Author Archives: nicholasmeier

Duncan’s Three-Pronged Attack on Education

Posted on by

One of the interesting things about recent educational policy is that the political battles over the direction of education do not fall along traditional political lines. In both the state of California (where I live), from Wilson (R) to Davis (D) to Schwarzenegger (R), and at the national level, from Bush, Sr. (R) to Clinton (D) to Bush, Jr. (R), to Obama (D), the move toward standardized curriculum and the high stakes use of standardized tests has been consistent, as has the message that our schools are deteriorating and destroying the national economy. (The Obama administration’s current position is particularly disheartening considering that he campaigned on a platform advocating the opposite).

In this essay, I will be addressing the three-pronged agenda of the present Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, that continues these policies and is based on these same assumptions. I will leave off for this essay addressing the two myths I mentioned above, that somehow the quality of our school directly effects our economy (no evidence exits for such a cause-effect link—in fact the cause-effect is probably reversed), nor the myth that our schools have gone downhill (Richard Rothstein’s book The Way We Were does a great job of myth busting on that score).

Duncan’s three-prong strategy consists of nationalizing educational standards (and the high stakes tests that go with them), implementing merit pay based on student achievement, and the increased use of charter schools. I will argue here that not only are none of these proven to be effective, but actually much evidence exists demonstrating their lack of effectiveness.

I will start with National Standards. Duncan has already started convening state governors to discuss these standards (leaving educational organizations out of the discussion). Having national standards assumes that there is a national consensus on the purposes, goals and means for effective education. Throughout the history of this nation, we have resisted such nationalization precisely because it was felt that such goals and means should be left up to local communities. Does such a consensus now exist? I say not. One little piece of evidence: Every semester for the past 5 years I have taught a class on learning theory. At the beginning of the course, which is during their first semester in the program (before they have been influenced by our beliefs and ideas), I have them do an exercise asking them to come up with their priorities for public education. I have them discuss these and try to come to a consensus. Then I have them compare their goals with what they see as the goals of the schools in which they observe. Not only do they disagree somewhat with each other, but I have found every time that there is very little overlap with their goals and the goals they observe in the public schools. It is possible that the students in this non-selective public university are somehow very different from the average citizen, but I somehow doubt it. In other polls of teachers, their views do not tend to vary dramatically from the general public.

Think of the debates you hear around you, talk to your friends, neighbors. Do you all agree on what should be taught in the schools and how it should be taught? In a pluralistic, multicultural, rapidly evolving society such ours, such a consensus seems unlikely. National Standards and standardized tests force such a consensus upon the public, and upon the education of every public school student. This does not seem to me to be the proper role for a democratic government to play in education. In human civilization, just as in nature, variety and differences are healthy and help create a more vibrant thriving sustainable society.

The expansion of charter schools is another of Duncan’s strategies. This is despite extensive research on charter schools that over and over have shown that such schools, as a strategy, have not shown themselves to be any more effective at raising achievement levels or closing the achievement gap between disadvantaged and advantaged students than traditional public schools. There is a fair amount of research that, as a whole, they are less likely to be serving the most needy students, especially students with special needs.

In some ways, the charter school strategy could seem to be in contradiction with the first strategy of standardization. One of the original purposes of charter schools was to allow schools to break away from the standardization of the traditional pubic school system (charter schools are public school, however, in that they receive public money, may not charge tuition, and are supposed to be non-selective in their enrollment). That charter schools could set their own goals and methods, based on the desires of the parents, students and teachers that made up that school was seen by many as their advantage. There are many such charter schools that are dear to my heart, and appear to be having tremendous success with their students.

The seeming contradiction is explained by what Duncan’s idea of support for charter schools is: Standardization. He wants to fund a few charter school chains that he sees as effective at raising test scores, and make such models standard. These are not charters that are created by local groups of parents, teachers or local communities and answerable to them. These are chains with their own pre-set agendas, methods and goals. It is really an attempt to give organizations that are outside of public control, control of public schools, on the assumption that “the public” is the problem with public schools. This is a dangerously anti-democratic belief system (reminds me of the anti-National health care debate where people are afraid of the “government” making health decisions, while not seeming to be afraid of corporate CEO’s making those same decisions for them).

His third agenda item is Merit Pay. This is based on the intuitive assumption that offering rewards for success will motivate teachers to work harder and more effectively. It is based on the assumption that the problem with schools (a commonly held belief) is lazy teachers. While some lazy teachers may exist, I know of no evidence to support this as a workable theory for the problem with schools as a whole. While the public seems to accept this theory for other schools, they do not believe it about the one’s where they send their children, the one’s where they can see the evidence of hard working caring teachers with their own eyes (see the Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll in the September issue of Phi Delta Kappan on the public’s opinion about public schooling).

Bonuses do not work even in the private sector, as recent studies have shown. They may, in fact, be counterproductive. Such schemes are no more likely to be effective in education. One explanation for their lack of success is to look at research on motivation. When we offer extrinsic (external) rewards for activities that people are already motivated to do, we actually make them less motivated. Find me the teacher that did not go into education because they truly wanted to make a difference in the lives of children. There may be some, but they are the exception that proves the rule. External rewards tend to lead us to do only what we need to do to get the reward, and attempt to game the system to “look good.” It might work for the worst teachers, but it is likely to have the opposite effect on the rest of the teachers. Most teachers teach because they find teaching rewarding. They find being unsuccessful at it unrewarding. What they need is help in being more successful, not prizes for beating out their colleagues.

Merit pay is also likely to lead to teachers resenting the difficult and hard to reach students, as they will bring the test scores down, and lower the teacher’s pay. These are the students who need the most attention and care. In addition, it can lead to teachers working against each other in pursuit of limited resources, rather than collaborating and supporting each other. In general external rewards sends a message that teaching and learning are not worth doing well for their own reward, but only when bribes are offered (or the other side of the same coin—punishments threatened). Is that the message we want to send to teachers and students?

All three of the approaches promoted by the present administration continue to follow the same failed policies of the last several administrations. With all of the insistence of teachers using “evidence based” strategies in their classrooms, none of the policies promoted by Arne Duncan are evidence based, and in fact contrary to the most compelling evidence that we presently have. Interestingly, one policy they have not considered is equaling the resources between those with the most (who actually have always done quite well in national and international comparison), and those with the least. In fact, we are the only developed nation that funds in such an unequal fashion, where the most advantaged and privileged, get significantly more resources in their schools than the disadvantaged students (for an extensive expose of this read Jonathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities).

What is the alternative? Providing strong support for good teaching and teachers. Providing adequate resources with which to teach. Trusting the people closest to the kids to make the important decisions about the best way to educate them, especially those who have the training and experience to do so, and who also know and care about those particular children, in close collaboration with their families. Yes, they need to be answerable, answerable not to standardized curriculum and tests, but answerable to the parents of the children and to the local community by demonstrating meaningful results. This is the meaning of true democracy, with a small “d”: Trusting people to govern themselves, including their schools. Are there risks in doing so? Of course. Will they always make the “right” decisions? Of course not. But, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy is the worst possible form of government until you consider the alternatives.

Play is the Work of Children

Posted on by

Two first graders come tearing down the hall and run into their teacher.
“Children, what was the head master just talking about today? Remember, no running in the halls.”
“But Mrs. James, we weren’t running, we’re horses.” At that, they galloped off into the yard.

