Deborah Meier's Blog on Education

Children First

2011-12-01T14:13:00.001-05:00

One of the surprising attacks on unions of late is that they try to raise wages and benefits and improve their working conditions for the sake of their members.

Big secret: Just as every corporation is in the business of trying to improve their profit status and the dividends of their "members."

Some professions or special interest groups do it by forming things called Associations, who "bargain" for them by sharing information and lobbying legislators and the general public. Part PR firms and part lobbyists—plus professional improvement.

That makes sense for professions in which most employees are independent entrepreneurs—they are boss and employee rolled together. Like doctors and lawyers often are. But even "independent" plumbers create unions to set wages.

Even though airline pilots are paid well, they work for companies and thus formed unions. They worry about safety (that was, in fact, the basis of Air controller strike and the famous Reagan firing of them. They argued that their working conditions were not appropriate for insuring the safety of airline passengers, et al.)

In some small firms, it could be argued that employees are satisfied with approaching the boss him/herself to ask for a raise. Some have unilateral contracts that spell out promotion policy, salary scales, etc.

Would most employers—including families who hire servants—pay better just for the good of society? If they can find just what they want at appallingly lower wages would they voluntarily offer to pay more? On occasion, would we all pay our fair share of taxes, for that matter, on the basis of conscience? For myriad reasons, the answer to both questions is—no, or rarely.

There is absolutely nothing unworthy about joining together to demand the best we—individually or collectively—can get for ourselves, our colleagues or our fellow citizens. It’s the American way. During the long cold war we even in part defined democracy by its free trade unions. The right to freely assemble on behalf of shared interests is at the heart of democracy. I am perfectly ready to accept that we all hope the tax code will favor us. But…. we are counting on a system of government that is not prejudiced against our particular tax bracket. That’s the rub.

Does a Wall Street banker, for example, really try first to figure out whether it is good for the average bank employee before he asks for a bonus or bargains for a better severance package and pension? Do we expect him to? No! We expect that his or her Board of Directors will be worrying about its affect on the company before granting that compensation, and our government will worry about its impact on those who invest their money in the bank.

At the heart of capitalism, in fact, is precisely the idea of each of us seeking our best return on our money—the market will work out the negative side effects to the advantage of all. And, if it does not…. that there is somewhere to appeal to.

Of course that is hardly quite how it works, but it is irritating to hear its cheerleaders condemn teachers for their paltry efforts to imitate them. The search also for security works for rich and poor alike. It amazes me how very very wealthy people worry even after they have enough money to keep their grandchildren financially secure forever.

Teachers bargain—and like everyone else those they bargain with are supposed to be concerned with the larger effect. That teacher unions have so often shown concern for the effects on the students in their bargaining is a blessing. Maybe bankers do too (though I would like to see the evidence of that).

And does not everyone deserve due process right? Its not my lawyer's primary concern whether I am guilty or not, although a lawyer can decline a case if he/she dislikes it too much. Court appointed lawyers do not have that privilege, because a right to due process, to appeal decisions, is offered to innocent and guilty, rich and poor, alike. Until proven otherwise… we are all innocent in the eyes of the law.

But, in fact, unions too try to dissuade their members from some grievances, and even occasionally refuse. But, that is a double edged sword. Often the reasons for the union’s disinclination is because they are “in bed” with management or do not like the complainant for other reasons. And when union President Al Shanker claimed that he would advocate for the students if they were union members he wasn’t being crass. There are other nonprofits whose duty it is to do that.

But he did not therefore claim that teachers as a whole had no moral obligations to think about the welfare of their students. Yes, occasionally it is hard to separate the two. But it is a fact, not an opinion, that class size matters to any teacher who intends to do more than give a wonderful lecture series to his audience. Actually I sometimes prefer a huge audience to a small one when I have come to give a performance.

But if held accountable—morally if not legally—for every single member of the audience understanding what I’m saying in the way I intended them to—well, I do not pretend I can do that to an audience of much more than maybe 20—even if they each come to me in clumps of every 45 minutes for 5 hours a day. And especially if I do not just want them to be able to recite back to me what I have said, but use it in a different context.

Stuff like that seems to us teachers like “common sense” and we are not surprised when people of wealth and power choose schools with very low teacher/pupil ratios. From infancy until graduate school—they know it matters. If we use their student’s future income as our only proof, we may find that class size does not matter much. Who knows—except that we all know that social mobility being what it is—very low these days—wealthy people will do pretty well regardless and poor people will do pretty badly regardless. But, actually I suspect—just a hunch that class size will matter MORE even on such a silly outcome tool for the poor than for the rich. Yet… the rich actually have always gone to schools with low class sizes. How come? In fact the very very rich have often chosen a one-on-one ratio for their young—the grand tradition of the 19th century well-to-do: tutors, until the time came when they needed to expand their networks of peers!

In short, teachers’ self-interests can sometimes conflict with their students’—but rarely. Sometimes it is of no difference in terms of outcomes—even real ones. And most of the time I would ague that most of what teachers collectively have fought for is precisely what the parents of the rich get from expensive private schools. In a real libertarian's dream, the gap between the two would be much vaster I assume, since there would be no government to help make up the difference. Each child will get what his/her parent's can afford or what they need in order to be more equal?

Deb

p.s. I am ignoring in this pro-union defense all the other lobbying and support roles that teacher unions take on issues affecting working and poor people in general.

Out of the Fire into the Frying Pan

2011-10-04T18:10:00.003-04:00

Here's a message responding to the Obama waiver plan, as well as Senator Alexander (R) proposed bill on the same subject—NCLB. I always have an easier time critiquing them—but if I were (absurd) a senator (like Sanders), what might I propose? Ideas, welcome—proposals/ides at the edge of the possible?

I am posting this guest column this month in response to the Obama plan. I think its important to read.

–Deborah

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire

(by Alan Young)

Please read the FairTest response to the Obama-Duncan waiver deal, if you have not already.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire it appears. We have few recourses left — one being to influence legislators for a very different ESEA upon reauthorization. If we are not able to influence that in 2013, then I fear we may have fundamentally lost public education in the U.S. for the foreseeable future anyway. The waivers, as you can see, are NOT the answer and not much help. They are based on the same flawed premises of all the current market-based reform ideology. We are really at a place where we could lose democracy in this nation. No one should think that taking this "deal" (as many states, including Kentucky appear poised to do) is a fundamental improvement that helps us escape from the market-based stranglehold of the ends and means of public education. We are at a crossroads. We have to redouble our efforts regarding organizing to influence.

We have to quell the seemingly ubiquitous reach of the market-based reforms that are choking our efforts to create caring, democratic schools (which is what I thought I was coming to help grow in Louisville). We will have to use grassroots means, as well as using mainstream and alternative media at the local, state, national, and international levels, to help focus and sustain attention to the damage of corporate-led reform and the lack of positive democratic education, etc., and its effects on the education and future of our youth and nation. We have to show the power of good, caring and democratic education and authentic assessment can have for our youth. We have to have a powerful offense as well as a defense. I think we have an overwhelming amount of research on our side, but we are not getting the message out deeply, consistently, powerfully, and strategically amidst the slick, well-funded DRONE of market-based reform mantras, to make a dent against it. While we have been growing and improving our coordination among groups (like FairTest, Save Our Schools, National Council of Urban Education Associations, Forum for Education and Democracy, Rethinking Schools, Rouge Forum, Coalition for Authentic Reform in Education, Parents United for Responsible Education, within unions and academia, etc.) we must do even better. Too much is at stake. We have to find a way to be a consistent presence in national and local media, mainstream and alternative.

I say all of this because I still think that we need to convene some type of a "national strategy session(s)" — not one aiming at publicity like the worthwhile SOS effort this summer (that may be one strategy that emerges), but to organize ourselves by creating a coordinated infrastructure to influence the public and policymakers and build a backbone for a movement. We need a planning meeting with many key players committed to a democratic vision for public education to organize ourselves to fashion a plan to influence and grow a national and international movement for public education based on democratic vs. market-based reform principles. WE ARE ALL WORKING HARD AND HAVE BEEN DOING GOOD WORK. But we must not only work harder, but smarter and together. We cannot do this separately, with us working mostly in isolation. We must find the means to convene to create a comprehensive, focused plan, with strategies (grassroots organizing, policy influence, academia, media campaign, coalition building, etc.), responsibilities, and a sustaining infrastructure to have a chance against the privatized and co-opted powers that be. Surely we can find a way to get this off the ground. And yes, I know, we will need to address the tough question of just how you fund an ongoing movement without changing its essence. But if we do not even convene a meeting to discuss the possibilities, find our commonalities and strengths, of how to move forward in a coordinated, strategic way, do we really think we have a chance against the domination of corporate-led reform? Yes, we need to continue to work hard and play to people's strengths. But we also have to work smart by working better together . . . and soon.

Of course, there is no guarantee that all this will be enough or be successful. We are up against powerful forces who have been working to co-opt, privatize, and change public education fundamentally for years. But the market-based approach is based on "psychometric hocus pocus." It is a "house of cards," "a house built on sand," and a "ruse" — so there IS a way for it to be challenged by speaking truth to power in a sustained, systemic, and strategic fashion. This a a democratic and human rights movement we are a part of. We just have to get better at actualizing it! And what choice do we have? We may not succeed, but it is clear to me that if we do not try to create a viable, sustained, coordinated, and growingly impactful counter-movement bubbling up all over this country, we are all but guaranteed that public education as the cornerstone for democracy is not long lived in the U.S. anyway.

The clock is ticking, folks. This is it. If not us, who? If not now, when?

Alan Young
(now in Louisville, KY)

Schooling for Ruling

2011-08-15T18:36:00.004-04:00

This is my speech at the Save Our Schools Rally, Saturday, July 30, 2011, on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C.

One thing that is interesting is that only mad dogs, Englishmen and teachers could imagine having a rally at noon in Washington DC, in the middle of the summer. But I am willing to be a mad dog and a mad teacher.

