This
is the last post on public school reform before some blog hiatus on that
topic. After nearly 100 posts on
various issues embedded in that alleged reform’s history, on standardized
testing and VAM issues, and on other challenges in and surrounding our schools
courtesy of “corporate reform” and NCLB, there seemed little to add. But the outbreak of political
correctness, and myopia permeating current rhetoric on the above called for a
reality check.
The
current status of test-based reform is fluid. Senator Lamar Alexander is chairing the Senate’s education
committee, taking testimony, and apparently in line to propose changes to ESEA
(NCLB). It is unclear whether the
pendulum is coming down on the side of some sanity that would reduce
destructive testing and at minimum cause the CCSSI debacle to be reviewed? What is apparent is that defenders of
continuation of present and proposed testing are ramping up rhetoric in
response to public protests of testing, offering some marginal to idiotic
reasoning why this testing is necessary to save our discriminated or
disadvantaged children from “falling through the cracks,” whatever scientifically
that is supposed to mean.
As
egregious as the above technically disputable wisdom, the principal argument
the advocates seem to muster is that the nation’s public school students will not
be evaluated in grades three to eight, and again in high school, if present
testing is not pursued. Do over
three million teachers, the vast majority more committed to real education than
the cabal of testing companies lobbying every state legislature or the US Department of Education, simply vanish
from the classroom when the time comes to do some formative or summative
testing of their efforts? Get
serious.
Straight
talk on public education is increasingly hard to find. Some is proposed here, in the form of perceived truths however inconvenient to both reformers and anti-reformers:
Truth
#1
Both the reformers and
the public school establishment are wrong, both culpable for the state of
American public PreK-12, and self-righteously turning out the least prepared
generation in a half century to deal with a nation’s survival problem-solving.
How did you get
there? Give us at least one fact
that is a legitimate assertion?
Top down: A U.S. President
and Education Secretary who believe they have the high ground, but are
ideologically so liberally twisted or delusional that the utopian obsession with tactically elevating all discriminated or disadvantaged children's education is rationalized as a legitimate basis for destroying a century-old
public school system; the present U.S. Congress (need there be more
elaboration?); and a cabal of testing companies motivated by distorted business
theory and greed, given carte blanche
to define what constitutes contemporary knowledge. Bottom up: the marginal to dismal performances of some
fraction of 15,000 systems and 90,000 schools, in both international testing, allegedly per the private sector in preparation for employment, and in lack of preparation for postsecondary work based on remedial work; the fumbling of some fraction of
15,000 BOE; the ineptitude to demagoguery of some large fraction of 15,000
superintendents who should not be there; and some fraction of over three
million teachers unprepared for their job description.
Not complex or detailed argument, but usually conceded to be general knowledge: That 35 years of highly involved reform challenges would not have endured if there was not some basis for deficits traceable to the public schools' performances (over and above deficits attributable to the income and cultural discrepancies among the nation's children); and on the flip side, over those same 35 years failure of testing- and VAM-based "reform" to actually produce measurable public school process and behavior changes not negative to genuine learning.
Truth #2
The present motif for
reform – hammering both students and teachers after the fact with simplistic
learning logic and convoluted tests – is so bizarre in the 21st century
it defies societal sanity.
Truth: America is turning
out a generation of its youth with an inventory of disaggregated facts that
will be neurally extinguished with disuse, so unbalancing legitimate critical thought
and problem solving capacities that the nation will be populated with a constituency neither capable nor creative in discriminating among increasingly complex and risky
options in every civil venue.
Truly bizarre: Calling for
every child to be “college ready” literally from kindergarten; juxtaposed
against the content of that college readiness based on standardized testing;
juxtaposed against the near irrelevance and even dysfunction of that alleged
learning to success in the college/university mission parroted? Does this actually go beyond simple
ideology or idealism to outright stupidity?
Truth #3
The values for those
fractions cited in Truth #1 are? Truth,
we know virtually nothing definitive about the full condition of America’s
public systems, because – with the exception of Dr. John Goodlad’s earlier
research spanning 22,000 public school students – our national leaderships have
not chosen to invest in that knowledge.
