By John Thompson.
National and local reporters who cover the Education beat already know the full story behind Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s retreat from his demands that states comply fully and immediately to everything on his corporate reform wish list. Most have displayed balance and excellence in reporting on the second tier issue that is public education. The press has ably documented the ways that testing has sucked the oxygen out of too many schools.
And now Duncan stepped up the coercion, revoking Oklahoma’s NCLB Waiver because the state’s repeal of Common Core. This means it will be even more difficult for reformers to deny that Common Core is a corporate and federal overreach. So, it is doubly important that reporters understand Duncan’s tap dancing, backing down temporarily as his actions show that he hasn’t really learned from the backlash to his imperious policies.
We teachers must now step up our game as we try to educate non-Education reporters on the reasons for Duncan’s temporizing, as well as why the story has important political and social implications. Too many political reporters have merely assumed that Duncan, corporate reformers, and reformers who use the word “accountability” over and over must have a sensible, middle-of-the-road set of policies. They have been too susceptible to claims that educators who oppose Duncan’s policies simply don’t want to be evaluated.
At first glance, Duncan’s Race to the Top (RttT), his School Improvement Grants (SIG), and other “innovation” grants seem to be normative, neo-liberal means to a basically progressive (or even liberal) end. To those who have no knowledge of education research and history, Duncan’s NCLB Waivers appear to be a suboptimal, but defensible, response to congressional gridlock. And, Duncan’s support of Common Core, at first glance, seems to be a simple matter of private-public partnership being derailed by conservative ideologues, Knownothingism, and inflated “rhetoric.”
Reporters who aren’t on the Education beat don’t need to know everything about school reform history and research. But, there are two (or three) sets of background information that are absolutely indispensable to understanding the Edu-politics of Arne Duncan 101.
The first issue is high-stakes testing. Regardless of person’s position on Common Core (I once supported it, but now I see its potential dangers in this age of test-driven reform as dwarfing the modest good that the CCSS could have produced.) We can explain to Education reporters why Common Core is like a road into the Amazon Rain Forest and how it could stimulate a devastating rush to privatize public education. I suspect, however, that non-Education reporters will be just as slow as I was in recognizing the full implications of Common Core.
The real issue that non-Education reporters must understand is high-stakes Common Core testing. The predictable harm that would come from ill-conceived testing is bound to be far greater for the youngest students and poor children of color. They will be more likely to dropout or be pushed out of school, or denied a diploma because of Common Core college readiness, high school graduation tests. It would be nice if reporters catch the bug, become policy wonks, and master the arcane research on why it won’t be possible to set fair “cut scores” for the new tests. But, it would be great if they simply understand that the potential harm will be far greater for lower-skill students. They must also understand that a one-year reprieve from testing will not restore oxygen to our classrooms.
Reporters should also remember that regardless of the arguments for or against Duncan’s federal “innovations,” the issues of Common Core and Common Core high-stakes testing are inextricably intertwined with Duncan’s aggressive use of grants and waivers to coerce compliance. He’s been unbelievably cavalier about giving an offer that can’t be refused to diverse schools across the nation. More often though not, the evidence base for Duncan’s preferred policies is weak or nonexistent. He (and/or his corporate sponsors) just think their ideas are neat, so they become the law in most of the land. Even though Duncan’s most notorious policies (like value-added evaluations) typically fly in the face of large bodies of social science, he has used these initiatives (of dubious legality)to micromanage school policies.
Duncan’s extreme overreach would have been questionable if he was only promoting old-fashioned, “win win” programs that might or might not work. Instead, he mandates risky “win lose” experiments that will inevitably hurt some (or many or most) students and educators, in the hopes of helping others. Duncan tends to ignore the facts on the ground in real schools, as he pushes the latest entrepreneurial-minded reformers’ hypotheses about incentives and disincentives that might or might not lead to better “outcomes.”
Non-Education reporters must realize that education reform is treating children as rats in an unregulated laboratory. Some kids will benefit as reformers roll the dice, but many will continue to be badly damaged by these leaps into the unknown. Its not often that grassroots movement rises in opposition to a lower-level cabinet officer. The reason it happened to Duncan is largely attributable to parents seeing their children hurt by his ill-considered policy experiments.