There are some advantages to being old, and that is that you have been there before. As Diane Ravitch reminded us yesterday, even in my one limited life this is about the fifth major crisis caused by teachers. But I do think there is something special about this crisis.

We are in a crisis, but not the one they are talking about. We are in a crisis about human relationships, and a crisis about the survival of democracy. That is what we are fighting for. The word public is even in the word republic. There can’t be a republic if there is not a public, and there can’t be a democracy if there is not a republic.

The latest great idea for solving the public school problem is to abolish it.

We are fighting for saving the idea and the existence of a public school system in the belief that the only alternative we are being offered is one whose faults we know are greater still. That is a marketplace, unevenly stacked between competing consumers. That is what is being offered to replace the public school system.

There could not be a worse idea.

Oddly, some of those who are the most active in promoting this idea are the very people who created the last crisis of the free marketplace.

Isn’t that intriguing? They hope to use it to increase their power, not to increase our power. What infuriates me the most is that they do it in the name of civil rights. This last economic crisis wiped out virtually half of the wealth that existed in the Black community, built up over the last 40 years, wiped out in the housing crisis. We have done more damage to the poor, the Black and the Latino communities in this economic crisis than, believe me, I did in first grade.

Yes, this attack on public education is being used as a distraction from many of the other problems facing us, but more than a distraction it is undermining everything I have spent the last eighty years (I started a birth) struggling for. Only Russia today has a greater concentration of wealth than the United States. Think of that. Only Mexico, in the European/American world, has a higher percentage of children living in poverty. We are a little bit ahead of Mexico, and way behind the rest of our competitors.

We would not be facing any of these crises of budgets next year if those top one percent who control 25 to 30% of the our wealth paid the same taxes that you and I pay.

We are at fault for something however. We should have started this much earlier!

Every single one of us is at fault for not having done that. Thank god a few people said, “Let’s start even if it is the middle of summer, even if we do not know what we are doing, even if we won’t get the millions we would like to get.” It has to start, all of us start.

I think our joint motto is “Schooling for ruling.” We want a school system that teaches us all how to be rulers of our own nation. To do so we need a reform movement that helps democratize, not privatize, the schools we have, which are flawed. They are flawed for not being democratic enough, rather than being flawed by not be privatized enough.

We are a motley crew. Another thing I have learned with age is to stop fighting against the things I cannot change, like my big feet. I used to dream of having long straight hair that would gracefully float in the wind. And now I make the most of having a mop.

We have to make the most of who we are. We may be splintered. I am speaking on behalf of three or four different organizations, each of which is in a state of crisis itself. But that is our plus. We are used to that.

We are not going to wait for some foundation to provide us with the funds. We can unite around some common demands. We each in our own way can do the job.

I want to say one personal word. I have been extraordinarily lucky. I have had 45 to 50 years of living in classrooms and schoolhouses in America’s public urban schools. They have been the greatest experience in my life. I fear there will be fewer of you younger people who will be able to say that if we stop taking teachers seriously.

To view this speech, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgNZ7BDRk14

A Few Thoughts On National Events......

2011-07-23T13:48:00.002-04:00

Dear friends,

It’s only a week before the various events in Washington D.C. I’m hoping, mostly, to have fun and for a sufficient size to not look foolish! As you can tell, I do my best to keep my dreams in check—but ye not abandon them! Being a long-distance runner has its drawbacks—even as one gets to one’s final laps.

On my mind: how to stay in the game”—or “who am I trying to convince of what?”

I was reading a story in the NY Times about the Tea Party’s take on schooling and realized that they were not going to be allies even on some narrow agenda—as I once had assumed. Still maybe some of those attracted to their political dramatics might be.
There are aspects of their seeming paranoia that overlaps with mine!

I read some of the Murdoch, Bloomberg stuff these days and realize that in this period of history there is no overlap in our message. Maybe there occasionally is/was with Gates.

But even when the overlap is there, it’s true ONLY about the immediate future of schooling in America. Have to remind myself that schooling is only one part of the jigsaw puzzle—and I got into it sort of by accident and the fight going on today involves all the other agendas that matter to me. Poverty, after all, is best alleviated with money, jobs, power.

We’re facing an “ideological” divide between those who truly believe that the winners of vast wealth deserve to be winners and that our future lies in putting our faith in them-no questions asked, no quid pro quo.

There is no way any of us can any longer count on the winners to even pretend to be selfless—or embarrassed. Naked greed is not shameful. It’s possible to say to ones fellow citizens: “I owe you nothing, although I may out of the kindness of my heart make a contribution now and then.”. That I make in an hour what you make in a year, that I spend on my child’s education—broadly speaking--far more than you make in a lifetime is just ‘one of those things.’ That we once – faced with a mutual stake in our nation’s future—were willing to pay 90% in taxes is just plain unbelievable in retrospect—and unlikely to even trouble our minds again.” Am I being unfair to “them”?

Imagine claiming that given our “deficit” it’s the poorest and oldest who must bear the brunt. “We” aren’t willing to contribute even a 1% tax increase. None. Our way or no way.

Obviously I’m not out to convince them—although I truly think that in the long run their “way” will be a disaster even for them. But I do think that their arguments, and their “stance” has persuaded many others who are convincible. So, it makes it hard to narrow the audience.. Usually I just aim my remarks then at teachers!

The idea of a more equitable and fair republic so clearly rests—as our funding fathers (sexist and racist virtually all) agreed on moderating the extremes of poverty and wealth. They were not men who gloried in their wealth. I’m not making paragons of virtue out of them, but I’m struck by their efforts to appear “modest”. It’s an “appearance” that many presidential hopefuls have put on every four years as well—so that part of our heritage has survived. But the disguise is so thin and so phony—and mostly takes the form of appearing dumb--that it takes very little to see the greed that it covers.

Imagine how easily they have raised the stakes for educating and caring for the poor onto the backs of the poor themselves and the relatively lower middle-class teachers and public employees who work with them., while also removing resources from them to do the job. Money suddenly doesn’t count.

Imagine how easily they have witnessed the burgeoning of a vast population of imprisoned fellow Americans with ease—perfectly willing to build a vast prison system for them.

I just got finished watching a show about chimpanzees “in the wild”—which of course means in their natural habitat-versus those essentially in prison. The speaker reminded us that any animal kept in conditions of captivity is likely to soon become mentally ill.

But we’ve increasingly done that to our fellow citizens. Even our schools—which now occupy a greater and greater portion of young people’s waking lives—are more like prison, places where we grow accustomed, socialized to expect no “rights” and plenty of obedience.

We need to counter this trend every place we can; we need to praise ornery, feisty resistance—which will sometimes be wrongheaded. We need to arouse anger when its alternative is passivity and withdrawal. We need to look for hope, for alternative paradigms, and for allies—even when it seems utopian to do so.

Next week—in Washington—some of us will gather to do so. More from me afterwards.

.

Neither to Praise nor Bury

2011-05-31T20:42:00.001-04:00

[This test is from a Speech I gave at a rally at Harvard Square on may 26th in response to Arne Duncan being recognized by the Alumni Association there.
Friends. Cantabridgians, Countrymen, lend me your ears,

We have come here to neither praise Arne Duncan nor to bury him. We have come not to question his honor but to question his being honored — being honored by that time-honored institution across the street. We are told by the Harvard Alumni Association that Arnie Duncan is deserving of honor, but since they, his classmates from the class of '86 who elected him Chief Marshall, have themselves successfully raced to the top, they have an understandable interest in honoring Arne Duncan, one of their own.

Duncan has now brought that same competitive spirit that got him and his classmates into Harvard in the first place, down to the pre-university level; down to schools, kindergarten through grade 12. Everyone is urged to join the race – children, teachers, schools, school districts, even state departments of education. The rewards for success on all these levels are huge – from grades in school to monetary incentives, to financial support to more money and, eventually, status and power.

But what about those who don't get there first or perhaps don't get there at all? None of the reforms which Duncan proposes will increase the number of those who reach the top – not more tests, not charter schools, not radical school closings, not tying teachers' careers to student test results, and so on. Nor will they result in a well-educated citizenry. The well known achievement gap is getting wider, not narrower.

We stand here today as advocates for transforming schools into Institutions which can truly nourish and sustain all children in the belief that all are capable of reaching the top. We need to build on the new consensus growing in the nation to speak back to Arnie; we are here also to honor all those out there who have been speaking up and out – the Davids confronting the Goliaths with their millions and billions; We are honoring the Fair Tests with their 2-person staffs standing up to the testing/publishing Goliath.

Yet Arne Duncan says that more and better tests are what the children of this country need – and Arne is an honorable man. Can we doubt his solutions? To quote his friend and fellow basketball player, YES WE CAN!

Looking at the Truth without Flinching

2011-05-03T14:41:00.000-04:00

Dear readers

I want to look at the truth without flinching. Some days it exhausts me. My brother Paul insists there is a silver-lining. For example, we did elect a man of color as President—unthinkable in the Golden Age (1945-70). Women are breaking new barriers everyday. Gay men and women are safer than they have been for centuries.

But we are also in the midst of a bold maneuver by wealthy ideological foes to roll back as much if not all of the New Deal/Fair Deal victories: enough so that even if they lose badly two years from now it will have been worth it. We would at best have to spend fulltime just undoing damages. They are prepared, I am convinced, to lose the "independents" and more. They are probably right—so to speak. It is a strategy that in my more revolutionary socialist youth I was in favor of too. They have essentially created a new rightwing political party with a revolutionary agenda led by a wealthy vanguard. Curtailing democracy and misinformation are often essential parts of revolutionary ideology as they intend to undertake reforms that would not be possible under ordinary democratic procedures.

In short: Public schooling may not in my lifetime be preservable. Something I was sure was untouchable, at the core of our nation. I am prone to short-term thinking these days. It is hard not to at 80. While I am not sure I will live long enough to see the undoing of 80 years of progress I do not regret having been on the other side of the barricades (so to speak). But… it hurts. Of course, actually the reform era I am remembering lasted "merely" 50 years.

Was I as certain of the true path to utopia as the Right is now?

