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By John Thompson.

Part 1: Holding Diane Ravitch and Corporate Reformers Accountable

Part 3: Countering “Reform Nonsense” with Common Sense.

This is a second post reviewing The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch.    Part one summarized Ravitch’s essays from 2010, which was the time when corporate reform pivoted from what she called “the Death Star of education,” NCLB, to “the Executioner,” her term for the Race to the Top which spearheaded the Obama administration’s and the Billionaires Boys Club’s attempt to “blow up” the education “status quo,” in a failed attempt to produce “disruptive” and “transformative” reforms.

Had NCLB’s architects bothered to read education history and social science research, they would have learned that education scholars mostly agreed with Ravitch that, “No other nation tests every student every year,” and “No high-quality system judges the quality of teachers by the test scores of their students.” Had the Obama administration taken the time to listen to researchers and practitioners, it might have realized that his administration dramatically increased drill-and-kill malpractice by mandating the use of statistical models that Ravitch correctly described as “fundamentally flawed,” and “inaccurate, unreliable, and unstable.”

For instance, Ravitch draws upon the work of Dan Koretz, who “excoriates the reform movement for its indifference to the harm it caused.” Koretz, as well as Ravitch, makes a sophisticated, carefully worded, scientific case against the testing imposed under the Bush and, especially, the Obama administrations. It’s not surprising that impatient corporate reformers didn’t want to take the time to read such complex science. But there is no excuse for their failure to pay attention to this specific harm cited by Koretz. How could they not face up to the damage that would inherently result from teaching kids that there is just “one ‘right answer,’” as opposed to asking the “right question?”

NCLB did terrible damage to schools, but it held only about 1/5thof educators accountable for increasing test scores. The novice reformers didn’t understand why value-added teacher evaluations, that were designed to drive the bottom 5 to 10 percent of teachers out of the classroom, would undermine the quality of instruction of most teachers.

Had they read Ravitch or the education research she cited with an open mind, they would have learned that most teachers didn’t teach tested subjects and they could be evaluated on students they never met. So, “A music teacher may be found ‘ineffective’ based on the school’s math scores.” I wonder if they could have then denied Ravitch’s conclusion, “This is madness.”

If a corporate reformer were to read The Wisdom and Wit of Diane Ravitch with fresh eyes, I wonder what they would say about the advice from the American Statistical Association (ASA) when she wrote:

The ASA issued a short but stinging statement that strongly warned against the misuse of VAM. The organization neither condemns nor promotes the use of VAM, but its warnings about the limitations of this methodology clearly demonstrate that the Obama administration has committed the nation’s public schools to a policy fraught with error. ASA warns that VAMs are “complex statistical models” that require “high-level statistical expertise” and awareness of their “assumptions and possible limitations,” especially when they are used for high-stakes purposes as is now common. …  In some states, like Florida, teachers have been rated based on the scores of students they never taught.

The ASA also points out that teachers are responsible for about 14 or 15 percent or less of student learning:

This is not saying that teachers have little effect on students, but that variation among teachers accounts for a small part of the variation in scores. The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences.

Ravitch cited a joint statement by the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education which undercut the fundamental hypothesis of corporate reformers and explained why “the VAM ratings of those who teach children with disabilities and English language learners will be low, because these children have greater learning challenges than their peers, as will the ratings of those who teach gifted.” But corporate reformers didn’t even ask the obvious question: how could mandating a statistical model, which was biased against teachers in high-challenge schools, be a lever for attracting talent to high-poverty schools?

So, why did smart and sincere reformers take such a leap without looking at the policy evidence?

Ravitch later noted, “For five years, the Obama administration has been warned by scholars and researchers that its demand for value-added assessment is having harmful effects on teachers and students, on the morale of teachers, on the recruitment of new teachers and on the quality of education, which has been reduced to nothing more than standardized testing.” So, why had Secretary Duncan “brushed aside all objections and pushed full steam ahead with his disastrous policies, like Captain Ahab in pursuit of the great white whale, heedless to all warnings?”

Ravitch also placed the Obama gambles within the context of the public relations spin which peaked at that time. This was the era of “Waiting for Superman,” and other high-dollar film productions which blamed teachers for education failures and portrayed school improvement as simple and inexpensive. She wrote, “The message in these films is that public education is a failed enterprise. The problem is not money…  Test scores are low because there are so many bad teachers, who jobs are protected by powerful unions.”

And the high stakes testing fiasco got even worse, especially when reformers imposed two other massive mandates. The first, Common Core standards, would have ordinarily been welcomed by educators had its designers not turned them into a grandiose experiment that ignored reality. Ravitch had long been a supporter of high standards but she was dismayed by the way that the Gates-funded process ignored research protocols. The planning lacked transparency and classroom teachers were largely ignored. Apparently, due to their worship of disruptive transformation, Common Core standards and testing were imposed on even the youngest children, prompting “nearly unanimous” skepticism about Common Core standards in the early grades.

Like most teachers who I knew, I initially welcomed the promise of Common Core standards of instruction. I naively assumed that they would offer an exit strategy out of the NCLB dumbing-down spiral. After all, no rational person would try to attach stakes to tests that might come with such standards … And how would anyone believe that value-added teacher evaluations could use untested, college readiness tests, to be taken by all types of students across a diverse nation?

Secondly, high stakes testing and the subsidizing of the aggressive growth of charter schools became even more destructive when test scores became the ammunition in the battles sparked by a greatly expanded school closure campaign. The resulting culture of competition inevitably prioritized the “juking,” or the fabricating of student performance statistics. The testing mania also undermined the quality of charter schools. Ravitch noted, “Today, charter schools are promoted not as ways to collaborate with public schools but as competitors that will force them to get better of go out of business.”

Moreover, as Ravitch wrote:

The question that neither President Obama nor Secretary Duncan has answered is this: Where will they find 5,000 expert principals to take over the schools that are closed? Where will they find hundreds of thousands of superb teachers to fill the newly vacant positions? Or will everyone play musical chairs to give the illusion of reform?

Corporate school reform reached its pinnacle of political power in the Obama years. After failing to improve public schools, the corporate reform movement degenerated into nothing more than a privatization campaign. By 2013 and 2014, the tragedy of accountability-driven, competition-driven reform was obvious and a revolt by educators and patrons erupted. The Opt Out movement spearheaded a counter-attack.

Across the nation, schools began suffering from budget cuts. After wasting billions of dollars on testing and punishment, Ravitch recalled, “there are larger class sizes and fewer guidance counselors, social workers, teachers’ assistants, and librarians.” This robbed students of the opportunity to engage in the arts, physical education, foreign languages, and other subjects. Due to losing both the resources and the autonomy to offer meaningful instruction to their students, “an unprecedented exodus of experienced educators  … [who] were replaced in many districts by young, inexperienced, low-wage teachers.”

So, we can call the Race to the Top the “Executioner,” which followed the NCLB “Death Star,” or we can use another term coined by Ravitch, “a Grand Detour.” Regardless it was the symbol of the tragedy created “when ideologues gained control of federal policy.” This bipartisan fiasco also opened the door to today’s threats that come from Donald Trump and Betsy Devos. Ravitch’s analysis of the current debacles will be addressed in a third post.

What do you think? What was your experience when every educator became accountable for test score growth? Which did more harm in your school(s), NCLB or the Arne Duncan/Bill Gates policies?

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Anthony Cody

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