the existence of a capitalist reserve army of the unemployed,
but with the moral failure of the poor themselves to conduct proper family
economy” (Dawley, 1993, p. 27).
By the 1960s the poor’s personal flaws
and the lifestyles (Kantor, 1991) they spawned were bundled within a new and
encompassing concept known as the “culture of poverty,” which acknowledged
structural barriers as well as the traditional blaming of the victim[i]:
First, though it acknowledged the structural sources of deprivation, the
culture of poverty thesis tended to focus attention more on the personal
characteristics of the poor themselves than on the economic and social
conditions that shaped their lives (Aaron, 1978, p. 20). Consequently, and this
is the second point, because it implied that people were poor due to their own
attitudes, behaviors, and life-styles, it suggested that changing the poor
rather than redistributing income or creating jobs was the best way to
eliminate the problem of poverty (p. 55).
The third
characteristic that Kantor (1991) attributes to the “culture-of-poverty thesis”
was its belief that, since the economic and psychological conditions left the
poor without the “will and capacity to attack the sources of their own
deprivation” (p. 55), professional intervention was required, which assured a
powerful role for the liberal public policy makers during the 1960s. Such interventions, however, did not disrupt
the underlying assumptions of economic order, systems of privilege, or existing
power relations, as initiatives to help the poor focused more on education and
training programs. As noted earlier,
these kinds of compensatory solutions could be provided without disrupting the
social and economic structures that would have been challenged by job creation
programs or other alterations to economic and socio-cultural patterns. The preferred compensatory strategies adopted
by liberals could “compensate for
capitalism's inevitable flaws and omissions without interfering with its
internal workings” (Kantor quoting Brinkley, 1991, p. 56).
Coleman’s
findings, however, were not governed by any of these assumptions. His findings clearly suggest the need for
structural alterations to the racial and socioeconomic organization of schools,
while clearly pointing to the limited value of simply adding resources without
structural modifications. The initial
findings of the Coleman Report, therefore, were appropriately muted by
Johnson’s White House; the media, with no open controversy to sell copy and
with its accepted narrative wisdom to protect, largely ignored the complete
findings when they did appear late in 1966 (Coleman et al, 1966). Both liberal and conservative policy people,
then, read the Coleman Report looking for ideological ammunition, and they
found it. Conservatives centrally concerned
with cutting costs and conserving the status quo cherry-picked Coleman’s
findings (Alexander, 1997) to argue that “throwing money”[ii]
at educational problems couldn’t fix them, while liberals used Coleman’s
findings related to social capital and the importance of racial and economic
mixing to argue for mandatory busing policies to achieve racial balance. Coleman remained disappointed (Coleman, 1972)
at the reception of the study, and he remained throughout his life an advocate
for removing all barriers to socioeconomic integration, even as an interim
measure toward achieving equity and equality (Kahlenberg, 2001). Kahlenberg
(2001) cites Coleman from a rare interview in 1972, in which his claim for the
significance of social capital is made unequivocal:
Coleman said
that research continued to show that "a child's performance, especially a
working-class child's performance, is greatly benefited by his going to a
school with children who come from educationally stronger backgrounds."
Coleman declared flatly: "A child's learning is a function more of the
characteristics of his classmates than those of the teacher" (p. 62).
How
different today’s education reform agenda might be if Coleman’s core finding
had been acknowledged and taken to heart for its central truth: schools alone
can never consistently close the gaps in achievement that reflect deep
differences in levels of autonomy and privilege, wide disparities in
opportunity, deep veins of racism, and an ongoing and deepening hope gap. How different our schools might be if we were
to take seriously what good research already tells us, or if we as a society
were to fund other social science research with the potential to matter in the
health of our neighborhoods and our world.
Or how differently our schools and our perception of schools might be if
we were to conceive of educational improvement as one important component of a
comprehensive commitment to social and economic renewal, in a way that
acknowledges the wisdom expressed by Jean Anyon’s (1997) quip: “Attempting to fix inner city schools without
fixing the city in which they are embedded is like trying to clean the air on
one side of a screen door” (p. 168).