They have distracted us by a fight over school reform in the name of equity and civil rights while they have destroyed the playing field that might over time have produced such equity. For example, "Chicago's unemployment rate for African Americas is triple the rate for whites—at 21.4%, and for every dollar the employed black Chicagoan earns, an African American makes 45 cents (Don Rose, Post Racial or Racially Dead Last? The Observer, 3/22/11). The financial bust we lived through has undermined, above all, the last Americans who made it into the middle class: Black Americans.

"If New York City were a nation it's level of income concentration would rank 13th worst among 134 countries, between Chile and Honduras." Lower than Egypt. Nor do we rank high regarding social class mobility anymore. Odd, isn't it, that what we all have nostalgia for is the America we knew between the 40s and 70s—"when the upper strata did just fine, enjoying a robust 10 percent of the pot" Versus 50% today (quotes from Tom Robbins, Village Voice, 2/02/11). And I used to think 10% of the pot was an outrage.

Then I look at the larger scene and realize that our flaws are built into some unwise structures and maybe we were just plain lucky to have done as well as we have. Example: I could put together eight of the most Republican states in the nation with a population smaller than NY State—but that they have 16 senators to our 2. How did we get as far as we did?

In 20 years we have tripled the number of people behind bars at a cost of billions—mostly non-Whites for non-violent crimes; a rise not due to more crime, but a policy shift.

Despite Brown vs the Board of Education, we have more segregated schools in the North (at least) than we did in 1954! And if there ever was a reform designed to segregate schools—and not just by race—the charter school movement has the patent on niche schools for aspiring poor non-Whites—note that in NYC at least they may take a lot of the poor—but the target audience are the "reduced" not the "free" lunchers. We are seeing a flourishing new K-12 market for the smart/gifted/mostly White kids in the public sector. (Data from NYC and NYS "Separate and Unequal," from the UFT.)

No changes dependent on new habits of heart and mind can succeed over time without persuading the "changees." But with enough money you can skip slow persuasion and fairly rapidly overwhelm what were once the norms of middle class American ideology. And it can last for longer than I would like to think given the lopsided media, and the enormous cost of running for "public" office.

Had we been able and willing to take fuller advantage of the reform climate that flourished twenty or thirty years ago, with their staunch assumption that the nation's wealth should be more fairly distributed, we might have averted this counter-revolution. Had we been able to continue to grow the progressive reforms initiated in the 70s and 80s, and had we anywhere near the financial support that the new deformers have, we would have begun to see how much further schooling could take us. It is more than 20 years since the States began ramping up top-down pressure for testing and "our way – or no way" plans. The shift has been lightening swift. The absence of success—in virtually every state for virtually every one of the Rights favorite reforms—has not made a dent; and in fact such reforms now lead the way ideologically to the bashing not only of teachers, or public workers, but of all those who are not smart or skillful enough to be members of the organized rich. Thus meeting a subsidiary goal of the "deformers"—destroying public unions.

The promise that charter schools offered us at their start was quickly abandoned as they morphed into large undifferentiated chain stores, ruled not by independent-minded "moms and pops" the way we imagined, but by the most powerful billionaires on earth..

By focusing our attention on schools as the lynch-pin we have distracted attention from the forces that truly undermined both America's economy and democracy. America's economy is "recovering" while the people of America and its democracy are sinking. Fear has been restored as the foundation of a "thriving" economic system, and "security" as something only the very rich have a right to value. And leisure is again a sin—for those who cannot pass down huge wealth to their children's grandchildren. Even my friend/foe Jay Matthews (Washington Post), in decrying the lack of sufficient homework, sees leisure as a waste of time. At least for the young. Get them pedaling on the treadmill early—maybe that is a solution to the energy crisis? It is a treadmill for, at best, staying in place because a true ruling class needs leisure and self-confidence, and encouragement to play outside the one right answer out of four. Redefining "achievement" will get harder, not easier to do. But it is a must.

I am not planning to give up. I wake up in a sweat some nights thinking about officially sanctioned torture, multiple undeclared wars, and a Supreme Court that not only thinks corporations are equal to people when it comes to their civil rights, but push comes to shove would put them first, I fear. But I continue to keep my eyes on schools—it is an old-habit by now.

Someday we shall wake up. Maybe even tomorrow. I have often been wrong.

Deborah

Perennial Headlines on Education

2011-01-24T15:29:00.002-05:00

Here are some Headlines from newspapers over the years. Can you guess when they were written?

1. "Attack Mounted on Dropouts/City Sets Standards for Schools"

2. "New York's Great Reading Score Scandal"

3. "Diagnostic reading tests are being given this week to 150,000 high school students as the first step in a new program—the largest and most systematic ever. ...We intend to follow through...to overcome deficiencies."

4. "The University of California (Berkeley) found that 30 to 40 percent of entering freshmen were not proficient in English."

5. "Hope for the Blackboard Jungle: ... Every year New Yorkers' performance had been getting a little worse, until by YEAR? only 32 percent of the city's pupils [were] doing as well or better than the national average."

6. "Even Boston's 'brightest students' didn't know 'whether water expanded or contracted when it freezes.' And while 70 percent of this elite group knew that the U.S. had imposed an embargo in 1812 only five knew what 'embargo' meant."

7. "Tougher Standards in Our High. The average freshman is a year and three months behind national standards in reading."

8. "City Pupils Remain Behind ... Official Asserts the Tests Suggest Difficulty in Early Grades. Last fall 40.1 percent were reported on grade level or above ... but in March, 43 percent ... were reading at grade level or above"; and "Bleak drop out stats are raising concern."

9. "Our standard for high school graduation has slipped badly. Fifty years ago a high school diploma meant something. ... We have misled our students. ... and our nation."

10, "During the past 40 or 50 years those who are responsible for education have progressively removed from the curriculum ... the western culture which produced the modern democratic state."

The quotes above come from mainstream publications over the past 150 years. The earliest is 1845, the latest...

And the Answers:

1. 1986
2. 1980
3. 1974
4. 1898
5. 1974
6. 1845
7. 1983
8. 1979
9. 1958
10. 1941

On to the New Year

2011-01-20T02:36:00.003-05:00

Dear readers,

Mostly I stayed at home in December, and enjoyed family coming up to visit—all the grandkids (the youngest is almost 18!), kids (the youngest is 50!) and friends. But there were sad moments too. Harold Seletsky, husband of the late Alice Seletsky (who was a great CPE teacher for many many years) died over the holiday. The funeral was eye-opening as we heard from people who knew Harold in such different contexts. Their words reminded me that while he was always Harold'ish, he had an impact far greater than I realized among many people I never knew of. We matter in ways we often are unaware of.

I am getting ready for a few trips to New York City. One trip is to see Central Park East and talk with the current staff, 38 years after we first opened our doors. More on that when I return from there.

Meanwhile I am going through all the clippings I have cut out and piled on my desk—items that I wanted to write about, or at least to think more deeply about. But they keep piling up and it is hard to go back and sort them in some useful way. They are also all rather discouraging, and I am trying to remind myself that there is no telling… the future changes at unexpected times for unexpected reasons. A respectable poll notes that the American people overwhelmingly support higher taxes on the rich and no cutbacks on Social Security and Medicare. Yet, the same American people (more or less) voted overwhelmingly for candidates who hold the opposite view. Should this be good news or bad?

On my "favorite" topic—schooling—it is clear to me that the school public has had it with so-called accountability and teacher-bashing. But this same trend is also picking up steam. In part because my allies are largely invisible to the media and the supporters of the anti-union, anti-public schooling reform crowd is unbelievably visible in every form of media ever invented. And the two sides use the same titles/slogans for their organizations! Democracy figures heavily – especially by the monied crowd. And while their tactics seem obvious to me, they nevertheless have gotten away with being viewed as the upholders of equity and democracy. They are self-styled opponents of the “status quo” when it comes to public enterprises. And they have succeeded in getting the media to treat teachers, unions and other educators as reactionaries, defenders of unfairness, and as a dangerous and powerful self-interest group!!!

According to them, if it were not for our failing public schools there would be little or no achievement gap, and employment would rise alongside of better teachers, better teaching, less talk about security, seniority and the right to fairness; in short, less public interference in public schools.

This is hardly something new—the cry of our schools are failing has been heard before; almost line-by line, every few decades. But I believe this time there is a substantial chance that the bashing of public schooling and teachers will succeed in destroying public education in favor of a helter-skelter totally unaccountable privately-owned and publicly funded system of highly segregated schooling—segregated by race, ethnicity and social class. And I think it will, as usual, be a two-tier system of schooling. For the urban poor it will be designed strictly to fill the 21st century form of menial labor.

The one thing it will not do is produce schools for the poor that are aimed at creating a feisty, democratically savvy citizenry—one prepared to rethink a society that accepts the highest level of inequality (and immobility!) of all modern nations. Obama's dialogue with Joe the Plumber is seen as a terrible blunder, since he acknowledged that he thought one of government's functions was to produce a fairer distribution of life's goodies.

It is time folks like us started talking about democracy—one of whose fundamental foundational imperatives is a society in which all citizens live in some reasonable equity with all others. The gaps between the rich and poor in the USA today are far greater than their test scores, and daily getting worse. The chances for the 80% at the bottom half to be heard, to be organized, to play a public role decreases daily.

Can this be reversed?

I have just read a two short books by Isaac Asimov (!) on Roman history. It reminds me that there have been far more brutal wars of conquest, far greater genocides, and far greater inequities in the history just of Western Europe. But the rich have always been fearful of when the "others" catch on to what is happening—they seem very confident these days that they have made that impossible. I am hoping that the human drive for fairness will bubble up again. Hope is a virtue as long as one does not depend too much on it alone.

Here is to a few triumphs in 2011 for the "good guys"—that is, my side. And for continued joy and happiness to my family and friends—my fingers are crossed that they all have or get jobs, lovers, new friends and the energy and will "to keep doing what needs to be done." Day by day.

