Alleged reform of our public schools has unfolded
over more than three decades though most mark its inception with launch of NCLB. How
NCLB became the point of the spear was addressed in a prior Edunationredux. That
history to a great extent explains why reform has created such disparate
tactics, throwing into the same bed players with conflicting motives, providing
openings for scams in the name of reform, and blunting the ability to change,
sometimes even sight the core problems.
Last Gasp
Analyzing
any problem generally invokes the early choice of the unit of analysis. Samuel Fay, who scored the first patent
for the paperclip certainly wasn’t attacking a global issue. Nor was the triad of 3M researchers who
ultimately created the ubiquitous Post-It note. But in our present venue of education, the unit can be
all over the place: Upper case
SYSTEMIC; an issue, cursive writing or not; a state’s schools; a local school;
a building; a classroom; a day’s lesson plan; and on. All can be important in their own context, but only at the
highest level of aggregation does the landscape get painted. This likely last post on public K-12
for a time is focused on the forest.
Looking
Large
The
big picture is, that American public education may be the only remaining
monolithic public system that has been by default protected from world-view
change. Reasons are three: A century of protection from
competition in delivering its basic services via the assumption of fault-free
entitlement; the nostalgic belief that because control is local, parents and
taxpayers are adequately and responsibly represented; and failure on the part of higher education to
intellectually police its schools of education and demand upgrades.
A
major rift, between what industry saw as its needs for educated human
resources, and what public schools were delivering directly, and to higher
education, precipitated private sector pro-action. The game was played aggressively, at the time by the CEOs of
our largest corporations speaking directly to our nation's governors via the
NGA (National Governors Association), followed by the 1983 report, ANAR (“A
Nation at Risk”) by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, created
by Mr. Reagan. Between 1983 and
2001 there were behind the scene skirmishes over how to change public K-12, but
prophetically, the public school bureaucracy itself, lacking coherent
leadership, simply continued its drift.
The sway and propaganda of the then more dominant teachers’ unions were
likely part of the force that blocked change.
In
2003 there was a report by the KORET TASK FORCE on K-12 Education, titled “Are
We Still at Risk?” The source of
that report was a consortium of three major and respected institutions, Stanford (Hoover
Institution), Harvard (Kennedy School), and Fordham, via a web site and
publication, EDUCATIONnext. The sources are all advocates of
competition as one mechanism for improving public schools, but that position
doesn’t diminish or demean the scholarship of the report and its observations. After three years of chasing
explanations for how our public K-12 schools wound up with feet of clay, the
report’s findings ring true.
KORET
Excerpts Addressing Reform Need
“What the Commission Said
The excellence commission organized its findings within four broad
topics: content, expectations, time, and teaching. Under these headings, Risk issued a 24-count indictment of
American primary-secondary education as the commissioners found it in 1983. The
spirit of these indictments can be sensed from the following excerpts:
• “Secondary school curricula have been homogenized, diluted, and
diffused to the point that they no longer have a central purpose. In effect, we
have a cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can
easily be mistaken for the main course.”
• “The amount of homework for high school seniors has decreased . . .
and grades have risen as average student achievement has been declining.”
• “In 13 States, 50 percent or more of the units required for high
school graduation may be electives chosen by the student. Given this freedom .
. . many students opt for less demanding personal service courses, such as
bachelor living.”
• “A study of the school week in the United States found that some
schools provided students only 17 hours of academic instruction. [In] other
industrialized countries, it is not unusual for academic high school students
to spend 8 hours a day at school, 220 days per year.”
• “Too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of
graduating high school and college students. . . . Half of the newly employed
mathematics, science, and English teachers are not qualified to teach those
subjects. . . .”
The commission’s four major recommendations did not call for sweeping
reform of the education system itself, but they demanded higher standards of
performance. The commission said:
• High-school graduation requirements should be strengthened so that
all students acquire a solid foundation in five “new basics”: English, mathematics, science, social studies, and
computer science.
• Schools and colleges should adopt higher and measurable standards
for academic performance.
• The amount of time students devote to learning should be
significantly increased.