The high-stakes testing wager, by far, is the greatest example of the output-driven hypotheses that have damaged children. By the time Duncan took office in 2009, even the true-believer in bubble-in accountability who authored NCLB (Rep. George Miller) acknowledged that the law was the most discredited “brand” in politics. Despite the investment tens of billions of new dollars, NCLB most damaged the children it was designed to help – poor children of color. Across the nation, but especially in under-the-gun urban school systems, curriculums were narrowed, soul-killing rote instruction and teach-to-the-test was mandated. The children who found it more difficult to meet test score targets were more likely to be pushed out.
The corruption of test-driven accountability was made worse by the competition incentivized by “choice” in an age of market-driven reform. The original, humane promise of many first generation charter schools was killed by the need to post higher test scores in a life and death battle against traditional neighborhood schools. Even many of the best charters were recruited into the war against neighborhood schools, meaning that their educators were more likely to be forced into imposing a steady diet of basic skills instruction. This prompted terrified administrators in traditional school systems to mandate nonstop test prep in response.
Non-educators, even those who don’t have kids in inner city schools, are likely to be informed about the NCLB debacle, but they tend to be less aware of some more recent trends. Only about 1/5th or 1/4th of teachers were held accountable for NCLB test results. Almost none could be fired for failure to meet the law’s ridiculous test score growth targets. Even for most administrators, sanctions for not meeting NCLB goals were virtually nonexistent. Real world, systems rarely had to do much more than change the marque outside of a “failing” school, renaming it as “reconstituted.
The problem, most educators knew long in advance of NCLB, was that the imposition of data-driven targets (especially those that were impossible to meet) would fire up education’s infamous “culture of compliance.” Personally, I was surprised by the extreme and destructive overreaction of school administrations. Even NCLB’s modest penalties prompted an epidemic of worksheet-driven malpractice and scapegoating that was beyond disgusting.
Duncan, however, put NCLB testing on steroids. Perhaps his most non-negotiable mandate was that all teachers be evaluated by “student performance,” i.e test score growth. Right off the bat, he thus expanded high-stakes testing at least four-fold or five-fold. Worse, he did so by pushing value-added models, or an algorithm that is inherently biased against teachers with large percentages of low-income, special education (IEP), and English Language Learner (ELL) students.
Most Education reporters understand why Duncan’s policies, that were touted as reforms for helping poor children of color, were exceptionally unfair to teachers in high-challenge schools. Non-Education reporters don’t need to understand the entire tragic story, but they must be aware of this dynamic. NCLB’s supposed promise, and its predictable demise, was rooted in the use of questionable metrics to “showcase” failing schools and systems. Duncan sought to use “junk science” metrics to showcase the failure of individual educators serving in high-poverty schools. The end result of both was to paint educators as “adult interests” who perpetuated inequality by failing to care for their students.
So, NCLB spread the myth that a selfish “status quo” was to blame for not overcoming the legacies of poverty. Reformers believed they were justified in using any means necessary to defeat those “adult interests.” This refusal to bear the burden of proving that their policies would do more good than harm has been devastating. Reformers encouraged charter schools and increased the destructive concentrations of generational poverty.
Duncan’s policies spread the slander, naming individuals as the perpetuators of a great evil, while also encouraging the mass privatization of public education. Not surprisingly, Duncan’s new, more toxic brand of testing, aimed at every single educator, produced even more fear, loathing, and retribution. That venom, predictably, flowed down on students, especially our most vulnerable kids.
A second post will address the second major dynamic that all reporters should understand, as well as a corollary pattern of interest to political reporters.
Featured image by DonkeyHote, by Creative Commons license.
Joanna Boyd Best
Non- education reporters are one thing. But what about non-education Secretaries of Education?
Richard
Do you think parents are waking up to the nonsense? I sure hope so.
grwww
The problem is that the viewpoint of the public is that teachers are underperforming. What the public does not understand is that it is they who are under performing in their tasks of community action, parenting and other needs that their children actually have so that they can come to school, ready to learn, instead of 75% worrying about eating, 30% worrying about the bully that they will avoid all day long. Then, there are those who will go home to completely broken households where they will have to spend the evening doing things beside some homework, because they won’t have any help with that anyways.
Things are really broken…
The educators are incapacitated by the circumstances that they are dealt.
What do we believe that education is a balanced budget? How does it work out that our investment in the future is somehow of known value now? Education funding and support of the teachers and the environment our kids learn in has to be corrected to deal with the issues of the day. But more than anything we have to fix those issues. We need to figure out how to improve the quality of life for all of the kids in the US so that the learning experience can actually happen once they get to school.