This anecdote (much abbreviated and paraphrased here), comes from a talk by Michael Armstrong, author and former teaching principal, at this year’s North Dakota Study Group meeting of progressive educators. He used it to illustrate the essential aspect of playing with language. We learn language by playing with language. It is language that allows humans to be creative beings.

The title of this column is attributed to Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), the German philosopher, and coiner of the term kindergarten, which literally mean child’s garden. Over the last couple hundred years, other philosophers, psychologists and educators have come to the same conclusion. These range from theoretical giants such as Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and John Dewey to modern practitioners and thinkers such as Benjamin Spock, Vivian Paley, Eleanor Duckworth, Deborah Meier, and Michael Armstrong, listing just the tip of the iceberg.

What these and many other educators and psychologists have discovered is that play is an, maybe the, essential manner in which humans learn. In fact not only humans, but many mammals learn the important skills they will need for adult survival though play, as anyone who has watched kittens or puppies knows.

Piaget, one of the first to empirically study how children use play to learn, demonstrated that children use play to discover how the world around them works, to develop their schema, and organize the structure of their thinking. It is through such play that children develop intellectually. Piaget demonstrated that while with didactic teaching we can get students to parrot back scientific or logical principles, such rote learning does little to really help individuals internalize and use such rules and theories. According to his research, only when we can play and experience these things for ourselves, test out theories of how the world works, can we make these ideas our own and apply the principles appropriately in real world situations.

Vygotsky saw imaginative play as important beyond the logical-mathematical realm that Piaget focused on. Through his research, Vygotsky demonstrated that through play and imagination children try out new roles. They imitate, creatively, the roles they see of those who are older than them, the adults around them. They develop socially and culturally through this process. In all realms, through play children can go above their current level of being and development. Like an actor, play frees children to act in ways they may not yet be able to do outside of play. Play creates a safe place to task risks, try out new ideas, and take on new roles.

Benjamin Spock, the famous child psychologist of the 1960s, in reaction to rigid and controlling theories of child rearing that were popular at the time, advocated for the importance of play in children’s lives. He explained that children do not engage in play because it is easy, but precisely because it offers meaningful challenges. Human being like to be challenged and solve problems. Otherwise they get bored. It is through such challenges that children learn, learn at just the level that is appropriate to their particular level and skill, what Vygotsky would call, their Zone of Proximal Development.

Many other practicing educators have described the power of play in educational settings, such as long time elementary teacher and author, Vivian Paley, in her book A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play (excerpt), Eleanor Duckworth (who worked with Piaget and Inhelder) in The Having of Wonderful Ideas, Michael Armstrong in Closely Observed Children and Elizabeth Jones and Gretchen Reynolds in The Play’s the Thing: Teachers’ Roles in Children’s Play, to name just a few. When you read these books, you see the joy and excitement that can fill classrooms when play takes a center stage. You see that rather than making school less “rigorous,” play actually makes them a more challenging and intellectually demanding place.

Deborah Meier has developed many schools based on the theory of play as central to learning. Meier’s small public schools of choice serve predominantly low-income minority students. Her work has documented how, when an entire school is designed with the importance of play as central, both in the literal sense of blocks and doll centers for young children, and the intellectual aspect of playing with ideas and theories for people of all ages (including the teachers and other adults) the levels of success for these students skyrockets.

As in the first anecdote, through playing with language, children not only have fun (though the importance of, and their right to, have fun should not be underestimated. Remember, this country was founded on the idea that we have the unalienable right of the pursuit of happiness), but they learn to frame their reality. The anecdote with which I started, in a charming way, illustrates how playing with language is a political tool—we use language to frame an issue. By defining themselves as horses, they find a way of framing reality where they are not breaking the rules—the rules apply to kids, not horses, and horses gallop, not run. These children are becoming powerful users of language, which we claim is a major purpose of education.

Play is a form of practice. But it is not rote practice. It is intellectual practice. Through play children are, in Piagetan terms, developing the schema of how the world works. Through play children have the freedom to discover how materials can be used, the limits and possibilities of those materials. Through play, in Vygotskian terms, children create a low-risk setting to move to the next level in their Zone of Proximal Development intellectually and socially. Through play comes discovery and invention. Through play comes power over language.

Despite all the evidence built up over several centuries, both theoretical and empirical, on the importance and power of play, it appears to be disappearing from the lives of children, especially their school lives, a place where they are compelled to spend 6 hours a day, 180 days a year.

This month, I observed one of my student teachers teach to a class of low-income Latino second graders. She did an hour and a half Reading First language arts lesson (a curriculum that is mandated in Program Improvement schools), following the lesson plan faithfully. The children responded dutifully and more or less competently to the assignments. Not once during that lesson were the children allowed to, much less expected to, use their imagination, to answer any question that did not have one right answer, nor did it allow them to explicitly use any experiences they might have had outside of school.

This experience is not the exception, but rather becoming the rule in schools serving low-income students. If you go into most public schools today, you will see that even in kindergarten (a term which is fast becoming an oxymoron), children spend most of their time sitting in seats filling in worksheets. When not doing worksheets they are engaged in other teacher directed activities. There is almost no time for children to choose their own activities or to freely explore materials. Where there is time to play, it is usually for those who finish their worksheets early, as a way to keep them busy.

Preschools, despite several recent large studies that show that children who attend developmentally oriented preschools outperform those in academically oriented preschools in later years (for more detail on this, read my March 2007 column), are more and more looking like the “traditional” first grades of my childhood—children spending their time doing teacher directed work sitting in chairs. Well-to-do parents are being convinced that only by engaging earlier and earlier in such “academic” work can their children win the race to get into the best schools later in life. Low-income parents are being told that only through such early preparation will their children have the skills that are required for entering kindergarten (when did we start expecting children to enter kindergarten with academic skills?).

There is also evidence that children have less opportunities and experiences engaging in imaginative play outside of school. Homework expectations are rising. Children, especially those of the middle and upper classes, spend more time than ever before in organized structured activities, such as sports, ballet lessons, or music lessons. While these activities are undoubtedly good for children’s development in many ways, they do not engage children in imaginative play. During the unstructured time they do have, children are spending more and more of it in front of electronic media, either television or computers. Neither television nor computer games stretch children to actively use their own imagination. At best they allow children to enter the imaginative worlds of the creators of these shows and games.

To those reading this column who are classroom teachers, I urge you to think about your own teaching. What are you doing in your classroom that allows children to use their imagination? Where can they express their own voice? What percentage of the day? Where are the spaces within the scripted curriculum that you may be mandated to use, where you can allow creativity and student voice?

To all of you, I ask, if you agree with the above critique, what are you doing to change the current system under No Child Left Behind that is driving out much of the space for imaginative work in schools? Preparing students to do well in high stakes standardized testing is often the reason teachers are told they may not allow creative lessons. The only national organization that is actively working to oppose the misuse of such tests for high stakes decisions is FairTest, working on a shoestring budget against the multimillion dollar budgets of the test publishers. At a minimum you can let your elected representative know.

One organization that is currently specifically working on saving the space for play in children’s lives is the Alliance for Childhood. Their site provides articles and links for more information and resources about play in children’s lives.

If you want to read some wonderful books on how to do such curriculum, you could start with any of the following books, some of which were mentioned above:

• Vivian Paley, A Child’s Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play
• Eleanor Duckworth, The Having of Wonderful Ideas
• Michael Armstrong, Closely Observed Children
• Elizabeth Jones and Gretchen Reynolds, The Play’s the Thing: Teachers’ Roles in Children’s Play

A useful teaching video is:
• Play, a Vygotskian Approach, by Elena Bodrova; Deborah Leong; John Davidson; Frances Davidson (Davidson Films).