Deborah

P.S. It is an amusing thought to realize that the most powerful people in America are now philanthropists—those rich enough to give away a lot of money as long as they can control its uses. As the daughter of the leader one of NYC's biggest philanthropies, I can imagine my father's denunciation of their paternalistic practices of philanthropy. More on that later (since I found an amazing speech on just that subject that Joe Willen gave almost 50 years ago).

Keep Doing What Needs to Be Done

2010-12-03T16:26:00.004-05:00

December

Dear readers,

I had a wonderful ten day trip to the west coast, and feel—cautiously—optimistic about "surviving" this dreadful period of history. Sort of. There were so many wonderful young educators and students at the annual Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum in San Francisco that we all left determined to keep the organization alive. Despite dismal sources of external funding. Instead we decided to raise the money person by person—from the ranks of friends and supporters within and around our work itself. We hope to raise $150,000 by spring—and half by the end of January.

So, first of all. Donate!!! https://secure.groundspring.org/dn/index.php?aid=32995

Any amount will do, but… We would like a bunch of $1,000 pluses amongst the many lesser sums. Our hope is to create a new kind of reform movement based on the reformers closest to the action (and their friends), rather than on grants from Foundations for projects. We hope the latter will continue to provide interesting work for us to engage in, but that we will not have to count on such foundation funding to keep a national presence going and the have our annual Fall Forum. We even hope to do the latter on a less lavish basis so that more of our teachers, parents and students can join us.

Put aside November 11-12, 2011, in Providence, RI. We're going back to our roots for this event.

What has always been unique about the Coalition is that while it rests its work on ten common principles, its schools have tried to solve the problems principles pose in their own unique ways. There isn't ONE model. Thus schools that also belong to Expeditionary Learning, High Tech Hi and The MET (for example) fit under our umbrella, but not always vice-versa. These other organizations are largely "service" organizations, with a particular model while CES, from the start, hoped to be useful to its member schools through its regional centers, and otherwise to represent the heart of Ted Sizer's original work nationally.

We need, more than ever, to demonstrate through the work of these many networks and centers that the "ideas" behind our work represent an alternate paradigm to the "no excuses," zero tolerance, test-driven, boot-camp style of education that has lately taken the fancy of many "reformers"—especially for poor students of color.

Furthermore, while we all support public education, CES has always included among its ranks many independent schools, and later charters, as well as locally based public education. We have never taken a stand on issues of school size—although CES recommended that the odds were on the side of being small enough to personalize relationships between key participants. Ditto regarding choice. Many of our schools are geographically zoned, non-choice schools and some are schools of choice. We include rural, suburban and urban schools. While we are over-weighted in terms of demographics toward low-income students of color, some of our schools are well-to-do suburban schools. As John Dewey reminded us, what the wealthiest and wises want for their children we should demand for all children. (Obama/Duncan: take note)

We treasure this range, and also respect the reasons why many reform efforts have focused on particular disadvantaged communities whose situation is much direr than schools "in general." But Ted Sizer's work also pointed to the emptiness and poverty of intellectual life within most solidly White middle class schools. He was seeking a revolution in schooling that extended to all. In fact, some Coalition schools are not even in the USA! But they all try to get to the heart of what he believed were essential intellectual habits needed for a democratic society. Go to our site for more. http://www.essentialschools.org/

While out west I also promoted Playing for Keeps. If you haven't bought it, it's an easy and cheap read, so do it right now. Just click here. http://store.tcpress.com/0807750956.shtml

And then finally I visited friends in Portland. I saw my very dear old colleague from Bank Street and work in East Harlem—Happie Byers. She says to tell everyone "not to worry about what you should do, just do what is right there in front of you needing to be done." Neither her granddaughter, Jessie, nor I can quite get the words exactly right, but we agree that was the message—and we intend to pursue her advice.

I also saw Alan Dichter and Vivian Orlen and their two fast growing sons. Alan is full of optimism, as usual. He is not necessarily therefore to be believed. And Vivian has been the principal since September of a 1,600 student neighborhood high school—Grant High School. I spent a day there watching her work. I was envious. She is having fun and the staff and kids I met with seem intrigued and delighted!

So, I left for home on a high, and intend to try to stay up there for a little while each day. But it is not easy work. The news from New York City regarding the new Chancellor is so appalling that I have not yet gotten my hands around what it augurs. We are entering a time when The Oligarchy seems poised to take over everything. And be responsible for nothing.

Deborah

Something New Under the Sun

2010-10-14T22:44:00.003-04:00

Dear whoever,

Puzzlements. Why all this hooplah about reforms that are clearly not working? If "open education" was dismissed based on so-called science (I never did know what evidence they had), how can this new wave of reform be picking up more steam in the midst of a blitz of data proving it wrong-headed?

Assuming, as I have for some time, that the current "reform" mania around public education is the offspring of not one but at least four, five, et al currents, all alive and well in the political climate of the past few decades, can we actually stop it, or even slow it down by noting that it defies reality—and surely all sound research. Maybe not, but it is worth a try.

Yes, the facts are blithely ignored by quite intelligent and well-meaning people, but maybe a siege of facts will finally get heard. .

Examples of what is ignored:

1) If unions are the problem how come the states with no teachers unions have not shown any evidence of being even as innovative as places like NYC or Chicago or LA where teacher's unions have been generally cast as the enemies. Maybe what has united many is just the chance to eliminate one of the strongest unions left in America. Having gotten rid of most unions serving the private sector and made organizing new unions nearly impossible, there is only one strong union base left: the public sector.

In the past half century, as Richard Rothstein of EPI has documented in Income Stagnation and Inequality, the percentage of workers who are members of unions is below that of any other democratic modern nation—and less than half of what it was at its peak. Given that most public sector unions are not allowed to strike and must pay heavy financial penalties if they do, their political influence is what they have long been focused on. If they are eliminated as a source of financial help to candidates and above all of organized manpower on behalf of candidates, then corporate money—freed from all constraints by recent court decisions—can truly run public life with virtually no organized opposition.

If we confront far more inequality than at any prior time in our history, and if we truly believed all that anti-communist propaganda about the virtues of a strong middle class, free trade-unionism and free-enterprise, we would be worried about throwing out the first two and resting it all on the third. The centralization of media power in the hands of a few people of international wealth and the internationalization of much of America's private enterprise also undermines even the liberal pro-capitalist western propaganda of the 60s, 70s and 80s. Everybody but "the workers of the world" seem to have united.

It fits.

2) It also fits a climate of glorification of "individual responsibility," while in fact, as David Brooks notes in the NY Times, real personal responsibility has been thoroughly trashed. Who paid ANY price for their intentional disregard of the public good in the Wall Street and Housing boom, et al? A lady was executed in South Carolina the other day for plotting the death of her husband. But the death of our economy and the enrichment of a small group of con artists has gone almost entirely unpunished—except the punishment inflicted on the victims.

I liked David Brooks' column (Sept. 24th) on the "responsibility deficit". I might even order the Philip Howard book he recommends. Where inequity does not make it a farce, I too want government to lay its hands off. My default position is always one of free choice. But when 2% of Americans hold so much power over 98%, "free," choice is not free. Brook's notes that teachers "have to obey a steady stream of mandates that govern everything from how they treat an unruly child to the way they teach." Then we accuse them of failing to be held accountable!

I am even against involuntary schooling, in the abstract. But in the world we live in I know who will and who will not become educated better to their own self-interests. Maybe with more attention to the potential of "public" discourse we might even begin to honestly talk about what we mean by being held "accountable"—and to whom. Jamie Vollmer (in Schools Cannot Do It Alone), who comes at this from a businessman's background making ice cream, notes: "We are witnessing a campaign to annihilate the emotional and intellectual ties that bind the American people to their public schools. And it is working."

The arguments of the disparate forces that joined on behalf of the Duncan agenda—from the strict free-enterprisers to the civil rights activists-- needs to be considered. One piece of good news. Among many of those attracted by the idea of "getting tough" on our schools on behalf of the underdogs—especially children of color—there is a shift that I can detect. What we are not seeking is going back to pre-NCLB/Nation at Risk practices, and our arguments need to be clear on this point.

Puzzlements are the beginnings of wisdom, as I begin to unravel this dilemma.

Deborah

The More Tests Change......

2010-09-03T18:45:00.003-04:00

I am still sorting those boxes full of old letters, records and newspaper clippings! It is hard not to keep stopping and examining the past more carefully. In an odd way it makes me feel better to realize that "I've heard that song before." The education headlines are indeed the old familiar score (see below). Of course, it could also be discouraging. But it reinforces my determination to sustain the work based on the data that matters most: the actual life histories of the human beings schools reach. "You can't take that away from me," I remind myself. In the end we each have to make some judgments about what "counts" most to us.

Meanwhile, we keep "counting" in ways that defy quite ordinary common sense. Examples:

[Headline] City Cheats on Reading Test: "The mayor has turned the Chancellor's smashing two-year increase in the citywide test into 'the single most important achievement' of his administration." From the Village Voice. By Wayne Barrett.,

And furthermore,

"It was not surprising that the city's scores had risen dramatically… the test the city uses is designed to do that… There is some concern that the children learn the art of passing tests, according to Ida Echavarria, director of testing" reports the NY Times.

Both the above from June 1981.

Just days before the 1981 scandal broke, even astute Albert Shanker's column in the NY Times was blasting testing critics and praising NYC's high scores, noting proudly that Washington D.C. students had made similarly big gains. Yes, it requires, he said, "special efforts to overcome" poverty, but "as the recent scores in NYC and D.C. show… the greatest gains were made by minorities and the poor in some of our very toughest neighborhood schools." No further comment after the expose.

I arrived in NYC in 1967 and had been an unwitting supporter of testing as a parent, teacher and local school board member. I was even part of a cabal (led by Ann Cook and Herb Mack) to "expose" Chicago's secret test scores a few years earlier. I was, like Diane Ravitch, a believer. It took experiences that involved both my own children and those I taught in central Harlem to wake me up. The kids and their scores did not match what I knew about them, and NYC's wild fluctuations led me to became an amateur expert on standardized testing. (Go to deborahmeier.com for a list of my writings on standardized testing.)

