(By invitation, following Jeff's great diary about Gerald Bracey. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
The Center for American Progress is "progressive." Right? After all, CAP's website touts it as a source for "Progressive Ideas." The homepage lists its "progressive priorities." And the "About Us" blurb declares CAP's mission to draw from the great progressive "social movements of the 20th century."
So you would expect that any thoughts about education policy emanating from The Center for American Progress would be, well, progressive, wouldn't you?
CAP's most recent opportunity to push for a more progressive agenda for reforming America's public schools was released to the world earlier this month with the publication of "Leaders and Laggards: A State-by-State Report Card on Educational Innovation," a follow-up report to another one bearing the same name two years ago. Even though the report was created in partnership with two well-known conservative organizations, you would expect that CAP would have inserted some fairly substantial representation of progressive education values in the report.
For instance, you would expect there to be some reference to educating children in ways that are similar to those pioneered by Francis Parker, who believed that children learn best by doing and that schools have to be child-centered. You would expect to find the influence of the great American thinker John Dewy, whose laboratory school proved that schools work best when they function as a community. And you would expect to see at least some reference to the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget and the work of Jerome Bruner who established that children aren't empty vessels that schools can just pour a standardized content into.
After all, the research base that proves that progressive education practices are effective has a pretty long history and is fairly well understood.
But anyone looking for a progressive influence in the "Leaders and Laggards" report will be sorely disappointed. Because there's none. Phrases such as "active learning" and "child-centered" never even occur. Nothing about schools functioning like communities, or kids being encouraged to construct their own meaning about academic content.
(I would have done this myself, but I knew that Jeff could do a much better job. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Quick! Who is your go-to expert on American education policy?
In a lot of political arguments, that's frequently the crux of the matter, isn't it? On the economy, you go to Robert Reich or George Will. For the Middle East, Juan Cole or Max Boot.
But when you're looking for opposing sides in the debate on America's public schools, the initial appearance is that, well, there aren't any opposing sides. For sure, there are differences of opinion on specifics that people often argue about with great passion - whether to give out school vouchers so students can attend private schools, whether to teach intelligent design in science classes. But among political leaders in Washington DC and prominent pundits in the MSM, there's a startling uniformity of belief about the state of American education - an over-arching narrative that provides a context that is rarely disputed even when people argue about the merits of year-round schools or whether or not to teach phonics.
For instance, when you look at the education policies that Republican presidential candidate John McCain was pushing for in his campaign, you'll find that these are the exact same policies - school accountability based on standardized test scores, merit pay for teachers, charter schools to compete with public schools -- that are being implemented by the Obama administration. And when the Bush administration's Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings passed the policy baton to the Obama administration's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, she welcomed him as a "fellow reformer" of what's wrong with US schools.
The reason for this is that, for decades, the popular perspective on American education has been dominated, almost exclusively, by a single, simple narrative. Whether you listen to E.J. Dionne or Lou Dobbs, America's schools are "failing." American education is in a "crisis," we've been told again and again. Our students can no longer "compete" against the students of other nations in the race to, um, whatever we're all supposed to be racing toward. Educators themselves are seen as part of the problem. And only the leading business captains or the famed entrepreneur dé jeur - such as Bill Gates or Louis Gerstner - can possible know what to do to fix our "broken" schools.
For years, the most prominent and powerful antidote to this contagion of lock-step thinking has been the writings of Gerald Bracey. Like the impertinent youth who persistently remarked that the emperor had no clothes, Bracey wrote a different story about our schools, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what was really true and not true about what was being said about them. In his books, his recurring column in Kappan magazine, and his diaries at HuffingtonPost, he argued persuasively - with actual facts and steel-eyed reason - that the conventional wisdom about our nation's public schools was not only false; it was a cover-up for what is, at the heart, a problem of our democracy.
Unfortunately, Dr. Bracey has left us. And as commenter craigspinks lamented at washingtonpost.com, "Who will take his indispensable place?"