For more scholarly academic work on the theory and evidence you might start with:
• Bodrova, E., & Leong, D. J. (1996). Tools of the mind: The Vygotskian approach to early childhood education: Merrill.
• Vygotsky, L. S., & Cole, M. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

Same Sex Marriage

Posted on by

Marriage has both a religious and a secular purpose. The California Court’s decision to allow same sex marriages would affect the secular aspect, not the religious aspect. Yet, almost every argument I have heard against same sex marriages has been based on religious grounds. This is despite the fact that our Constitution has a clear injunction against promoting particular religious beliefs (colloquially known as the separation of church and state). During the campaign, those who favor denying same sex marriage talk of that this is going beyond tolerance and forcing them to recognize such marriages. They are correct there. This is the same argument racist Southerners used in opposing civil right laws of the 1960s when they were forced to recognize African-Americans as full citizens, with the same rights as everyone else. On the other hand, there is nothing in the legal recognition of such marriages that would force their church to recognize or perform such marriages. Allowing the State to recognize same sex marriages maintains the separation of church and state. Disallowing it does not.

Does the State have an interest in allowing such marriages, beyond the argument of civil right and fairness? It does. For instance, often gay couples raise children together. Without the right to marry, if the “official” parent dies, the “unofficial” parent has no legal right to continue to raise the child. This means that a child in such circumstances often not only goes through the trauma of losing the parent who dies, but also being taken away from the person best in a position to offer support, and a normal continuation of their life. This further traumatizes such children. Another purpose is for care of the sick and elderly. With no legal status, it is difficult for gay and lesbian partners to help in the care of their sick or elderly partners, which can put the burden on the State.

Our Declaration of Independence states, “All men are created equal.” It took us over 150 years to extend that to include women and almost 200 years to include African-Americans in the promise, if not the reality, of that equality. Now when the California Supreme court has said that such an idea should also apply to the Gay and Lesbian members of our society, others want to continue to deny such equality. They argue that a majority should have the right to tell a minority how to live their lives. This is a mistaken belief that democracy is majority rule. That type of majority rule can also be known as tyranny of the majority. A Constitutional democracy protects the rights of the minority against the persecution by the majority. It is on exactly those grounds that our State Supreme Court ruled.

Do we want to follow the example of countries like Iran which impose one set of religious beliefs on all citizens, or do we want to live up to the promise of our Constitution that we are all created equal, deserve equal rights, and no group should be able to impose their religious beliefs on others?

Secretary of Education

Posted on by

George Orwell coined the term Newspeak. An aspect of Newspeak is Doublespeak in which language is often used to mean its opposite. We have seen this come to play in our times in many ways—missiles called “Peacekeeper,” being one of the most infamous. In education, the recent example is the “No Child Left Behind” Act (NCLB), which is leaving more and more children behind educationally. Now it is being used against Linda Darling-Hammond, a possible pick for Obama’s Secretary of Education. “Reformers” are those who want to keep to the policies of NCLB, and anti-reformers are those who want to break with them in this new twist on language.

Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford, was one of the main educational advisors and spokespeople for Obama during the campaign, and has been leading the transition team. In contrast to Dr. Darling-Hammond, possible picks include several who run large city school districts: Arne Duncan, superintendent of Chicago’s public schools, Joel Klein, Chancellor of New York City’s school system, and Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of the Washington, D.C. school system.

In the press, Dr. Darling-Hammond is being labeled as too “status quo” and the other named possibilities as being the “real” reformers. This to me appears immensely ironic. Dr. Darling-Hammond has spent her career working for improving education for poor and minority students (she is herself African American). This has meant a constant battle with policy makers and school leaders, creating reforms on multiple fronts and multiple levels, ones that went against long standing traditions of education in this country. For much of her career, going back at least to her days in New York City with Teachers College, she worked to support the small schools movement and more autonomy for such schools in a system made up of high schools that often have many thousands of students, and were run (and is still run) in a very top down fashion. The small schools movement in New York City, that she was part of starting, has shown remarkable results with low-income and minority students in study after study. The autonomy and sustainability of these schools to has been enormously undermined by “real” reformer Joel Klein, the chancellors of the New York City public schools. More than one of those schools has ceased to exist despite their success, due to the Klein administration.

In Connecticut, Darling-Hammond created new standards for assessing teachers, based on high levels of performance assessment methods, which again have been shown to be successful there in raising teacher quality. The new “reformers” would rather use standardized test scores to measure teacher competency.

At Stanford University, Darling-Hammond has continued her advocacy for poor minority students. She has been a constant critic of NCLB, while the other “reformers” are willing to accept the premise of this act as a valid way to measure schools teachers and students. As in Connecticut, she was involved in creating a performance-based assessment system for credentialing teachers in California. Among her efforts to support teacher quality through capacity building was her involvement in creating the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

Not one to work only at state and national levels, at the local level she founded two charter schools, one high school and one elementary school in East Palo Alto, a very poor community that went 25 years without its own high school. Both of these schools were founded on the small school, democratic and constructivist principles, to serve poor minority children. None of these types of reforms have ever been popular among the status quo for use with poor minority children. (These new reformers push policies that reinforce drill and kill rote learning for the most needy students.) At Stanford, she developed the School Redesign Network to support efforts across the nation of local schools and districts who are trying to create smaller learning communities.

On what do they try to base these attacks? Her being a successful academic makes her seen as suspect in a country that is highly anti-intellectual. Part of this comes from the fact that, as a professor, she believes strongly in accurate research. She is both a researcher herself, and an avid and critical reader of the research. She will not support reforms that research shows to be ineffective or counter effective, which is true of some of the reforms posed by some of the other names.

That she does not favor their “reforms,” in particular is probably the main problem. For instance, she has not been a supporter of Teach for America (TfA), one of Rhee’s pet projects. Darling-Hammond dared to examine and report on the actual research on TfA in a less than favorable light. Teach for America has therefore started an offensive against her appointment.

Her support for teachers themselves and their unions is another main criticism. For many reformers, those teachers who have to carry out these reforms are seen as the enemy. This goes along with the general attack on the working class, akin to blaming the auto workers for the failure of the American auto industry to compete. (Look whom our government bailed out—the Wall Street rich, but the auto workers and homeowners are left on their own.) The three above named so-called reformers are among those who see teachers as the problem, rather than the solution, to our schools’ difficulties.

The alternative reform of these three large school district leaders? All three have fought for authoritarian power. Klein, for instance dismantled the New York City School Board and the local semi-autonomous school districts. In the name of making teachers accountable, he is accountable to no one. The idea of these new “reformers” is more reliance on high stakes test scores to measure both students and teachers. Such tests reinfoce rote learning and drill and kill teaching methods. Despite fifty plus years of using such tests and teaching methods with the poor, they have never shown any lasting positive results. The data from any of these districts is less than promising under the leadership of these three.

Not only are the reforms of these so-called reformers unproven, they are highly anti-democratic. They rely on those at the highest levels making the decisions and then using rewards and punishments to insure compliance. It is likely that if any these reformers have national power, they will advance polices that promote top-down mandates, more testing and anti-teacher measures.