For example, between 1974 and 1975 scores took an amazing turn: going from 33.8% reading on or above grade level to 43.3% in 1975. A year later the headline in the NY Times noted "A Slight Decline in Reading in New York Schools," although the Times noted that the decline was from 1975 which had shown "surprisingly high achievement by pupils compared with earlier years." What changed? The test publisher. So, the next year the Board of Education contracted with still another test publisher. Guess what? Next year: we all did better.

In 1979 the NY Times front page noted that "City Pupils Remain Behind in Reading." But there was improvement. Although a different test was used that year so comparisons were hard to make, said reporter Ed Fiske.

In 1984 Gene Maeroff noted that more than 50% were now reading above grade! Victory? An improvement in less than 10 years from below 40% to over 50% reading on grade level. None of my high school teaching friends saw any sign of change in their students who had so miraculously scored better during their elementary years.

A year later Joyce Purnick reported "Reading Scores Fall in City for the First Time in 5 Years" The Chancellor said "that reading experts had told him the version of the test given this year was more difficult… but suggested that the teacher shortage may also have contribute to the dip in scores." The Chancellor said "he would meet with a committee to determine… whether to use a different test entirely in the future."

And so it has gone for the 43 years I have been a NYC school test watcher. I was hardly surprised then to read the headlines a few weeks ago that informed us that in fact the latest test scores that the Mayor touted during his reelection campaign were… inaccurate. In fact, the latest data shows that we are more or less back where we started when Bloomberg became Mayor 8 years ago. The only difference this time is that the dips usually coincide with the appointment of a new Chancellor and Mayor Klein is still with us. But in the old days NYC controlled its own tests!

Dizzy from trying to follow these ups and downs?

Remember, these publicized scores went along with a lot of "deep" editorial analysis, plus hours of precious time spent in every school and district carefully dissecting each up and down by class, grade, teacher and kid. Teachers and schools were inundated with sure-fire commercial test prep programs—for doing better next year. And if you are a school teacher now, this should sound familiar.

Given that the tests used were all produced by equally reputable test makers, who promised that their tests were "normed" with expensive and extensive pre-testing, guaranteeing a high degree of reliability and reported measurement error, and built to measure the exactly same thing—how is this bizarre history possible?

When the switch was made from "norm-referenced tests" to so-called "criterion-reference" tests, I jokingly noted that this was another word for "politically" normed tests—with benchmarks set to meet a particular political agenda. But, since I suspected the old tests were also influenced by politics, criterion-referenced seemed a step forward. However, they came with another decision—to report scores simply as a 1, 2 ,3 or 4. Period. The difference between a high 3 and a low 3 being indistinguishable, and thus a move from a 3 to 4 might indicate almost no change—except in headlines.

The climax of this story? Last fall, 2009—before the Mayoral election—we witnessed the claim that another rise had taken place in the 8-year upward curve of test scores under the Mayor's reign. But—another report this summer has uncovered a new truth—actually test scores this year were back where they were before Bloomberg became Mayor 8 years ago.

I hope this explains why my expertise has convinced me not to believe data collected by any city or state or Federal DOE (domestic or international)—re attendance, drop-outs or so-called achievement. I know what goes on behind the scenes—at what hour one takes attendance matters, what constitutes a drop-out depends on how you record it. Like "achievement" they are equally subject to Campbell's Law. The data declines in value the more high stakes attached to them.

I am not anti-data—but I want the real stuff. More on that next time.

Deborah

What Price Control?

2010-07-27T21:19:00.005-04:00

Dear friends,

Organizing life is almost more time-consuming than living it! I'm overwhelmed with pieces of paper that I can't bare to throw out, but can't bare to keep. So, I need to organize them! But as I do so, more and more appear.

My daughter-in-law, Tricia, discovered a huge file full of old letters to and from me going back to my teens. The Lily Archive at Indiana University wants them but first I have to see what makes sense for them to archive. I have spent hours at it and already discovered two letters that I immediately tore up, and a few I put aside in a "to be thrown out" pile. Then there are those that have sentimental value to me but do not belong in an archive dedicated to teaching. In those days before e-mail, and before telephoning seemed cheap enough to make long long-distance calls, many of the letters are long arguments for and against particular ideas.

I had forgotten about the Antioch co-op job in an Indianapolis Day Care Center. I did it because I wanted to visit with my Uncle Marty and my cousins Jeremy and Daniel who lived there. It was clear that I was not a very responsive assistant teacher and was impatient with restless children who refused to go to sleep at nap time (when I could then read), and whose parent's came late (so I couldn't leave early). It definitely inspired me not to take any education courses when I got to the U of Chicago which I was urged to do as a married woman who might need a fall-back job.

Yet in fact becoming an accidental teacher opened up the world to me in intriguing ways. It altered the way I saw and heard, and the way I understood politics, history and human behavior! There's no subject that seemed "boring". My democratic leanings from childhood were strengthened as it became more and more obvious that 12 plus years of schooling was such a poor preparation for democracy. The strong-willed, skepticism that is essential alongside of the habit of seeing and feeling the world from different perspectives (call it empathy?) is precisely what schooling dulls rather than nurtures, what is stronger at age 5 than 15.

I reread a short speech Susan Sontag gave to Vassar graduates in 2005 and realized how strongly I identified with her admonition: "Don't allow yourself to be patronized, condescended to" and "Don't be afraid."

When I visit many "acclaimed schools" for poor children I'm struck by how hard the adults work at putting kids "in their place", at public humiliation and condescension. The way the children's families are too often talked about by school adults is unnerving. Yet school adults are also the object of a similar condescension. But the connection between the two is somehow lost.

Too many of our schools are organized around fear and thus the "solutions"/reforms are too. The details are similar to those that drive prisons. The unspoken motto from school to classroom design revolves around issues of control: what will happen if we don't control them? In the same way I was struck by how easily teachers are intimidated by the authorities who rule their lives, how much principals fear "downtown", and parents fear the teachers--and the teachers fear the parents! It isn't universal, but it is widespread. The common answer: tough love and "no excuses".

The old-fashioned eccentric teacher who locked herself and her kids in her "castle" has all but disappeared: along with the strong-willed teacher who could create an alternate environment.

What we have forgotten is that part of being a good citizen is being skillful at resisting authority, organizing "our side" on behalf of common interests. It is our faith in our superior numbers that may be called upon to trump the power of guns and money. Democracy is always a fragile ideal, probably never fully realizable. It requires strong feisty citizens with a sense of their "entitlement" and an awareness that democracy is an exercise in balanced power. Learning to exercise power is as important as learning to be cooperative, who knows there is another story worth hearing (excuses?), is prepared to compromise, see the world from many perspectives, and have a good sense of humor. Adults teach these conflicting traits to kids in part by example ideally. What may seem like petty requests to us may, for kids, be matters of honor and integrity. But not if we adults have grown accustomed to swallowing our honor.

I heard a rightwing Republican congressman (Steve King from Iowa) speaking on TV about the Second amendment. It is not, he said, about hunting or protecting ourselves individually. We need guns, he continued, so we can confront a tyrannous government. He happened to think we were on the brink of an Obama-dictatorship. He was right: in 1776 the rebels saw liberty as closely allied to our ability to challenge a dictator with an armed citizenry. He is wrong about those guns, but he is right that democracy is always endangered and has a tendency toward centralization of power in few and fewer hands that must be resisted. If not by guns, what is the alternative?

Resisting the centralization of schooling of who decides what my children are taught and where the school's moral code is spelled out requires being "armed" by the powers that come with citizenship. We need new words that distinguish the kind of heated argument that democracy arouses if its decisions matter from winner/loser arguments that are only an exercise in exerting power over others. We depend upon such arguments, we depend such compromises, we depend upon resistance. Yet there is only one public institution where these habits of heart and mind might be developed: our schools. It is a shift in our picture of the tasks of schooling. To produce a community in which the young are learning from those older and wiser about democracy will take time to invent. Such schooling habits will not spring into being overnight. We will need to develop norms that make arguments, resistance, skepticism and solidarity and a good laugh at ourselves tolerable, even cherished. It does not happen just in a course of Civics, but in all the activities of the school staff meeting, parent meetings, math classes, phys ed classes, music, and even the playground.

After I finish sorting all those letters, maybe I will have time to figure this out. Maybe soon I will be ready to prescribe how democracy is best taught. But probably not.

More another time.

Deborah

The Conversation

2010-05-15T19:21:00.002-04:00

Dear friends,

A whirlwind month visiting friends and colleagues around the country—from Maine to Denver. However, as usual I end up seeing more people who agree with me than disagree with me on the fundamentals of school reform. I had a chance in D.C. to talk to a friend of a friend who support Michelle Rhee’s reforms. I was dying to get into it, but as a guest I felt constrained and we dropped it quickly. What a shame. Was I right or wrong?

If we are to engage citizens with issues relating to educating the next generation of citizens, we have to get over our reluctance to talk about controversial issues. Maybe that is one reason we are, as Al Ramirez notes in last week Ed Week commentary, so eager to hand over our education policy to the federal government. Maybe it is not just the money they are bribing states with, but also a chance to get off the hook by appearing helpless? I think that appeals at times to teachers also. "Why blame me? I followed the recipe and if it did not produce the results you wanted, I'm not at fault."

Teachers are (alongside mothers) very prone to guilt for all the mistakes they made in the course of 6 hours, day after day. Hundreds of decisions each hour that may or may not have subtle or not so subtle ill-effects. I hated it when I made one of those "I should know better" mistakes on Friday at the end of the day. I had all weekend to stew about them, hoping I could undo it n Monday.

Maybe if the penalty was "just money," I could feel less upset about it? Fred Meier once said that he preferred playing card games for money, otherwise it seemed like he was playing for his honor.

Does cheating on the results make one feel less guilty? Probably not, but it makes one's honor a more private matter. Besides, I have discovered that people forget they fudged the data, and begin to boast about it as though it were real. Reporters, for example, boasted that the high school I was directing at the time, CPESS, had a 90% graduation rate before we graduated a single class. Did I correct them? It was so foolish that I let it pass…. Would I have tolerated such foolishness if the media had made public false bad results?