• The teaching profession should be strengthened
by raising standards for training, entry, and professional growth.”
KORET
Excerpts Addressing Roadblocks to Change
“Why So Much Change Yet So Little
Improvement?
First of all, the commission’s diagnosis was incomplete. It paid scant
attention to the K-8 years, seeing them as providing a reasonable level of
basic skills, when in fact many children were failing to gain the fundamental
knowledge they would need to continue learning in subsequent years.
Second, the commission was either too obtuse or too naïve to take on
the basic functioning and political control of the system itself. It seemingly
believed that the public education system of the day, given higher standards,
better-trained teachers, and more time on task, would move the schools and
their pupils toward loftier levels of performance. It trusted the system to do
the right thing once that system was duly chastised and pointed in the right
direction.
We now know that this was unrealistic, that the commission failed to
confront essential issues of power and control. It seemed not to realize that
the system lacked meaningful accountability and tangible incentives to improve,
that it exhibited the characteristic flaws of a command-and-control enterprise.
The commission accepted the system as it was, with all the anachronisms
inherent in a political mechanism created in the mid-19th century.
We now know that powerful forces-three in particular-proved far
stronger and more stubborn than the commission could have foreseen in 1983:
• Risk underestimated
the resistance to change from the organized interests of the K-12 public
education system, at the center of which were the two big teacher unions as
well as school administrators, colleges of education, state bureaucracies,
school boards, and many others. These groups see any changes beyond the most
marginal as threats to their own jealously guarded power. Moreover, they are
permanent features on the education landscape, whereas the excellence
commission detonated its report and then disappeared, with no real successors
to shepherd its recommendations through the political minefields.
• Risk underestimated
the tenacity of the “thoughtworld” of the nation’s colleges of education, which
see themselves as owners of the nation’s schools and the minds of educators,
free to impose their ideas on future teachers and administrators regardless of
evidence about their effectiveness. Some of the commission’s own expert
advisors were advocates of these ideas, in effect poisoning the report from
within.
• Risk also
underestimated the large number of Americans, particularly in middle-class
suburbs, who believe that their schools are basically sound and academically
successful. This misapprehension arises mainly from the dearth of honest,
standards-based information from objective outside sources concerning the true
performance levels of our schools, an immense data void that the commission
failed to address.
In counterweight to these forces of inertia, the past two decades have
also seen the development of powerful new forces for reform that should
strengthen America’s ability to improve its schools as we head into the future.
These include:
• The public’s surprisingly durable belief that education reform is
one of the most critical issues facing the nation-a belief heartily shared by
impatient business leaders and elected officials. Although this sense of
urgency seems inconsistent with the oft-reported complacency of parents about
their own child’s school, satisfaction levels do not run deep. A majority of
American parents believe that private schools are more effective than their
children’s public schools and say they would move their children if they could.
• Growing and sustained support for both standards-based and
choice-based education reforms has the potential to leverage changes that are
farther reaching than those the commission envisioned, though both reform
strategies face staunch resistance from established education interests.
• Minority parents are increasingly angry and
disenchanted with failing inner-city school systems and are less willing to listen
to promises that things will get better if they continue to trust the system
and drench it with resources.”
It
would difficult to be clearer in expressing what has vexed both the schools and
reformers to this day and hour. But, basically, in a decade and since 2003, none of the
above constraints on genuine reform of public K-12 has changed. If anything our K-12 schools have
become even more defensive and resistant to internal rebirth, finding tactics
that can satisfy the sub-optimal test standards while refusing rethinking of
past learning strategies.
The national NEA and AFT have adopted rational goals, but local union
components remain as corrupt as prior seeking only higher teacher salaries without
related increases in performance or accommodation of needed productivity change.
Our
public school system is massive and a systemic hydra because of myriad state
differences in approach. National
census of its precise participants, their roles, their strategies, and their
tactics is a black box. We lack
even the basics of a methodical approach to characterizing the mass of public
systems, preparatory to finding models to allow what they do and how they are
doing it to be researched and quantified.