Instead, it
would seem that another, though harsher, version of corporate education reform
is now aimed toward U. S. schools. The
latest testing/accountability scheme of Race to the Top continues to ignore
Coleman’s core research findings on how social and economic segregation impact
achievement, even as today’s corporate reformers continue to cite education[iii]
as the civil rights issue of the present era.
If we are to believe, then, the mountain of scholarship[iv]
that validates Coleman’s findings (Garoran & Long, 2006) as they relate to
the power of shared social capital and the limited capacity of schools alone to
end output gaps as measured by test scores, we must surely find ways to counter
the essential irrationality that says there are “no excuses” for children and
teachers segregated by race and class, who must accomplish the impossible or,
else, accept the punishing and inescapable consequences. Here we are reminded Richard Hofstadter’s (1955)
warning to those who dare challenge the status quo masked as reform:
In determining whether . . . [social] ideas are accepted,
truth and logic are less important criteria than suitability to the
intellectual needs and preconceptions of social interests. This is one of the great difficulties that
must be faced by rational strategists of social change” (p. 204).
Until such
time that our society signals a return to common sense and humane values
applied to education policymaking, we may wonder what calamities may be
required to halt this generation’s “revolving, reformist administrative shell
game” (Martin, Overholt, & Urban, 1976, p. 71) to preserve the status quo
while proclaiming change. During the
first half of the previous century’s “orgy of tabulation” (Rugg, 1975), it took
an economic depression and a world war to interrupt the virulent
social-efficiency engineering project that eventually threatened democracy and
human rights everywhere. Will we, once
again, choose the failed efforts and dangerous intoxicants of the past in a
different guise, while ignoring the continuing retrenchment of structural
inequality and social inequity that make our democratic ideals increasingly
arcane and the hope that sustains us, adults and children alike, less likely
with each passing school year?
[i] William
Ryan coined the phrase, “blaming the victim,” in his 1971 book of the same
title, Blaming the Victim.
[ii] Karl
Alexander (1997) traces the skeptical research related to school spending to
economist Eric Hanushek, longtime Fellow at the conservative think tank, the
Hoover Institution:
Hanushek's first literature
review, titled "Throwing Money at Schools," covers 130 school-level
and person-level analyses of basic "bread and butter" issues,
including effects on student performance of pupil expenditures, class size, and
teacher experience. His conclusion (1981:30): "Higher school expenditures
per pupil bear no visible relationship to higher student performance."
That was in 1981. Then in 1989, with more studies in hand (N = 187):
"There is no strong or systematic relationship between schooling
expenditures and student performance." (Hanushek 1989:47).
Words like "strong" and "systematic" somewhat
qualify the 1981 conclusion, but the impression stands, and people in high
places take this work seriously. In a series of speeches in 1988, Former
Secretary of Education William Bennett invoked Hanushek's work to conclude:
"Money doesn't cure school problems. We've done 147 studies at the
Department of Education and we cannot show a strong, positive correlation
between spending more and getting better results" (cited in Baker
1991).
Such a sweeping conclusion is very likely wrong, however. For
example, a recent meta-analysis (Hedges, Laine & Greenwald 1994:11) of
Hanushek's 1989 data finds "substantially positive effects" for per
pupil expenditures and for teacher experience and "typically positive"
effects for teacher salary, administrative inputs, and facilities.
[iii] Since his appointment in 2009, Secretary of
Education, Arne Duncan, repeatedly claimed that “education is the civil rights
issue of this generation” (http://chronicle.com/article/article-content/64567/). In laying out his similarly focused, though
more aggressively privatized, education policy agenda in June 2012, the
Republican contender, Mitt Romney also called education “the civil rights issue
of our era” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/24/us/politics/romney-calls-failing-schools-civil-rights-issue-of-our-era.html). Both political parties continue to embrace
charter schools as a key policy initiative, even though charters have been
found to have segregative effects, even in schools systems that are intensely
segregated (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, & Wang, 2010; Miron, Urschel,
Mathis, & Tornquist, 2010).
[iv] See
Applications of social capital in educational literature: A
critical synthesis (Dika & Kusum, 2002)
Review
of Educational Research, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 31-60