I have been following Tony Judt's memoirs in The Nation avidly. His skepticism about democracy's potential is refreshing. How can we argue about this more broadly than in the pages of The Nation? How about in school? How about a continuous curriculum that raises questions about democracy, that accepted Judt's bald statement that "democracy has always been a problem." One problem is that everyone now claims to be for it: Chinese, Burmese, South Africans, George Bush, Tea Party'ers as well as Obama and I. It is a "dangerously empty term" Judt argues. We "either re-educate" the public in some form of "public conversation or we will move toward what the ancient Greeks understood very well, which is that the closest system to democracy is popular authoritarianism." Dare we risk such a conversation in our schools?

Deborah

Free Market Schooling

2010-04-06T20:58:00.001-04:00

"This is a perilous moment. The individualist, greed-driven free-market ideology that both our major parties have pursued is at odds with what most Americans really care about....Working families and poor communities need and deserve help because the free market has failed to generate shared prosperity — its famous unseen hand has become a closed fist." Bill Moyers and Michael Winship, and I, agree. But the public seems just as suspicious—if not more so—about public institutions as the private ones. Thus the relative lack of alarm over the extraordinary shift in "ownership" of our public schools. We are witnessing more federal intervention at virtually all levels of schooling, more power in the hands of private wealth, and more "market-driven" decisions — at the same time! And there is almost no well-funded opposition, except for teacher unions who are then villainized as being anti-reform, self-interested, too protective of their bad apples.

What epitomizes the latest "true reform" is that it cuts off both teacher professional and parent/family judgment about what goes on in publicly-financed schools. Above all in urban areas, but overtime perhaps to rural and suburban communities too.

Even vouchers are creeping back; but there is no need for vouchers if the same interests and ideology can be served without any clear legislative decision to abandon "schooling as we know it." It has been slipped in—first as an experiment to shake off old habits. A charter here and there with a new idea that could appeal across geographic boundaries would open up our thinking, courage real innovation—influencing all schools. All it needs is: a friendly Mayor, a friendly President and weakened unions.

Let many flowers bloom, managed largely by private companies, including school chains serving as many pupils as the average school system does now, working under a broad state-wide and federal oversight and boards/trustees selected by the school's "founders." Caps? None, they argue. Only proponents of the current "drop-out factories" would want to slow this replacement down, charter fans say.

Meanwhile let there be a national grade-by-grade definition of what young people should know and in what sequence, and back it up with a nation-wide standardized system of testing. (Hardly what the Constitution had in mind.)

The big difference? Everyone studies the same things. What is at stake is who chooses the school's leadership, its staff, pedagogy, textbooks, sequence, and rules of operation. If money is saved that money becomes profit. Private individuals/groups—some for profit and some not-for-profit—some more inclined to listen to their teachers and families, some less so will run the show. But whether they listen is up to them.

At a time when all the usual and very expert regulatory bodies failed to supervise far fewer banks and investment houses, why assume that regulators can protect hundreds of thousands of schools that serve, above all, our least advantaged students. It is an idea that no one has ever proposed openly, each step along the way having been viewed as just offering slightly more flexibility, openness, opportunity, etc.

And I fell for it myself. Instead of getting the entrepreneurship to open up schools with progressive ideal such as mine, or even those with other particular visions we are getting versions of the old story—vocationalism disguised as academics or academics disguised as vocationalism — organized so that they do not need highly expert employees.

Note, that in the "charter world" this latter mainstream model now has a name — "the no excuses" schools. Three-strikes you're out, zero tolerance. Shape up or ship out.

We will clearly still need a public sector for the square pegs—those kids who charters kick out—plus, perhaps, public schools for the highly selective winners, those who do not 'need' silent hallways and lunch periods, "no excuses policies", or rote learning pedagogies focused narrowly on reading, writing and arithmetic. The new privately managed charter schools would serve the large majority of 'at risk' children with a regimented 19th century education iin the name of closing the test-score gap.

In the Harvard course on charters that I attended recently all this came to me as though I had not noticed it before. It seemed starker and clearer. "Those children" need it, "they" are not like "my" or "our" children. I had not as bluntly confronted this language since I began teaching in 1962 when I heard it from both left-wing and traditional conservative teachers. It was the original reason I started Cental Park East and then CPESS in East Harlem—to counter that claim. To show that what was needed was a more intensified progressive education, not a more intensified reform school model. And then to my surprise we hit a moment in history when the idea spread like wild-fire. In 1985, when Ted Sizer's book appeared, there were literally thousands of schools interested across the country. Not, mind you, "systems," but principals, teachers and families who wanted or had to stay in the pubic system but wanted something very different. Within less than a dozen years the Coalition itself multiplied a hundred fold, and several other like-minded nation-wide alliances began on a scale similar to the Coalition, alongside smaller geographic coalitions in regions and states based on similar progressive views.

Following Annenberg's shot in the arm, (we had relatively little support from foundations), increasingly impatient with our snails pace. (In fact, Ted Sizer's original idea was to model only 15 schools over a decade)—to prove it was not utopian. It was the foundations who insisted they would only support the work if we went whole hog.

Test scores were okay—but the score gap remained fairly stable, and the "bureaucrats" with private money had had "enough." The bureaucrats with public money never bought in, except on the far edges: District 4 in NYC, some integrated sections of a few other districts, sprinklings of public "pilots" in Boston and Chicago, and in a few states like Minnesota and Wisconsin.

But our short-lived spree did not outlast our generation; the new crew of reformers coming from elite universities and colleges, backed by connections to the truly rich, and eager to make their mark in history bought into another utopian grand scheme. And as I listened to the young man who was on the platform with me I saw in him the same enthusiasm and care that I had had—for a very different idea. He took it for granted that the kind of schooling that had worked for him could not work for the kids he was determined to educate well. And by educate well, he, at least, had the same aspirations that I did. Feisty, well-informed and skilled grownups who would defend and extend democracy and equality to our beloved country and planet.

I left both discouraged and elated. If he was right, I would be delighted. If he was wrong, we would "just" have to wait until the new wave of reformers discovered it. Meanwhile, we "just" needed to stay alive until the period of bottom-up reform came around again. Meanwhile, what both sides needed was to thoughtfully explore how we spread sufficient mutual respect and trust to learn from—not convert—each other. That is why I like democracy—it rests, in the end, on persuasion not mandates

Deborah

http://deborahmeier.com

Small Schools and Choice Revisited

2010-03-17T17:46:00.001-04:00

Dear friends,

Sigh! It’s not the first time I’ve noted how even my good ideas can be “corrupted” for quite different purposes than intended. It’s the story of many of the political ideals I still hold to. Small schools were a tool, not an end. So was the idea of requiring a super-majority in the Senate a way to prevent the majority from railroading the minority. So too, I guess, is democracy itself. We can all bemoan it at times.

A colleague from whom I learnt so much died recently, Seymour Sarason. He always thought I was too naïve, but he never tried to discourage me. I will miss his encouragement.

Two of my favorite ideas: small schools and choice – have become bywords of reform, backed by millions and millions of dollars and the power of the city, state and federal government. As “the grandmother” (or so I am often introduced) of the small schools movement, I should be overjoyed. As the author of an article in The Nation magazine in 1991 called Choice Can Save Public Education, why then aren’t I feeling proud? I was right, and wrong. Here’s my account.

My mistake was forgetting a puzzling fact. (In fact I gloated about it, as evidence that the twain can meet.) These two ideas became popular at a moment when the nation was moving to the right, not the left and when the idea that “the free market place” was the over-riding safeguard of our liberties held sway. I was right to take advantage of every crack that came along to do better for kids, and enjoy my work as well. But, as Sarason said, I was atypically (I claim) naïve. All in all, I don’t regret it. The “small-schoolers” made a difference, and still do, in the lives of many children and restored hope to many adults. That cannot be taken away. But…

My slogan in the 80s and 90s was not just small schools, not just schools of choice, but self-governing small schools of choice, democratic schools where most decisions were made at the place that family, teachers and students met. (Exceptions: issues pertaining to civil rights, health and financial integrity). Richard Rothstein in The Way Things Were reminds us that change has long been needed. We did not face a new educational crisis but just one more educational “opportunity” to rethink practices that have not served us well for a century and more. Change of the magnitude that I believed desirable (leave out necessary—who knows about that?) could not be mandated, I argued. They could not be brought to scale by either the logic of argument or the power of the State. A free people must freely change its mind. We could nudge, and we could set the odds in favor, but we cannot and should not override the opposition through mandates.

I believed, in hindsight maybe foolishly, that smallness was perhaps something however that could be mandated. That’s a fact—I did! Because, I argued, only in a small community of adults could the conversation that was needed take place; only face-to-face could teachers and parents explore their common goals, restore trust. To expect a weekend retreat in which 100 teachers and who knows how many parents will usefully come up with a mission or vision was absurd. Only in a small community could the trust needed be built, so that parents and teachers might ‘experiment” together on the young. . This isn’t to make guinea pigs out of the children—but to allow local committees to use what they know about their own children and students. But, as I used to remind parents, neither were their first born, and there’s some evidence that they turn out “best.” But, to make sure, I also urged, sufficient choice should exist so that all families would not need blind trust. Unfamiliar practices would expand as rapidly as the demand for them grew. (I too, am a free-marketer on many issues.)

I argued that only a small community could focus on the multitude of academic and social needs of the young while also educating them for democracy. Only a small community could dare take leaps—of faith. The balance of forces required frequent revision, we had to stop often to be sure we weren’t leaving some behind in our adult enthusiasms. We also needed external review to help us see what we otherwise might overlook, to restore needed balance. We said we’d do X, are we doing it? We said it would help us do Y, is it?

Starting with many short-lived storefront and freedom schools in the 60s, the exploration grew. Teacher centers blossomed around New York City, for example, run and operated by local colleges full of teacher-talk and experimenting together. Out of these grew programs on with physical sites, such as Lillian Weber’s Workshop Center at City College. We created small communities of teachers within existing schools which had permission to work together around a common corridor, across grade levels, with the support of their principals and assistance from the Workshop Center. (I was an advisor to such sites.).