According to leading "education researchers" (sub required), the draft guidelines that the Obama administration has published for federal economic-stimulus money and Title I aid for schools "have no credible basis in research."
The researchers point to two regulatory priorities in particular that are lacking in research evidence: evaluating teachers based on students' standardized test scores and promoting the growth of charter schools.
"One theory of action seems to be that holding teachers more accountable for the gain in their students' test scores will induce them to become better teachers," writes Duke University's Helen Ladd. "At this point, I am not aware of any credible evidence in support of that proposition."
And research on the performance of charter schools has shown that their track record is "highly variable." ....
I wrote an earlier diary, back in June, about the research on charter schools--which came from charter school advocates, actually. I also managed to find an open link to the article, here.
Jeff goes on to say:
The article points out that the Bush administration was famous for insisting that schools adhere to policies and programs that were based on "scientific research" while it promoted an agenda that had nothing "scientific" about it.
Now, the Obama administration is insisting that schools make decisions based on "data that shows what works," while it pursues mandates that have no data to support them.
What's the difference?
The difference is, apparently, that just like Clinton with NAFTA, a Democratic President has much easier time screwing the Democratic base than a Republican would.
On Friday, vastly overshadowed by the push for "health care reform", Obama announced his plans for "education reform," dubbed "Race To The Top". In it's coverage, the Boston Globe was depressingly typical of the shoddy reporting around education that greases the wheels for this travesty.
The "Race to the Top" initiative is designed to identify new, effective ways to teach, reward states for innovation, and give state authorities a chance to patch rapidly widening holes in education budgets.
It also spurs states to voluntarily make sweeping reforms the administration wants - including linking teacher pay to how well students do on tests, and expanding the role of charter schools in public education.
"This competition will not be based on politics, ideology, or the preferences of a particular interest group," Obama said, flanked by Education Secretary Arne Duncan at an afternoon press conference in the Department of Education headquarters. "Instead, it will be based on a simple principle - whether a state is ready to do what works."
Of course, as I blogged recently, there's no evidence that charter schools "work"--they do not differ dramatically in performance, but rather slightly underperform standard public schools. Nor is there any substantial research showing that merit pay tied to test scores is an effective way to improve educational outcomes. Thus, Obama's competition is based entirely on ideology--an ideology that is primarily about shifting control of education as far out of the classrooms and into America's boardrooms as possible.
In fact, Obama is stabbing his union allies in the back:
A new report, ""Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States.""(pdf) (pdf executive summery / pdf press release), from Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, finds that charter schools significantly underperform overall compared to the traditional public schools they are supposed to improve on--a major embarrassment that will no doubt be ignored, just as all evidence of privatization and corporatization are ignored, especially since Obama's basketball buddy and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a huge charter school booster.
Here's the graphic representation of results:
And the accompanying text:
The Quality Curve results are sobering:
• Of the 2403 charter schools reflected on the curve, 46 percent of charter schools have math gains that are statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their TPS comparisons.
• Charters whose math growth exceeded their TPS equivalent growth by a significant amount account for 17 percent of the total.
• The remaining group, 37 percent of charter schools, posted math gains that were significantly below what their students would have seen if they enrolled in local traditional public schools instead.
Nore from Democracy Now!, Gerald Bracey and Rethinking Schools on the flip.
In the latest iteration from our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan declared that
"But to somehow suggest we should not link student achievement to teacher effectiveness is like suggesting we judge sports teams without looking at the box score."
Given the fact that we don't really judge sports teams by the box scores (hello, it only matters who wins!), let's think about the whole highly questionable idea of framing education endeavors around a sports analogy.
I know that there are always a lot of lame sports analogies in our culture:
* sports as a formula for success in business (yeah right, who "won" in our current financial debacle?)