To complicate the issue of reform, its parameters quickly began to be shaped
by resources lacking the knowledge and epistemology to make those calls;
specifically, the alleged “common core” is freezing what is already
questionably contemporary knowledge layered with ideological methods reasoning.
The Effects of Oversimplification and Ignorance
At
the forefront of original corporate angst with public education was that our
schools were essentially unaccountable for performance versus their mission, a
red flag to the business ethos. It
is also clear that “accountability” became a selective form of remediation narrowed to teachers, and
“measurable standards of performance” were never fleshed out to reflect the
research needed to verify what constitutes proper measurement. In the case of accountability, some
unidentified combination of critics latched onto the notion that the teacher
was the key log in learning, a conclusion that can be correct, that can be
wrong, but that has never been adequately subjected to legitimate research on
the multivariate causes of how effective learning happens, how it co-varies
with other causes of learning success, and with the beginning conditions for
learners.
Wholly
ignored, the debacle of public school administration ignorant of several
decades of findings about human behavior, and of organizational behavior
propositions that foot performance of all institutions including schools. Add that BOE human resources who may
lack the first qualification for the chore perform vetting of most current
school leadership. In essence, there
is virtually no accountability for the direct leadership of most of our public
schools.
On
measurement, instead of competent professional development of assessment
methods keyed to learning progression, resources lacking either the
intellectual capacities or patience to develop proper standards and measurement pushed the present structured bed of standardized testing and school grading. The motivation was political conformity or profit in the case of the testing
companies. With conspiratorial Gates'-funded
lobbying, this is now internalized in the vast majority of our states, and
virtually impossible to root out of state bureaucratic education practice
without legislative overturn, unlikely in the majority right wing dominated
legislatures.
In
sum, if you were asked a perverse test question, design a system of attitudes,
actions, organization structure, performance-quality-administrative assessment,
strategic planning, classroom tactics, and pervasive use of resources, that
would produce the worst possible system for moving a nation’s children from
nascent learners to accomplished thinkers and practitioners, the best answer
would likely be: Positions of most U.S.
public schools, along with the comprehensive ineptitude of oversight
responsible for their control, aggravated by alleged reform, and absolving literally none of the names
you might recognize.
How Remedy This Catastrophe?
A prophetic article, “Why Do Americans Stink at Math,” has a barely suppressed subtext — that America’s public school teachers have not been trained to teach contemporary math, perhaps extending the thought, not much at all. If that is true, the causal arrow only has one vector, our failed schools of education as implied above. The
closest thing to a systemic solution is a major strategic reach and would demand a decade, but
possible: Essentially disenfranchise our
existing schools of education and redesign the model of teaching education
within the science and/or behavioral science halls of higher education, or create a new entity divorced from present leadership and curricula. Simultaneously, via state cooperation,
develop one set of higher education-driven and administered standards for teaching certification that recognize the need for one or more instances of teacher
subject matter expertise.
A subset
of the above, there are out there with the potential to
enter the K-12 learning arena, possessing greater education than much of the present public
teacher pool, more human resources than presently occupy all of our K-12
classrooms. In addition, present certification
models should be seen for precisely what they are – a protective mechanism to
keep non-indoctrinated resources out of the teaching industry, protect insider dogma, and
prevent competition. Consider, there are approximately 1.5MM highly educated teachers in U.S. academia (excluding TAs), most with doctorates, successfully teaching our best and brightest, few if any of whom claim having needed or taken Praxis I or II.
Leaving
this topic for now, a parting prediction is that there is left virtually no
mechanism for adjusting the present trajectory because of entrenched positions. Left in place, the standardized testing without extension to
cover more appropriate learning, with states’ simplistic school grading, and with curricular distortions being imposed, simply promise to harden what has become a
standoff: Our reformers won’t
retire the match; our systems are too deeply entrenched, and devoid of the
creativity and insight to find an end run; and our political solutions are so partisan they offer no help. But the product of all of this is predictable -- at least one generation if not two that
is so narrowly programmed by our public schools that our nation’s status as 'educated' drops even
further.