Out of such programs grew essentially semi-“independent” public schools. Central Park East in East Harlem was one of a great many that came into being in the 70s under the leadership of Anthony Alvarado and Sy Fliegel. (Most were not recognized as real schools for 20 years, and were therefore led by teacher-directors not official principals.) Many teachers got excited at the idea that they could work differently without abandoning the public sector, that public did not have to mean mediocre and lockstep. As the idea took off, it seemed as though the genii could never be stuffed back into the bottle.

We struggled with the idea of how voluntarism would work. We argued about whether such schools could be selective without doing harm to the idea itself, and to the children not selected. We argued about whether the choice was the school’s or the families’? We argued about how far we ought to be able to stray with public money. We proposed, in the early 90s, that we initiate (with Annenberg monies) a large-scale pilot of approximately 50,000 students with a 5-year mission to bring these ideas to scale, while Columbia University and New York University studied our work and an external body of critical friends and experts kept close touch with what was happening (responsible in the end to the Chancellor and the School Board.) The local teacher’s union waived virtually all the contract provisions to further this experiment, as did our then chancellor and the State Superintendent and our local NYC Board. We had everything ready to go, including financial support . And then…a new chancellor and a new state commissioner put an end to it. They did not see themselves as coming to office while their empire was taken apart—even gradually.

Although not followed through in New York, the ideas of small schools and choice was picked up by others. My joy that many a Big Business was also excited by our ideas gave me hope. My paranoiac antenna was overcome by the unlikely friendships the idea seemed to create. When charter schools began I saw them as an offshoot of our ideas. In fact one of the early high schools to break into smaller units was in Philadelphia and they called themselves charters. (See work by Michelle Fine.)

I never had illusions about the voucher idea—of free-market private schools paid for with public funds—which were being turned down in state after state. Charters, I assumed, would be thoroughly public, as in the East Harlem and Annenberg proposal. An example was Ted Sizer’s Parker School in Massachusetts, where for once he could try his ideas out as he had dreamed of them (modified by those who joined him). Friends all over the country got excited and I urged them on. Groups of teachers or parents with their own different ideas and willing to exploit themselves to make them work cropped up in many unlikely places. But so did similar public schools—in Boston, Chicago, California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and on and on. I went on to Boston where a smaller scale model of our Annenberg proposal got under way—the Pilot School network.

Well, you all know what happened. Diane Ravitch. in her new book the Death and Life of the Great American School System. has laid it out pretty thoroughly, as have others. Charters became the favorite new toy of businesses and businessmen. Some hoped to make a profit off it, some hoped to find fame and glory, some just liked to be part of the latest fad. They saw testing as a way to relatively cheaply control their quality, and ward off regulators and monitors. They saw teachers and parents as buyers/clients/wage earners. The model was business—and maybe not the best of business at that, as some business reformers warned them.

The crisis talk, our economic shakiness all seemed a perfect backdrop for scaring people into forgetting about our age-old experiment in public education, an experiment that has been adopted throughout most of the world, above all in democracies.

We have installed new bureaucracies, we have recreated too many chain store schools. Decisions were made further and further from school folks. The charter schools themselves also grew larger to accommodate efficiency. In several cities the mayors decided to use them to unload their own “accountability” for public education and replace it with privately managed corporations. Maybe deliberately, maybe not. I’m hoping for the latter, and that they too will take a careful look at what they have created before we cross the line of—well I was going to say “no-return”, but actually history doesn’t end and if democracy remains a good idea, we will grow truly public schools again. And again.

If this privatization fails in the ways I suspect it will, it will have destroyed our public system; and it may be hard to put humpty-dumpty back again. That’s why we need to work very hard to retain the best examples of public education before even the memory of what it meant for us all to have a stake in each other’s children.

Deborah

P.S. Mike & Susan Klonskly lay out an extended treatment of this issue in their book Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society

Learning: What and How?

2010-02-01T17:40:00.001-05:00

Dear friends,

On coincidences? Speaking of Richard Elmore—as I was in the last letter I wrote you. Right after writing that blog, I came across a booklet he wrote for the Albert Shanker Institute in 2002. Almost ancient history. Title: The Imperative: Investment in Human Skill and Knowledge. It reminds me why I have always admired him—and had caveats.

His argument in short is that we need to recognize that performance-based accountability, if it is to do what it was intended to do, ”requires a strategy for investing in the knowledge and skill of educators.”

His definition of “what it was intended to do” is not bad: “improve the quality of educational experience for all students and the performance of schools.” But? To what end? How would one measure “the quality” of an experience or a school? Current tests surely do not do that job. Elmore slips over this issue too quickly. I think that accounts for where we begin to part company.

If teaching is done right, he says, students will learn what has been taught. I hope not! Given how many parents, teachers and other “instructors”(including TV, et al) are likely to be teaching/preaching stuff that is plain untrue, or partially inaccurate, or accurate only in part, the rest “we’ll cover later.” (Think of how what we say to children is intentionally not quite true, but they will get the unvarnished version when they are older!)

The “misunderstandings” that occur between the best teachers and the best students (and mostly we have to contend with less than the “best” of either) are where all the fun of learning actually takes place. This begins at birth. Humans are not only born curious, but they are born with a capacity for rather rigorous mechanism for correcting mistakes. They build and rebuild their “theory” of the world based on trial and error—over and over, with modifications and side paths, and adjustments and sometimes huge revisions! Sometimes this process stops—in face of too much uncertainty or not enough—and we fixate, obsessively, on a theory that never gets revised even when faced with its “obvious” contradictions.

I apologize for getting so “up in the air” with this, but I’ve more and more come to believe that this assumption—which academics call constructivism—that I hold about learning is much more controversial than I wish it were. Not only do some disagree with me about what “being human” is like, but insofar as they agree, they think it is one of those qualities that serves us poorly, a bad habit that gets us into trouble. There are those who think that schooling is needed precisely to eliminate that quality of infantile investment in our own ideas, our resistance at just doing or believing what we are told. Yes, we may have to give some of that egotism up, but we need also to hold onto it as we learn also to conform a bit more. We have to watch out for what the trade-offs are—or the adults in our life have to watch out that we do not give up too much.

If we think that the central core of what publicly supported education is about is passing on the best and wisest of our traditions, but simultaneously questioning and revising them, we have a problem with schools as they are. E.g. Which traditions, and whose traditions? There are many. Personally, I expect schools in the USA to pass on the fragile claim that democracy, for all its faults, is the best form of governance. Even as I know too much about how well or poorly it often (mostly?) works! How to pass on the habits and knowledge that will solidify such a claim is a risky business.

But if that is a central purpose, then we need to beware of the idea that what is taught (especially in school) can be measured by whether the learner agrees with what he/she has been taught.

Yes, it is true that you cannot learn anything new if you have no facts and knowledge to build on. But the accuracy of that knowledge is always contentious—from birth on. Sometimes it seems like ”we all know,” “obviously” and “of course.” How could we finish a sentence if we didn’t accept the idea that there is a consensus on most things. But what do we do when we realize there is not? Those phrases—“we all know” and “obviously” and “of course”—often stop us from revisiting past learning. This is one reason children’s rate of learning so far surpasses that of their elders—there is no shame yet about ignorance. It may be why Richard Elmore’s colleagues turned down his idea of revisiting old beliefs.

Finding the balance between accepted facts and truths and questioning them is an art, and a bit of a science—i.e. informed trial and error. But the problem is that we are easily intimidated from publicly exposing our possible ignorance in ways little children are not. This leads in turn to testing them out, often just in our heads. Or sometimes it means we settle, at least for now, on those that feel most comfortable or more polite. Most damaging of all is when we avoid even any inner doubts or questionings. In short, we learn to become non-learners. Except, ah yes, there are always exceptions. Such as when we are fired up by powerful charismatic ideas, people or “movements” which upset our comfortable old theories. At least temporarily. The joy that occurs when a new ideas clicks in place is sometimes even a signal: be cautious. “Conversions”—when we wholesale drop old ideas for new ones, or sometimes just graft one set of ideas onto another—need revisiting from time to time too

The two authors, of many, that I return to when trying to make sense of this are David Hawkins and Jean Piaget. But my most powerful teacher of all is observing with care children’s experiences in schools and elsewhere, and finding the parallels in my own life.. Then I fall back to a favorite quotation from Eugene V. Debs. “I would not lead you to the promised land even if I could. Because if I could lead you into the promised land, others could lead you back again.” How can we embrace solidarity but not group-think?

When Elmore argued for revisiting—as educators—our old ideas, what caught my eye was his unusual willingness to re-explore—not just changing his mind. I live so much within a world that disagrees with me that sometimes I over-cling to that subset of people and institutions that are on my wave length. Finding the right balance is hard for me.

I’m hoping to use this blog (unlike Bridging Differences with Ravitch) to explore what I believe.

So challenge me (if you keep reading these letters).

Deborah

I used to, but now...?

2010-01-05T22:36:00.003-05:00

Dear friends,

My working table is a mess—piles upon piles of clippings and interesting articles to comment on. I watched a TV show today about pathological “hoarders.” I think that I am one—all the stuff I know I’ll want to use someday in the future.

When I started blogging for Education Week with Diane Ravitch I thought, ah hah—at last. I'll have plenty of time and space to say everything. But oddly enough it hasn’t had that effect at all. Everything connects with something else and eventually the pile is so huge I can't use any of it. What's such fun about education as a topic is that everything leads to so many connections.

In a way, this reminds me of the way a good curriculum develops. Almost any starting point can lead on to so many connections, and by the time we have to call it quits we’ve barely scratched the surface. It turns out that virtually everything is interesting, and that most interesting things find a way of reminding us of other interesting things, that in turn influence how we think...and so on.

Of course, one must make decisions in life as in the classroom. Which means we are all the time acting on our latest and best hunches, and hoping that in the process we’ll uncover new possibilities for when we come back to the same questions again.

