By John Thompson.

A first post summarized the way that Paul Tough’s new article, previewing his new Helping Children Succeed, explains why we must celebrate the fact that “the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Act, which dominated federal education policy for the past decade and a half, was finally euthanized.” I had hoped that Tough’s previous masterpiece, How Children Succeed, would convince corporate reformers to pull the plug on test-driven, competition-driven mandates. This second post explains why I fear that the Billionaires Boys Club will spin his new work as a justification for their test, sort, reward, and punish approach to school improvement.

Tough’s conclusion is unambiguously great:

Here’s a hopeful thought: Perhaps with the demise of the law, the education debates that raged so furiously during the No Child Left Behind era—on charter schools and Common Core, teacher contracts and standardized testing—might now give way to more-productive discussions about what low-income children need to succeed. We know a lot more than we did when the law was passed about the powerful environmental forces that are acting on many low-income children, beginning in infancy. And we know a lot more than we used to about what interventions and strategies—both at home and in the classroom—most effectively help these young people thrive in school and beyond. A national conversation that starts from this growing scientific consensus and moves forward into policy might be our best chance to improve the lives of the 51 percent of American public-school students who most need our help.

But, then comes the following:

This article is adapted from Paul Tough’s new book, Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why. This work was funded in part by a grant from the CityBridge Foundation, the education-focused foundation of Katherine and David Bradley, who also own The Atlantic.

I followed the link to CityBridge’s web site in the hopes of finding evidence that the Bradleys’ would finally reject their simplistic corporate reform model and heed Tough’s wisdom. What are the chances that Katherine and David Bradley would reconsider their history of supporting Washington D.C.’s Impact, which uses standardized testing as incentives and disincentives for individual educators?  Will they shift their support for charters, Common Core, and anti-union teacher-bashing? Yes, the foundation supports early education, but will it heed the critiques of new preschool pedagogies that are implicit in Tough’s article and explicit in an Atlantic article, by Erika Christakis, from earlier in 2016?

So, the following are my concerns.

Starting with Tough’s concise summary of the work of Roland Fryer, my first worry may sound petty. Tough writes, “As a body of work, Fryer’s incentive studies have marked one of the biggest and most thorough educational experiments in American history.  … And yet in almost every case, Fryer’s incentive programs have had no effect.” He mentions four of Fryer’s multi-million dollar experiments involving tens of thousands of students. He quotes Fryer’s acknowledgment that “The impact of financial incentives on student achievement … “is statistically 0 in each city.”

I congratulate Tough for getting such a statement from Fryer, who has stubbornly refused to make such admissions in regard to Houston and Oklahoma City where his experiments failed. More importantly, reformers still spin many of the same approaches as Fryer’s incentive plan in Denver as promising.

In other words, I wish more top-down reformers would follow Tough’s lead, keep an open mind, and learn from experience. Even when Tough praised Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone for its stress on the socio-emotional, he was prescient in noting this overreach. Canada “believed that he could find the ideal intervention for each age of a child’s life, and then connect those interventions into an unbroken chain of support.” Now, Tough cites the work of Angela Duckworth, Camille A. Farrington, and others who emphasize the role of character, “grit,” and other noncognitive skills, but who see obstacles to scaling up a technocratic system for teaching them at scale. For instance, Farrington concludes, “‘There is little evidence that working directly on changing students’ grit or perseverance would be an effective lever for improving their academic performance.’” Moreover, she concludes that it is “school or classroom context,” not the quantifiable inputs by individual educators, that helps students develop positive mindsets.

But, true believers in No Excuses charters are now ignoring Duckworth and other experts who warn against grading students (or teachers) on such characteristics (as well as the ability of educators to increase scores on them.)  Similarly, KIPP and other charter management organizations may express agreement with the conclusion, but I hope they will listen to Tough’s reminder:

One of the signal results of toxic-stress exposure is a hyperactive fight-or-flight mechanism, which does not encourage in students the soothing belief I belong here. Instead, it conveys opposite warnings, at car-alarm volume: I don’t belong here. This is enemy territory. Everyone in this school is out to get me. Add to this the fact that many children raised in adversity, by the time they get to middle or high school, are significantly behind their peers academically and disproportionately likely to have a history of confrontations with school administrators. These students, as a result, tend to be the ones placed in remedial classes or subjected to repeated suspensions or both—none of which makes them likely to think I belong here or I can succeed at this.

Similarly, Tough praises Turnaround for Children and EL schools (formerly Expeditionary Learning schools). To Tough, the EL schools’ most significant innovation is understanding that it is not enough “to directly address the impact that a stress-filled childhood might have on disadvantaged students.” He concludes, “For a student to truly feel motivated by and about school, he also has to perceive that he is doing work that is challenging, rigorous, and meaningful.”  Corporate reformers have aggressively pushed challenging and rigorous work in order to meet test score growth targets, but I wonder if they will change their models and offer the meaningful instruction that is offered in affluent schools. Will they heed Tough’s call for “less lecture time; fewer repetitive worksheets; more time spent working in small groups, solving problems, engaging in discussions, and collaborating on long-term creative projects?”

I suspect that edu-philanthropists will embrace Tough’s call for high-quality early education, at least rhetorically. However, will they allow themselves to face up to what it takes for systems to provide such learning?

And that brings us back to Christaki’s Atlantic article. She wrote, “Preschool classrooms have become increasingly fraught spaces, with teachers cajoling their charges to finish their ‘work’ before they can go play.” I doubt that corporate reformers will own up to their contribution to the edu-politics that prompted “the shift from an active and exploratory early-childhood pedagogy to a more scripted and instruction-based model.” As Christakis notes, “The preoccupation with accountability has led to a set of measures that favor shallow mimicry and recall behaviors, such as learning vocabulary lists and recognizing shapes and colors (something that a dog can do, by the way, but that is in fact an extraordinarily low bar for most curious 4-year-olds), while devaluing complex, integrative, and syncretic learning.”

Finally, while I respect the diplomatic way that Tough articulates his synthesis, I can only half agree with his words, “we know a lot more than we used to.” Yes, especially in terms of practical interventions, we’ve learned a great deal in the last fifteen years.  But, Tough and others cite scholarship dating back to the 1970s.  Plenty of the knowledge which Tough updates was well documented before NCLB.  Corporate reformers were either blissfully unaware of that science, or they were dismissive of it.  Perhaps, it will take Tough’s third book, as well as the new recent research that he now cites, to persuade accountability-driven reformers to rethink their devotion to quantifiable targets, and incentives and disincentives. Gosh, I wish I hadn’t become so skeptical of venture philanthropists but, still, I won’t be holding my breath.

Part Two (see Part One here.)

What do you think? Will the third time be the charm? Will corporate reformers start to pay attention to education research and cognitive science?

Dr. John Thompson is an award-winning historian and an award-winning inner-city teacher. Now retired, he is the author of A Teacher’s Tale: Learning, Loving and Listening to Our Kids.