This is again in strong contrast to Linda Darling-Hammond, who has been a strong advocate for democratizing schools. She believes instead in giving teachers and local schools the tools, support and professional development to succeed. This is known as capacity building. It is based on the idea that teachers do want their students to succeed, and that those closest to the children are in the best position to know how to succeed, given that those people have the resources and knowledge to do so.

While believing in high standards, Darling-Hammond argues that the measure of success cannot be found in multiple choice tests, either of teachers or of students, but must be found in assessments that authentically measure the skills, abilities and knowledge that we actually want out teachers and students to have. She has spent a career developing and promoting such assessment tools.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could have as Secretary of Education someone who was both one of the most respected researchers in educational reform, knowledgeable about the research on school reform, and experienced at successfully carrying out many of those reforms and both local and state levels? And an African American woman to boot!

Will Computers Free Teachers to Teach More Creatively?

Posted on by

At a party of a friend recently I got into a discussion with someone about education and the use of computer technology. The person I was conversing with suggested that educational software could and should be developed to relieve teachers of the technical aspects of teaching. Why should each teacher have to figure out how to teach reading or arithmetic when the best minds could solve that problem and create a computer program to teach the children these basic skills? Having software relieve teachers of this technical aspect of teaching, he argued, would free teachers to do the work that needed human interaction—teaching critical and creative thinking. I would like to use this column to explore why this suggestion makes me uncomfortable.

In some ways I agree with this fellow. The main problem in education is not the difficulty of teaching children to read or do arithmetic. Despite claims to the contrary, virtually no student leaves school illiterate. Our students may not be as literate as we would like, but students who truly cannot decode text and do accurate arithmetic are rare outside of classes for the severely disabled. And such failures have only gotten rarer over each decade (1). I agree with him as well that an inordinate amount of time and professional development is spent on the training of the technical aspects of how to teach reading and arithmetic skills more effectively and at an earlier age. The main point we agree upon is that helping students to learn to use their minds well, in critical and creative ways, is given far too little attention in the large majority of classrooms. This is especially true in classrooms serving low-income and minority students. Due to the fact that these students generally do less well on standardized tests, the schools that serve them are pressured to focus on raising those test scores. Most of these schools rely on teacher-centered direct instruction focused on discrete skills to achieve this.

His solution of using computerized instruction of basic skills to free the teacher to do the work of teaching critical and creative thinking is based on a couple of assumptions. One assumption is that if this software actually did efficiently teach these skills, teachers would engage in the critical and creative teaching we both believe is necessary. Is that what would happen? There is certainly no guarantee that teachers would be allowed, much less encouraged to use their time that way. It assumes that those who decide how teachers may use their time want teachers to do those other things. What could happen instead is that teachers, as professionals, are seen as superfluous. Since the computers are doing the “real” teaching, teachers become monitors whose job is to ensure that the students are sitting at the computer doing what they are supposed to be doing. I have actually seen after-school programs that run this way, using adults who are not trained or certified as teachers to oversee the students as they engage in such computer reading or math programs.

To counter this, I argue that we do not need to focus on developing or advocating for such software (and in any case, such software is rapidly being developed by the multi-billion dollar educational publishing industry which spares no expense in advocating for its usefulness). What we need to do is advocate for the second half—the focus on creative and critical thinking for the purpose of developing democratic citizens. There is a real lack of movement in that direction in the public schools. According to the mainstream media the purpose of education is about raising test scores to create a competitive workforce for the global economy. (And what does competitive mean? Best skilled? Or willing to work for the lowest wages?). Even if this first assumption is true, that software could be more efficient in the technical aspect of teaching, the second part is unlikely to become true until we change the perception of the purpose of schooling. That won’t happen without some strong grassroots advocacy since it challenges the status quo.

Another assumption of the software solution is that one can divorce the technical aspects of learning from the emotional, motivational, critical and creative aspects. This is a more fundamental difference in learning theory. What is known as Critical Learning Theory, as developed by Paolo Freire and others, argues that the technical aspects cannot be separated from these other factors (2). This theory claims that the context of our learning, the content of the curriculum, and the power relationships over who decides what and how we learn, are part of the learning itself. When we learn to read by being put in front of a computer, we are learning about what the purpose of reading is. The content of the material teaches us what and who is considered important. If the ideas and content of what is read or learned about are not discussed, the child has no guidance and help in making meaning of it. Constructivist learning theory (as developed by Dewey, Piaget and Vygotsky) shows us that learning is a process of making sense of the world based on one’s actions and interactions with the environment. This theory tells us that we learn skills best in the context of meaningful and purposeful activities. We learned to speak and walk, not by being explicitly taught to do so. Rather, we learned to talk because we had something we wanted to communicate and were surrounded by people who were doing so, and who helped us to do so, in a non-coercive environment. We learned to walk because we wanted to get somewhere—to have more freedom to explore our environment, again in the company of others who already knew how to walk, and were willing to offer assistance when we wanted it. Maybe this is true of all learning—that it is most efficient to learn to read, write and do arithmetic, as well as to learn to have strong democratic habits of mind, by having reasons that are meaningful and purposeful to the student in the company of others who can model and assist them as they learn. Am I talking pie in the sky? Let us examine the evidence.

What is the evidence for the efficacy of using software to teach basic skills? There is currently mixed evidence with some research showing no gains, and other research showing some short term gains, in reading and math scores for some students (3). There is no long term evidence as of yet.

In contrast, progressive schools based on constructivist principals of learning have a track record. The famous Eight Year Study (4) demonstrated its effectiveness at the high school level as far back as the 1930s. Contemporary examples such as Central Park East in New York City (5), Mission Hill in Boston (6), the Shutesbury Elementary School in Massachusetts (7) and many others have been extremely successful with children of all walks of life, over the long term. These schools avoid scripted curriculum and use a minimum of teacher-centered—or software-centered—instruction. They maximize the time students are engaged in projects that have a purpose beyond getting a grade from the teacher. They allow students to be the active agents in the learning process, in charge of much of the “what and how” of the learning. It is creating more of such schools and classrooms that I believe needs our advocacy and support. A focus on technological solutions may distract of from this larger purpose.

Endnotes:

  1. Richard Rothstein, The Way We Were? The Myths and Realities of America’s Student Achievement (New York: The Century Foundation Press, 1998).
  2. Joan Wink, Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World, Third Edition (Longman, 2005).
  3. Andrew Trotter, “Major Study on Software Stirs Debate,” Education Week, April 11, 2007, pp. 1, 18.
  4. Wilford M. Aiken, The Story of the Eight-Year Study (New York: Harper and Row, 1942).
  5. David Bensman, Central Park East and Its Graduates: Learning By Heart (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000).
  6. Deborah Meier, In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).
  7. Ron Berger, An Ethic of Excellence (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003).

New City School

Posted on by

In my role as professor, I often supervise student teachers in schools serving some of the most disadvantaged students. For the most part, such education has been reduced to scripted curriculum that turns learning into a lifeless chore for students and teachers alike. I especially find it appalling to enter kindergartens, where I see these young children engaged in either whole class teacher centered instruction, or individual worksheets at their desks for the large majority of the day. All those things that the author of “Everything I need to know, I Learned in Kindergarten” learned are no longer being taught, in our rush to start our children on what we call “academics.” There is no time for creativity, children following their interests, learning to be social beings, or the engaging in the real work of childhood, which is play. Only the future will tell us what the cost of this will be to the next generation.