The quick retort from the dissenter, that is not practical for that massive
universe. Response: What’s needed is not necessarily
census, but a valid and reliable model for assessing those systems based on data from a projectable sample
of our schools, verified, then made available to our states and systems as a nationally
required DIY format for self-assessment and benchmarking.
Truth #4
America’s colleges and
universities should have been in the forefront of any public system reform,
because they have ignored primary/secondary education for a century, and
because they have the stewardship for the training of our nation’s public
school teachers. Those schools of education have failed, for lack of intellect, and dogmatic pursuit of the wrong learning
rubrics. Our colleges and
universities in turn have been too cowardly to address that higher education
failure.
The least known, but
most egregious contemporary reform act, involved the creation of common K-12 STEM
standards. That chore, undertaken
by legitimate scientists in higher education in concert with the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), was advanced with a proposed
process to make that knowledge accessible for critical thinking and problem
solving. Required, however, the hand-off
of that intelligence to the CCSSI crowd; the standards were promptly trashed
and subverted to become more disconnected fact chaff for support of
standardized testing.
Embedded in this truth,
both higher education and our public systems could have demonstrable gains from
breaking through the wall of mutual distrust or contempt that separates
them. Higher education could
materially reduce its costs of delivery if public K-12 delivered true
college-ready students (not the ersatz
version insanely advocated by Arne Duncan and the unthinking), making a four-
or even three-year degree the norm.
Truth #5
Some fraction of America’s
BOE is a disaster. Present methods
of electing those supposed to provide oversight are not uncommonly failures of
democracy. Frequently there is no
competition for joining a BOE, there is electoral manipulation by a system’s
administration to promote compliant BOE members, there is ineptitude in knowledge
of educational theory and practice, there is no requirement for their training on
education before being seated, and in too many cases service is sought for all
of the wrong reasons. Below the
radar, this may be our nation’s weakest electoral office, and until 50 states
upgrade that system for assigning local school oversight, it is a controlling roadblock to any
genuine change in our public systems.
Truth #6
An arguable material fraction of our public
systems’ superintendents has obsolete managerial education, is poorly selected by incompetent BOE, is poorly vetted, and should be re-educated or booted from public education. A fraction increasingly earns jail
time.
Perhaps west central
Ohio is an anomaly, but its schools also feature some of the most incompetent,
venal, and arrogant alleged education administrators seen in 15 years of
research. Ohio has virtually no
valid system for removal of such administrators from office unless they commit
a high order felony; even theft of resources, failure to perform,
insubordination, and violation of education open records laws are challenged as
a basis for dismissal. Just plain
educational ignorance, managerial ineptitude, despotism and power seeking, and
even sociopathic behavior barely tip the scale. Incredibly, those illustrious attributes can result in
promotion to broader superintendent responsibility, a sick case in this
area. One egregious example of system
venality is a case where three of its BOE members cannot be conceptually viewed
as having been elected, the result of system manipulation of nominations, and
three candidates for three BOE seats.
They effectively elected themselves if they voted, and voted for
themselves – school democracy in action?
In another large public system
in a sister state, its superintendent (already on the record as educationally naive and a leadership failure) is currently seed funding an attempt to enact state law
that would restrict public system transparency and reporting. Say again? Its BOE is complicit in the quest, and the community’s taxpayers, parents, and its press appear as dumb as rocks in response to this effort.
Truth #7
Ultimately the truth is
that there are good US public schools, but no way currently in place of
comprehensively identifying and classifying those successes; equivalently, the difficulty
in singling out the systems that actually should be reformed. Another truth is that the testing army
can succeed in beating on our public systems for the next decade, and they will
not measurably reform or genuinely improve learning in those systems. Because any real change in the
complexity and culture that is a public school system will have to be executed from
within the organization, and have to actively engage all of its critical human
resources. That has been borne out
by decades of sophisticated business practice, but ignorantly or deliberately
ignored by the reform horde.
Truth #8
Another truth: Present school grade bands were an
invention of the early Carnegie attempts to manipulate public education;
present school organization is a century or more old; both are arguably
obsolete in our present society and world. Virtually no effort has been made by any educational authority to
innovate these infrastructures that are confining and misdirecting real
learning.