* sports as a framework for personal fulfillment (go ahead, try using "winning" as a productive framework for personal relationships)
* sports as an analytical argument for politics (currently being vigorously applied in the MSM with awful consequences for the rest of the country)
But in what way is sports really analogous to schooling? Should schools and teachers really "compete"? Don't we want everyone to "win"? Is there really a direct relationship of teacher behaviors to student achievement, or isn't there a lot of influence on student achievement that is outside the teacher's control (research says there is)?
But perhaps even more frustrating than the overly simplistic argument that determining success in schooling is somehow analogous to determining success in sports is the indescribable vagueness of what Herr Duncan is maintaining, which is that teachers "be judged on student performance, though not solely on test scores," without ever giving a clue as to what else is involved in his private criteria for evaluation.
At DKos, teacherken has a rather frightening new diary (h/t dkmich), "Schools - are we headed for national tests and standards?", in which he lays out various bits of evidence, recent statements of President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan, and concludes that the answer is "yes". He then asks, what exactly will these standards aim at producing--a happy hive of worker bees?
He raises a whole host of important questions, to which I want to add one that Gerald Bracey has repeatedly pointed to, as I've noted before: the professed purpose of workforce development and increased US competitiveness is totally bogus. The US is already #1 in competitiveness, while other countries where students outscore ours--such as Japan--have worse economic problems than we do. Furthermore, we already produce a workforce that is underemployed for its skill level.
I am all in favor improved education, but (a) we need a broader concept of what education is for--as teacherken argues, and (b) we need to improve our entire economic system so that it makes full use of the workforce we already have, and has jobs for the workers of the future we are intent on educating today. These two points imply a very different approach to education and our economic future than Obama appears to have in mind--and, most troubling of all, there appears to be virtually no public discussion of these very important issues.
Quotes from teacherken and further discussion on the flip.
In part one, I presented the background for this diary, a partial framework for understanding the battle of elite conservative and neo-liberal "reformers" to take over education. With that background in mind, let us consider four columns written anmd published at Huffington Post by Gerald Bracey, America's leading mythbuster on the education front, whose been on that job since 1991.
Bracey's first column looked back at the severely limited public debate preceding the choice, which had virtually shut out the possible nomination of Linda Darling-Hammond, an actual life-long educator who appeared to have the insider track as head of Obama's transition team on education. The next takes aim at the myth of educational crisis. The last two look at the utter cluelessness of Obama and his eventual choice, his basketball buddy Arne Duncan.
Compared to Admiral Blair or Sanjay Gupta, Obama's pick for Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan may not seem too bad. He hasn't been responsible for enabling any massacres that we know about, and he hasn't lied through his teeth on national TV that we know of, either-yet, at least.
Sure, those are pretty low standards, but standards are for kids and for teachers, not for "education reformers," especially those in the upper circles of Versailles. So, like I said, not too bad, by Bush-lite standards. And Bush-lite seems to be pretty much exactly what Arne Duncan is. All sorts of failed conservative ideas-these about dismantling public education in the name of "reform"-tricked out a little bit differently than the last round of failed conservative ideas, just to look "new" and "innovative" and "outside the box" and whatever new buzzwords they've come up with this year.
"Hey, didn't those guys lose in November?" You ask. No. They're the House. The House never loses, they smile.
Duncan is most decidedly NOT an educator. He's a lawyer. But Duncan has this extraordinary qualification: He's Obama's pick-up basketball buddy from Hyde Park.
I can't make this up.
Not that Duncan hasn't mucked about in the educational system. Chicago Boss Richie Daley put this guy in charge of the horror show called Chicago Public Schools where Duncan turned a bad system into a REALLY bad system.
And Obama knows it. Indeed, although he plays roundball with Duncan (who was captain of the Harvard basketball team), State Senator Obama was one of the only local Chicago officials who refused to send his kids to Duncan's public schools. (The Obamas sent Sasha and Malia to the Laboratory School, where Duncan's methods are derided as dangerously ludicrous.)
So, as they say in the trade, the optics are not good. And Obama's all about the optics, as we well know. So why does he go with such bad ones? Could it be his belief that no one really cares?