However, I actually am writing this column to talk about a school visit that renewed my spirit of what is possible! This was an impormptu visit last June to one of my favorite schools. On a vacation to visit friends and family in southern California, my wife and I were driving past Long Beach, when I suddenly blurted excitedly to my wife, “Can we stop here and see my friend’s school?” My wife agreed, somewhat reluctantly, as she has little interest in the topic of education, and few positive memories of her own schooling. I called up my friend, Stephanie Lee, the director of this small charter school in downtown Long Beach. She was more than happy to let us visit.

The New City School, or actually 2 sister schools now, are a pair of two-way immersion (Spanish-English) democratically run small charter schools (K-8), with multi-graded classrooms, and team teaching, using a project-based, constructivist approach to learning. With students from all walks of life, and a large proportion being from low-income Latino families, it represents virtually all the ideas I respect and admire in education.

Their new site, which I had not visited before, is a converted factory floor. The largely open space has mostly partial walls dividing the “classrooms,” with a couple of closed off rooms for particularly noisy or particularly quiet activities. The office is the old office of the factory, which looks down from above on the goings on below from its glassed in window, letting one see all the buzz of exciting activity. In walking around the school, we saw children engaged in projects of all sorts, from making life-sized anatomical drawings of the human body, to creating model cars. Each of the projects had some sort of “academic” aspect, often a written product, to demonstrate the learning of subject area content, and acknowledging that students did need to learn to become proficient in academic writing. Every wall was covered with creative works, arts and crafts. Wherever we went, students were busily engaged in work they cared about, and that had a purpose to them. My wife was amazed that this could be done in a public school, and was now glad she had agreed to come along. She loves music and dance, and was really excited to watch a group of kindergartners engaged in a hip hop dance routine as part of their elective in the afternoon as they learned their second language (dominant English speakers choose activities that took place in Spanish and vice versa).

While recognizing that standardized tests are not accurate measures of meaningful learning, they have managed to do what they need to do to keep their scores high enough to not fall under the thumb of state or federal sanctions. This is more than can be said for most of the schools I visit who use the scripted curriculums specifically designed to raise such test scores, yet still end up missing their targets. The success of The New City School has meant that they have a waiting list as big as the school (which was why they opened a second campus). Since under the requirements of NCLB and the State of California, the required scores are a moving target (each year the scores requirements are raised), how long they can sustain this is anyone’s guess. But for the meantime, this is one school where children are learning that education can be meaningful and worthwhile, and that it can allow for creativity, social learning, and be done in an environment where people treat each other with respect.

If you are in Long Beach, you might see if you can get a chance to visit! It restores my faith in what education can be. Maybe it could do the same for you!

Reading First

Posted on by

[Click here for the full version of this article as published in Critical Literacy Vol. 3, No.2]

A front page article in Education Week  (May 7, 2008) proclaims that “Reading First Doesn’t Help Pupils ‘Get It.'” This assessment is based on the U.S. Department of Education’s Reading First Impact Report. For those of you who are not aware, Reading First is a Federally funded grant program for “failing” school districts that use textbooks approved by the Federal government as being based on “scientifically based reading instruction.” What makes it scientifically based? That it presumably follows the advice of the National Reading Panel. The question becomes, why haven’t such programs shown effectiveness if they are scientifically based?

It turns out that where these reading programs are failing is in the area of “reading comprehension.” The report documents that schools using the program are increasing their use of the recommended practices. These programs do appear to help at so called decoding skills. However, the use of these recommended practices and these gains in decoding skills do not appear to translate into improvements in actual reading—that is, making meaning of text. Those who actually read the Reading Panel’s report should not be surprised. The fact is that the report did not have any evidence that the recommended strategies would help in reading comprehension. The only “scientifically based evidence” the panel found was that a limited amount of systematic phonics and phonemic awareness instruction would raise scores on tests of phonics and phonemic awareness for “regular” beginner readers(1). Just as in the evidence from the programs used in the field, there was no evidence in the Reading Panel’s report that such practices improved reading comprehension.

That advancement of such skills would raise actual reading ability is based on a theory of reading that is in fact quite controversial among reading researchers and specialists. Many of the foremost reading researchers, theorists and specialists have always contended that only a minimal amount of “skills-based” teaching is helpful, and that reading is most effectively learned through… reading(2)! (With support and help from those who already know how.) Moreover, the Reading Panel report found evidence for even this limited effectiveness of the skills-based approach only for students who were not shown to be problem readers, have learning difficulties nor to be second language learners. Yet these Reading First programs are often used for students of all types. In California, teachers are often mandated to use these programs in schools serving overwhelmingly Latino students whose dominant language is Spanish—in the name of scientifically–based curriculum. These skills–based strategies are applied in these programs for a much larger proportion of the teaching day than the research supports (more than a minimal amount is overkill—it’s like trying to pour more water into an already full glass). And at grades that the research has no evidence for effectiveness (the research on these approaches only looked at first or second grade). Students, whether they are already reading fluently for meaning or not, at all grade levels, are spending hours every week on decoding and phonics skills in these programs.

A friend of mine teaches kindergarten at one of these Reading First schools. The school is made up of over 90% Latino students. On the phone with her just the other day, she was telling me how they are constantly advised to examine the data on the students (another educational buzzword currently popular is “data-driven instruction”). She tells me that she is all for examining and basing instruction on data about her students. In fact the school spends considerable staff development time doing just that—examining the scores of the students so they know just where each student is. She can tell you exactly where each of her students measures up on all of the assessments which are carried out at the end of each six-week unit. Yet then she is told to keep all the students on the same page at the same time, and that she should not deviate from the script in the textbook (see, we’re not leaving them behind, they are on the same page as all the other students!). So what good does it do her to have this data? This practice ignores the research on the uselessness of teaching above students level of understanding(3). If you move on when students don’t get it, they certainly aren’t going to get the next lesson which builds on knowledge from the previous lessons, especially in a skills–based approach(4)! Her story of being mandated to use a one-size-fits-all approach is one I see and hear repeatedly from many of the student teachers and the experienced teachers I work with as a professor of teacher education, particularly those working with low-income minority children.

One of the worst problems of such programs is that they not only ignore the expertise that teachers bring to teaching their actual students—they try to prohibit it! Good teachers have always known that different children learn in different ways. Anyone who has taught knows that. Any parent with more than one child knows that. Good teaching is about figuring out that way for each student. If we really want to “Leave No Child Behind,” we have to stop tying teachers hands with scripted one-size-fits-all programs. We must allow them to do what they are trained to do, and spend a career getting better at—figuring out how the actual students sitting in front of them learn, and adapt their teaching to the students, not the other way around! (Which is part of the argument for small class sizes, but that’s another topic).

[Click here for the full version of this article as published in Critical Literacy Vol. 3, No.2]

Endnotes:

1. Elaine M. Garan, “What Does the Report of the National Reading Panel Really Tell Us About Teaching Phonics.” Language Arts 79, no.1 (2001): 61-71.

2. Edward A. Chittenden, Terry S. Salinger, and Ann M. Bussis, Inquiry into Meaning: An Investigation of Learning to Read (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001). Gerald Coles, Misreading Reading: The Bad Science That Hurts Children (Heinemann, 2000); Kenneth S. Goodman, In Defense Of Good Teaching: What Teachers Need to Know about the “Reading Wars” (York, Me: Stenhouse Publishers, 1998); Stephen D. Krashen, Three Arguments against Whole Language & Why They Are Wrong (Heinemann, 1999); Jeff McQuillan, Literacy Crisis: False Claims, Real Solutions (Heinemann, 1998); and Frank Smith, Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read. 6th ed. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004).