Truth #9
The most righteous in
our present uncharacterized mass of public schools, differentiated by 50 states
with varying levels of educational oversight credibility, are likely its
teachers. An accompanying reality,
that is because they are mostly in the profession by self-selection, and rooted in empathy that makes them valid in the classroom. Simultaneously, that focus on the children they must
support, with what is regularly now formulaic to despotic school
administration, results in their retreat to their own space, rendering them
incapable of leading any real reform charge.
Truth #10
Reality is that little of the substance of the genuine challenges, debates, and information that surround present school reform manages to appear in our general press, allegedly guided by journalistic integrity to see some truth. For whatever reasons, ignorance of the detailed questions, desire to report only good news, fear of offending local systems' educators or parents, or that school learning deficits are just not as newsworthy as a good killing or scandal, our press seem incapable of informing the public of what's driving testing, VAM, and other assaults on their systems. The most blatant lie regularly allowed past the "Pinocchio Test" is, that without present standardized testing, parents would have no idea whether their children are succeeding in their schools. Our schools, our teachers, do not test any aspect of the learning process they conduct? Even the most ill-informed parent couldn't swallow that. In turn, the so-called education pages of your average newspaper report primarily the feel good propaganda put out by local schools. That there is literally a war with public schools underway is lost or unwanted intelligence to most press. Some editors go so far as total denial, or censorship, to deflect that knowledge from their readers.
Truth #11
Really inconvenient
reality: Too many of America’s
parents and taxpayers, victims of Truth #10, are products of the same school concepts being aggressively
attacked for 35 years as inadequate, and perhaps because of that education, are
blind to or incapable of critically thinking about their local schools, or too
timorous to object to local education failures or system malfeasance. A perversion of the mantra “local control:” As the costs of local public education are
increasingly diverted by our states to local funding, that shift with electorate
disinterest or evaluative deficits in assessing local system performance, further complicates any positive change.
Truth #12
Call this summative
assessment of the truth about America’s public system attacks: The 35 years of targeting public
education did not originate out of thin air; the performances overall of our
public systems in the last several decades of last century were the trigger. Schools of education, and public
systems taking their cues from that platform, adopted a series of silly liberal
motifs, ignored innovation, and evolving from managerial weakness and lack of
proper teacher education, led to systems dropping the learning ball. The build-up of private sector
resentment finally led to the proactive reform events that started long before
NCLB, factually in 1980 spearheaded by The Business Roundtable and the National
Governors Association (NGA). This
quietly stayed under our general population’s awareness until "A Nation at Risk" (ANAR) issued, formulated to panic the nation. That Commission perverted its findings to support NCLB
and a market give-away by the Bush Administration to our testing companies
already deeply rooted in control of school texts.
Our public schools with
any intelligence responded as expected to the testing onslaught; they did
whatever it took in the short run to execute a testing work-around. First teach to the tests as
quickly as possible, then in a few quality cases also create legitimate
learning. In the not so quality
cases, teach to the tests, if that came up short cheat on the testing, and if
that was inadequate manipulate who was tested to control scores. In this decade a runaway test load has
in many cases invalidated even better schools’ attempts to weave in real
learning because teachers are intimidated or the time simply doesn’t exist.
Truth #13
Lastly, it is almost
unfathomable how an army of reformers and established educators, who must have
some intellect, have managed to ignore virtually every precept of the science
of explanation and increasingly sophisticated understanding of human behavior
and neural processes forging learning, and wagered all on fraudulent and
ignorant process for forcing change.
Is this ideology overtaking every vestige of critical thought? Is it naïve belief in single cause
systems? Are these value systems
that are truly warped to self-centric beliefs that override even common sense? Is it all of these? Perhaps at the most macro level our public education
fabric is fragmenting into factions with only myopic self-interest, or into
some subtle level of national insanity?
That is really serious inconvenient truth; because there seems no pat
prescription for disrupting the present reform trajectory generating public
system fragmentation and entropy.