3. John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney L. Cocking, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000); and Linda Darling-Hammond, Barbara Low, Bob Rossbach, and Jay Nelson. The Learning Classroom: Theory into Practice (Burlington, VT: Annenberg/CPB, 2003).

4. James H. Block & Robert B. Burns, “Mastery Learning.” Review of the Research in Education, 4 (1976) 3-49; and J. Ronald Gentile & James P. Lalley, Standards and Mastery Learning (Corwin Press, 2003).

Educational Research

Posted on by

There are a variety of important issues in regards to educational research these days. One hot topic right now is that our current federal administration has restricted the definition of exceptable research to only one type of research design. This design is known as the experimental design. Qualitative research, which allows us to look at what actually goes on in classrooms and schools, and with children, as well as at the process of how education is working, is not deemed acceptable. Neither are other designs of quantitative research, which might examine a particular school or setting or situation, without having a matched control group. This decision to only allow this type of research does not come from any consensus within the scientific or educational research community as to what counts as research(1). It is a political decision by the current federal administration. This policy has important implications for our schools. One implication is that it highly influences what research gets done. It does so directly by the fact the government sponsors research. Federal dollars will only sponsor research that fits the administration’s definition. It affects schools secondarily by what research they cite and use for their policy decisions. Researchers who want their research to influence these policies are likely to adhere to those protocols. Third, outside researchers and universities may decide to only fund research that follows that research paradigm, again restricting what research gets done. It also affects in some cases what practices schools may use, as the federal government insists that it only fund “scientifically proven” methods. Federal monies for curriculum and instruction are therefore funneled to areas that are supported by this one particular type of research.

I raise the above issue of what counts as research to make a point about educational research in general. This point is about the limitations of much of the research that is done and has been done in education even before the current policies. The above policies will only exacerbate the one’s I will address below.

Two difficulties that I will address here in regards to interpreting educational research are, one: what was used to measure the effects; and two: over what period were the effects measured.

Most educational research uses standardized tests to measure the success or failure of a particular program, or method or other variable of interest(2). However, the validity and reliability of these tests as actual measures of what they purport to measure is highly controversial(3). I will use the example of reading. I recently went to a talk about the research on learning to read. The presenter argued that the research showed that phonemic awareness was required to learn to read. However, the research cited actually showed that the explicit teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics helped students to score higher on tests of phonemes and phonics! This has been part of the trouble with the debate between whole language versus phonics and “phonemic awareness” advocates. Whole language theorists tend to use measures such as comprehension, reading for pleasure, and quantity of reading as their measures of success. Phonics and phonemic awareness advocates tend to use standardized tests that focus on phonics and phonemic awareness skills as their measures of success. How they define “reading” and how they measure reading end up predicting the outcomes they are looking for! According to Elaine Garan(4), a member of the National Reading Panel, the panel made this error in its recommendations—in limiting its analysis to studies using the experimental design, and focusing on experiments that looked at reading sub-skills, it biased its own conclusions.

Similar scenarios occur across many areas of educational research. It is not that research can say anything, but that one must be careful to examine how the researcher defined and measured success of the variable they claim to be examining. The reader and user of the research must be able to decide if they agree with the researcher’s definition, and whether the tool used to measure it is valid according to that definition.

The second problem is with the short-term aspect of most educational research. Most research is done over a one school year or shorter duration. There is an assumption that if gains are shown, they will persist over time. However, much of what we know from experience and other research contradicts that assumption. I refer us here to the “Three Little Pigs” analogy. Let us say we decide to study what materials are best for building houses. We have three identical pigs, all building houses. We notice one is building his house from straw, another from sticks, and a third from bricks. First, what is our measure of success? It is going to be how far has each pig gotten in building his house. After day one, we look to see how far each has gotten, and we notice the pig who is building his house from straw is already done. The one using sticks has his walls mostly up. The pig building with bricks is just getting his foundation done. We conclude straws much be the best material for house building, and mandate straw—based on research!

As most of us are aware, we often forget what we learned in a class or course soon after the class is over, or even during the class, right after the test! Short terms gains often do not correlate to long-term gains. Sometimes it is just do to lack of use—the knowledge or skills learned are not used again, and therefore we don’t remember them. Sometimes it may be that a strong foundation was not built, and so, like the straw house, our understanding collapses easily when it needs to support more complex use or understanding. Researchers Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier(5) have shown evidence of this particularly in language learning, where English-only methods show slight gains in early language learning for English language learners, but students in bilingual classes overtake them in later years, due to, according to language theory, a stronger foundation in their primary language. Research on developmental versus skills based approaches to early childhood education have shown similar patterns. Early academic advantages for skills based approaches are lost over the years to longer-term advantages for the developmental approaches(6).

A main reason for this problem is summed up in an old joke I will repeat here:

 It is late evening and a woman sees a man on the street by a lamppost who looks like he is searching for something. She asks him if she can help.

He responds, “Yes, I dropped my keys.” Together they continue to look for a while. Finally, as they are having no luck, she asks him if he can remember, when and where he last had them, so they might narrow their search.

He tells her, “Oh, yes,” points across the street, and says, “I dropped them over there somewhere.”

“Then why are we looking here?”

“The light is better”

Short term designs and standardized test measurement is the lamppost. It is very difficult to carry out long-term research. It is expensive, so funding is difficult. The researcher must commit to the long haul. They may need a team who can also commit this time. The “subjects” are hard to keep track of as years go by. And the variables get more complex as time passes. At the end of a school term, or of our test of the method, we can be fairly sure that the large majority of our subjects will be right there in the same place for us to administer our tests.

Standardized tests are given to virtually all students, can easily be compared across students, classes, schools, even districts or possibly states. Even if the standardized tests are particular to the study, they tend to be quicker, easier and less expensive to administer than other measures. They are also easier to run statistical analyses on.

However, what good does it do for me to know that “such and such” a reading series or teaching method led to higher test scores for these second graders, if there is no evidence that these higher test scores actually lead to an adult who reads, understands what they reads, and knows how to use what they read to better their life and their society?

As they say “Garbage in, garbage out.” All of the advantages of time and money and statistical reliability do not matter if they will not really answer the questions we want answers to. If what I want to know is: will what am studying lead to a better educated citizen?, then I better make sure that the tools I use to measure that really do measure it.

Now I come back to my original discussion of what counts as research by the government. The federal government defines research only as the experimental design. This design lends itself well to short-term research using quantifiable scores, such as those of standardized tests. The second issue—what counts as evidence—is also more restricted. It is especially difficult to get long term research to fit the experimental design, as following exactly matched groups over years becomes more and more difficult as time passes. Many questions cannot be studied using matched samples, as in many instances it would be unethical to randomly assign students to different groups. Should we randomly retain some students and not others to see the effects of this policy? In other cases, it is impossible. For instance we cannot clone a school or district and recreate the exact same situation if we want to understand policy or curriculum decisions made on that scale. What makes for an educated and successful citizen is not always easily quantifiable, and definitions vary. Therefore, the narrow type of research the government allows also restricts what types of questions even get asked by the research.

It is my contention that although the experimental design in research is commendable and valuable where practical, it can never be the only model of research to answer the complex questions about human learning and behavior. To answer such questions we must use the broader definition of research that virtually all scientific disciplines understand.

If we want to answer important questions in education we are going to have to find a way to fund long term research, and use more complex measures of success that are more closely aligned with the actual skills and knowledge that successful members of society need and use.

Endtnotes:

1. Debra Viadero, “AERA Stresses Value of Alternatives to ‘Gold Standard’,” Education Week, April 18 2007.

2. Deborah W Meier, “Needed: Thoughtful Research for Thoughtful Schools,” in Issues in Education Research, ed. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and Lee Shulman (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999).

3. Alfie Kohn, The Case against Standardized Testing: Raising the Scores, Ruining the Schools (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2000), Deborah W Meier, In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), Susan Ohanian, One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999).

4. Elaine M. Garan, “What Does the Report of the National Reading Panel Really Tell Us About Teaching Phonics,” Language Arts 79, no. 1 (2001).

5. Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, “School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students,”  (Washington, DC: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, 1997), Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, “A National Study of School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students’ Long-Term Academic Achievement: Executive Summary,”  (Washington, DC: Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence, 2002).

6. Rebecca A. Marcon, “Moving up the Grades: Relationship between Preschool Model and Later School Success,” Early Childhood Research & Practice 4, no. 1 (2002), Jeanne E. Montie, Zongping Xiang, and Lawrence J. Schweinhart, “Preschool Experience in 10 Countries: Cognitive and Language Performance at Age 7.” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2006): 313-31.

School Reform: Where is the Evidence?

Posted on by

Under the Bush administration, the rhetoric is that the decisions we make in schools should be based on “scientific” evidence. Not only must it be “scientific,” according to the administration, but it must be based on the controlled experimental design, which is actually just one acceptable form of evidence within the scientific paradigm. No actual scientific field relies exclusively on this one form. However, putting that aside, even accepting a broader range of scientific evidence, the basic tenets mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) are not based on any empirical evidence, controlled experiment or not(1), and many, as I will outline, are in contradiction to accepted educational and organizational theory.

What are some of these mandates that I am referring to? High stakes testing, external tutoring programs, state takeover or charter school reform for “failing schools,” are the ones I will discuss in this column.

High Stakes testing has been around for a long time, and each time it is used it tends to show gains in test scores in the early years which quickly flatten out. Long term educational improvement of any sort has never been demonstrated. NCLB is different in that the stakes are quite higher than in previous reforms, so many argue that previous evidence(2) is not valid. However, the best that that leaves us with is an untested experiment on a massive scale, affecting nearly every public school child in the nation. I won’t even discuss here the massive amounts of monies going to the corporations the make these tests. They get money for developing the test, then selling the tests to the schools, and then for scoring the tests. Then they develop curriculum to help students prepare for these very tests that they design so schools can boost their test scores.

Another major feature of NCLB is that schools that do not reach the required test score goals must offer children tutoring that is done by an outside agency. The theory is that if the school failed the children, they are obviously not qualified to help these children. There is some logic to that theory. However, again, there is no evidence that outside agencies, as a generic category, are better equipped to help failing students than the public schools themselves(3). The administration did not first pilot this approach in some places, and test it against in-house support to demonstrate that it was more effective. Therefore, this mandate is another massive untested experiment, moving enormous Federal dollars from the public to the private sector.

If schools continue to fail to reach mandated test score goals (with rising moving targets—every year a larger percentage of students are required to “pass” the test), then they can be taken over by the state or turned over to private charter agencies. What is the record on this? School districts have been taken over by city or state governments in the past. In California, Compton, and recently Oakland have been the targets of such take-overs. In neither case have there been any significant changes in the education students receive. State governments, not surprisingly, have shown no more capability for creating positive educational changes than the local bodies they replaced. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find a theory to support why one would expect them to(4).

Charter schools, which began as an experiment in the early 1990s, and quickly spread across states and cities nationwide, were based on a theory that more freedom from state regulations and forcing local public schools to compete for students would create educational innovations and improvements. This is based on the market theory. This is a reasonable theory, especially in a country whose economy is based on such a theory. In fact many charter schools are exciting places, with innovative pedagogy showing successful results. However, after extensive research, charter schools as a class, have shown no higher test scores than their public school counterparts(5).

Another possibility in some states is the use of vouchers to send children to private schools. However, again, if you hold demographic variables constant, even private schools show no better results on standardized test scores than do public schools(6). If we are supposedly doing this reform in the name of accountability, private schools have no accountability either to state governments nor their local constituencies. There are no public school boards nor open meetings laws required of private schools, nor are their financial records open to public or government scrutiny. Once more, this aspect of NCLB is based on a theory which current evidence does not support. In most states private schools do not have to administer the same standardized tests that NCLB holds public schools accountable to. While public schools, who are answerable to the public directly, are not trusted without such tests, for some reason, private schools do not need to demonstrate any such accountability.

Is there evidence for other ideas? There is something that schools that have made a significant and dramatic difference for students have in common—local control. Some of the most effective schools are those where the people closest to the kids—the teachers, parents, and community—are actively involved in deciding the mission and curriculum of the school. It appears to matter less what that curriculum and vision is than that it was made by those closest to the kids. Virtually all of the reforms being called for at the sate and national level are based on a profound mistrust of those very people. Yet it should be obvious that when people feel coerced they are less likely to work efficiently. When people feel empowered, they are most effective. The evidence bears this out. Find a school that has significantly beaten the odds with low-income and minority students, and I’ll bet it did not happen based on external mandates! Progressive examples such as the Central Park East schools in New York, as well as models based on more conservative ideas, such as the KIPP academy and Core Knowledge demonstrate this. Not only that, but it honors our democratic ideals. Democracy is based on  the absurd idea that all citizens are capable of making the important decisions in the public sphere and should do so an equal basis. While it is absurd, no one yet has devised a better alternative.

In terms of a particular approach to learning, there have been a number of longitudinal studies showing the success of progressive and developmental approaches to teaching and learning. These are forms of teaching and learning that are the opposite of the scripted teacher-centered approaches mandated in schools that fail to meet the standardized test score targets required under NCLB. The famous Eight-year study, started in the 1930s, which followed students from their freshmen year in high school to four years after graduation found that those in the progressive schools did better on all significant measures, both in high school and in college, than their matched counterparts(7). The more extensive the reforms, the more impressive the results. Despite these dramatic findings, the public mood had shifted away from such innovations, and the results were ignored after they were published. Another more recent example is the Central Park East schools (both elementary and secondary schools) in New York City, and their resounding success of working with poor minority students in East Harlem, with 80 to 90% of the graduates getting into and being successful in four year colleges. Yet these schools are under constant attack to discontinue their innovative approaches(8). A couple of recent studies of preschool practices, comparing developmental child-centered approaches against academic skills based approaches have shown better academic and social outcomes in later elementary grades for those in the child-centered developmental programs. One of these was done in Florida(9), and the other an international study covering over 5,000 students in 1,800 preschool setting in 10 different countries(10).

The reforms of NCLB are based on a premise that those closest to the children should not be trusted to make the important decision about their education. The teachers should not be trusted to make the important decisions about how to teach the children, and the parents should not be trusted to govern the schools locally. It is based on a theory that unless coerced, these parties will not act in the best interest of their own children. It is based on a theory that unless coerced, children are not interested in learning. This is in direct contradiction to the basis of democracy. Democracy is based on the theory that no one is better positioned nor has more of a right to make decisions over their own lives than those most directly effected.

As children spend twelve or more years incarcerated in these institutions called schools, which are becoming more and more anti-democratic, our children are losing the one public place where they might learn what it means to be citizens in a democracy, where they might experience democracy in practice.

If you believe as I do that NCLB is counter to the educational needs of our children and the democratic needs of our society, at a minimum let your state and federal representatives know, as NCLB is up for reauthorization very soon. Unless they hear otherwise, these legislatures will take the politically safe course and not make any significant changes. If you would like to be more involved see my links page for some organizations that are working actively on this issue, such as The Forum for Education and Democracy, and FairTest.

Endnotes

1. Gerald W. Bracy, “Things Fall Apart: NCLB Self-Destructs,” Phi Delta Kappan, February 2007.

2. A.L. Armrein and David C. Berliner, “High-Stakes Testing, Uncertainty, and Student Learning,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 10, no. 18 (2002).

3. Bracy, “Things Fall Apart: NCLB Self-Destructs.”

4. Kenneth K. Wong and Francis X. Shen, “Measuring the Effectiveness of City and State Takeover as a School Reform Strategy,” Peabody Journal of Education 78, no. 4 (2003).

5. Katrina Bulkley and Jennifer Fisler, “A Decade of Charter Schools: From Theory to Practice,” Educational Policy 17, no. 3 (2003).

6. Sarah Theule Lubienski and Christopher Lubienski, “A New Look at Public and Private Schools: Student Background and Mathematics Achievement,” Phi Delta Kappan, May 2005.

7. Wilford M. Aiken, The Story of the Eight-Year Study (New York: Harper and Row, 1942).

8. David Bensman, Central Park East and Its Graduates: Learning by Heart (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000).

9. Rebecca A. Marcon, “Moving up the Grades: Relationship between Preschool Model and Later School Success,” Early Childhood Research & Practice 4, no. 1 (2002).

10. Jeanne E. Montie, Zongping Xiang, and Lawrence J. Schweinhart, “Preschool Experience in 10 Countries: Cognitive and Language Performance at Age 7,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2006).

What is Education For?

Posted on by

Our nation is preoccupied with the issue of improving our schools. Claims of falling standards and achievement abound (these claims are dubious if one actually examines the data. Richard Rothstein’s book The Way We Were is an excellent refutation to that claim). Even if one accepts that the educational quality of our schools is lacking (which I accept, even if not the claim that it is declining), an important point is often left out of this issue: What are we educating for?

There appear to be two main goals that drive current educational reforms. Implicit in current reforms is that higher test scores equal better educated citizens. I come to this conclusion since it is only such test scores that are used to rate states, districts, and schools, and even nations as to their educational success. And at that, it is often only test scores in Language Arts and Mathematics that are examined. By relying exclusively on standardized test scores, it is implicitly saying that those are the only important goals. We see the effect of this when other subjects receive little or no attention, as is true in many elementary schools. Subjects such as arts, music, and even social studies and science are often ignored in elementary schools. This is especially true of schools serving the poor and students of color. It has gotten to the point that some schools are doing away with recess, and even being built without play areas (while we regularly read about the obesity epidemic sweeping our country)! It is not only the subjects that are taught, but how they are taught that this goal affects. The ability to think deeply, critically and creatively, to put the knowledge to use, is often ignored, as those skills are not directly tested, and teaching to such abilities is seen as taking away time that could be used to prepare students for the tests. Again, this is especially true for those not from the dominant culture, or those who are poor—those who are more likely to fail the tests.

The second goal is the rhetoric we hear from government, corporate, private think-tanks and media sources. These groups almost exclusively connect educational attainment to the national economy and to personal economic gain. However, even if we agreed with those aims, the claims as to the cause-effect relationship between education and the economy are somewhat questionable. The claim that increased schooling in a developed country improves the economy is not an excepted theory among educational economists. In fact, it is likely to be the reverse. Schooling responds to needs in the economy, and not the the other way around. When the computer industry boomed, lots of students went into the computer sciences. When the bust years came, they didn’t, and those that had often found themselves unemployed. Training more highly qualified engineers will not help them compete with engineers in India who will work for $7,500 a year, at a time when even highly technical jobs can be outsourced.

Will more schooling at least help one individually? There is strong evidence that years of schooling and degree attainment is highly correlated to income. There is some evidence that at least part of that correlation is not causal—that is, it may be that those who come form higher socioeconomic backgrounds are likely to have both more schooling and higher incomes, and it is their background that is the cause. However, even if we accept the premise that it is causal, at least to some degree, it is not clear that it is the content or quality of schooling that matters. Schooling may simply be a sorting mechanism for employers to screen applicants. This is the meritocracy argument. The best will rise to the station in life that they deserve. It is not clear if the actual knowledge and skills learned in school directly relate to the knowledge and skills needed in the workplace. Ask your doctor how much of medical school was useful? Or a lawyer about law school. Or a teacher about their education courses. Most will tell you that very little was useful, and the real skills were learned on the job. More schooling may be needed in our economy due to the fact that as more people graduate from high school, employers need to up the ante, and require a B.A. to differentiate candidates and reduce the pool. As more people have B.A’s, the same employers start asking for at least an M.A. to apply.

There is considerable debate whether schools do this sorting fairly. There is considerable evidence that again, students of color and the poor suffer discrimination in this system. Even if they don’t, should it be the job of a public institution to sort children for the sake of private employers? Is it the right of the government to force all citizens to take part in this sorting mechanism? Does it serve a compelling public (rather than private) purpose? None come easily to my mind.

Let us now examine the purpose of schooling as giving students the knowledge and skills for employment. Even if schools did do this, should it even be the job of public schools to train workers for private industry? What gives the government the right to compel 13 years of attendance in school during such a precious period in one’s life, if it is solely to meet the needs of the private sector? Why shouldn’t this be an individual choice, paid for either by the families who valued such training or the companies who wanted such workers?

Having read up until now you might think I am questioning the usefulness of public school. You would be wrong. I am questioning the current implied and stated goals. If we look back historically, the arguments for public schooling were made in large part based on two other goals. Going back to Thomas Jefferson, many argued that a democracy required an educated populace that could weigh evidence and make informed decisions. As Dewey said, if we are all the ruling class (which is the assumption of a true democracy) then we all need an education worthy of the ruling class. Anything less would be anti-democratic. Another argument was that in a country made up of people from so many different cultures and backgrounds, we needed a place where they would all become citizens of the United States and learn to accept each other’s differences. As an advocate for democracy, it is these latter goals that I find more convincing.

Such goals imply a different kind of learning and teaching than is common in many public schools. It requires focusing not on the rote learning of basic skills and the memorization of historical and scientific facts, but rather the ability to use those skills and facts to weigh evidence, come to conclusions, better understand one’s world, and even to take action, action that both fulfills one individually but also helps the nation or world improve upon our democratic ideals. We don’t know exactly what knowledge and skills will be needed either for the economy of the future nor to solve the problems that our society will face. We do know it will take the ability to work with others, find the necessary information, and to think both critically and creatively. It will also require tackling consciously and overtly issues of difference; of being able to take on different perspectives, understand other points of view, and to have empathy for those different than oneself. This type of education needs to go beyond the idea that we all should respect each other despite our difference, but to understanding the roots, causes and costs of prejudice and discrimination. It needs to get at not just the past wrongs that have been overcome, but the ongoing problems in our society and the world at large.

It is the goal of educating our youth for their place in a pluralistic democratic society that, for me, is a compelling reason to have a public school system for all of our children.

If you would like to join me in working toward these goals, you might inform yourself about, and join, one or more of the educational reform organizations featured on my Education Links page.