This was precisely the basis of our curriculum design at Mission Hill. We designated some broad topics—three per year—and then jumped into them. Every four years we more or less came back to the same questions—when we were all four years older and wiser. In this spirit I recently reread several pieces I wrote for Dissent magazine in the 60s. Then I began to reread the short essays I sent home to parents after Central Park East started in the 70s. What changes could I detect over these 40-50 years?

Why was I so much more optimistic back then? When I think about how discouraging those years were--Vietnam, the bankruptcy in NYC, etc--why do I feel things may be worse now? Many of the issues I now wring my hands over were surely worrisome then too. Like standardized testing. Like top-down decision making, passive elementary school teachers, the shortcomings of the UFT (my union) and the patronizing put-downs I received from folks when they discovered I was an early childhood teacher.

So when I saw Harvard professor Richard Elmore’s essay in the Harvard Education Letter (Jan/Feb 2010) entitled “I Used to Think…and Now I Think” I decided it was time for me to do the same. The most enlightening/amusing point in Elmore's essay came early: how the idea of consciously revisiting one's old views was so thoroughly rejected by his colleagues. I'd like to have been a fly on the wall.

Says Elmore:
1. I used to think that policy was the solution. And now I think that policy is the problem.

2. I used to think that people’s beliefs determined their practices. And now I think that people’s practices determine their beliefs.

3. I used to think that public institutions embodied the collective values of society. And now I think that they embody the interests of the people who work in them.

I found myself agreeing with many of his thoughts as he developed them on all three topics. But least of all about #3. So I’ll start my own list with his three. In my next letter you’ll get my "I used to...and now" thoughts. But a few hints.

Grandiose policies avoid the realities of practice. But they are both less and more important than I once thought. The practices/beliefs conundrum intrigues me. When Elmore quotes poet Yeats, who said he increasingly saw the world “with a cold eye and a hot heart” I took a deep sigh... Me too. But unlike Elmore, my heart still goes out to all the constituents of our schools—children, their families, and their teachers. I'm less worried than he appears to be about some kinds of "self interest." I still believe that we can develop practices and beliefs that bring together the self-interests of at least those most directly affected by schooling. The connecting link between community, family, teacher and child does not seem unbridgeable. I still believe in our potentially shared interest in…well, almost anything and everything, if we believe ourselves powerful enough to have an impact. And finally, I still have a tendency to worry when a "Crisis" is declared and quick solutions demanded. Democracy works best when we have the leisure to do some hard thinking together.

More later….

Mayoral Control and Democratic Schooling

2009-12-27T10:24:00.001-05:00

In an interview with the Journal-Sentinel published the day prior to the meeting, Secretary of Education Duncan noted:

“Where the challenges are so large, you need all hands on deck . The best way I can think to get everyone rowing in the same direction is from leadership at the top, and that comes from the mayor.”

Leadership or control? Duncan means control.

It is a funny conundrum. We invented (a century and a half ago) universal public education on the grounds that it was a prerequisite for democracy. But democracy is an idea we have such little faith in that we fear allowing control over schools to lie in the hands of their own constituents, or any combination of such constituents. I refer here mostly to parents and teachers, and the immediate community served by the school, and possibly even its students. But friends of mine often agree with Duncan on the grounds either that, on one hand, it is too dangerous (they might sneak in school prayers, creationism and, of course, racism), and on the other hand they would not dare take the kind of radical steps necessary for the sake of the children or our nation’s economy. In essence the new reformers argue that “politics” (local, close to the site) is bad for schools, while Mayoral and Federal control are good.

Every authoritarian movement or leader has for centuries made more or less the same arguments: that “the people” will misuse their power or that the people are too timid or selfish to take the necessary revolutionary measures that are in their interests. “We,” the enlightened, must do it for them.

Can schools, in which even well-educated professionals are seen as too risky to trust, a likely place to inculcate respect for democracy? Of course, democracy is filled with trade-offs that make it hard to always help us arrive at the best decisions. There are places where I too have favored federal, rather than local control. For instance, I supported the kind of authoritarian directives from the Supreme Court that, in the name of democracy, outlawed school segregation. (Of course, the limits of even such righteous power is well noted in the limited impact that directive had.) And I regret the Supreme Court’s subsequent decisions against implementing such policy through affirmative action or quotas. Where they went wrong perhaps was in trying to micro-manage it? But both were essentially “political” decisions.

Nor, in the name of accountability, am I against the State’s role in the collecting of data that exposes the impact of schools and society on different races, ethnicities and economic substrata. Information is a form of power needed by “locals.”

The idea that we can decide virtually all of the important decisions made within a school through authoritarian means and then insist that the institution’s role is to promote democratic thinking is just plain stupid, absurd and, in fact, an oxymoron. To put this on a somewhat more trivial level, it reminds me of the experience kids have trying to invent board games. They have great ideas. They love doing it. But it’s only in actually playing the game that one discovers whether it works. Ditto for democracy. Churchill’s quote in defense of democracy—that it’s a thoroughly absurd idea “except for when one considers the alternatives,” is one I keep in mind morning, noon and night.

If we are to support democracy as well as invent better forms of it—appropriate revisions of the game—we need a citizenry that understands the game better. Why ever did we invent a rule that allows 40% to veto 60%? Why can nine men (or women) appointed in times past, outlaw legislation that 60% now support? Why do some individual citizens votes on national matters count 5, 10 or 100 times more than other citizens? Why do experts on the economy not get more votes on economic decisions than outright ignoramuses? Bah humbug to democracy if such absurdities define it….or, is it possible that I too at times count on such roadblocks to common sense? There may be good reasons—though debatable ones—for each of these. But students and their teachers need to be exposed to such arguments, not only through the written word but also through experience.

A democratic citizenry needs habits – of mind and heart – that hold them back from the momentary appeal of authoritarian measures. Probably not even democracy can guarantee that we make wise decisions about democracy. But both institutional and personal habits can provide us the time to correct and revise our passions of the moment. It is in crises that our habits are most tested. Skepticism, which I much value, is not the same as “the habit of distrust.” In fact, as a habit, I rather like the default position of trust. It is a habit that helps smooth the way for democracy. But—and this is a big but—we need to counterbalance the habit of trust with the habits of skepticism. We need to balance trust with an acknowledgment that there are good reasons to distrust.

The same goes for “civility” of manner and mutual respect and tolerance. These are all three good habits. But….. They are dangerous without a critical second opinion, the habits of indignation, the willingness to act even in face of uncertainty, the habits associated with solidarity and empathy.

In short—a good education requires us to continually rethink our own habits, as we also honor them, to take note of the consequences and accept responsibility for them. And on and on. Will schools that engage in this, while also engaging in teaching kids specific skills and academic knowledge, survive? Indeed, if they can’t, neither will democracy writ large. At least, for starters, we ought to try it out in the ways we adults interact and implement decisions in our schools. To do so, we need to leave more power inside the schools.

Finally, there’s a interesting auxiliary reason: kids are not comfortable in the presence of powerless “wimpy” adults. And adults who are always having to say, “I didn't decide that, so don't blame me” are actively promoting a mindset which runs in direct conflict with the environment best suited to learning. It also substantially undercuts the desire of the young to grow up (and be powerful), and their respect for their teachers.

This column is an exploration of a subject of increasing interest to me. Comment below or send me an email.

Deborah.

December 2009

What’s Wrong with Our Schools?

2009-06-16T22:36:00.000-04:00

April 2009

Recently Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post, in his article “How Bill Gates Would Repair Our Schools” (Monday, March 30, 2009) explains the answer is: replicate KIPP and more Charters. The trouble is simple, the article explains

Institutions stand in the way. School boards resist the expansion of charter schools. Teachers unions resist measuring and rewarding effectiveness. In fact, Gates said, evidence shows no connection between teaching quality and most of the measures used in contracts to determine pay. Seniority, holding a master's degree or teacher's certification, and even, below 10th grade, having deep knowledge of a subject -- these all are mostly irrelevant.

The absence of a correlation between good teaching and the teacher’s own education, certification, or deep knowledge appears pretty astounding. Even Teach for America lays its claim to fame, for example, on the value of an Ivy League diploma.

What is intriguing is that neither Gates nor Hiatt stop to wonder if the absence of correlation might indict the tool for measuring the impact of teaching: standardized test scores.

If I reported on studies showing something similar in the field of health—that seeing a credentialed doctor didn’t prove any more successful than consulting the man on the street—I would face somewhat more skepticism, I suspect. What kind of measuring rod could I be using, would be the first question. Ditto if I argued that you do not apparently need to know how to play an instrument well to teach it well, you might want to know how I defined “well,” and how I measured it.

But lo and behold, by some measure that passes the sniff test for Gates and company, teachers don’t have to be well-educated people to pass “it” on to kids. He may be right: if tests are “it.” Then what is needed, apparently, are trained drill sergeants that explicitly teach testing skills. When I started teaching this was something that the test companies explicitly called cheating! (Sort of akin to my artificially raising the temperature on the thermometer as a child when I wanted to stay home from school.)

Psychometrics—as a discipline—was built around a different paradigm: prepping, they argued, literally invalidated the results. (On LSATs, Lani Guinier pointed out that there is reverse correlation between high scores and lawyer’s performance of public service. Which do we value more?)

In the new aggressive drive for higher scores—by any means--have we lost something more important?

Imagine a concern over the driving skills of Americans which focused on the low scores on the standardized bubble-in portion of driving tests. We might conclude that current driving instruction— with it’s focus on the road test—was having no impact on test scores. Shock and surprise. We might then decide that we were wasting money on driving instruction. How about intensive prepping for the test and less driving of the car? Lo and behold neither class size, driving experience or expensive simulations seemed to matter when it came to the paper-and-pencil driving test. Maybe those who preferred to take the old-fashioned driving road test could go to expensive private schools for it. In the name of equity though the cheaper bubble-in test would do as well.

It wouldn’t take long before some smart sociologist noted that we were ignoring the critical measure: road accidents. In fact, road accidents and driving test scores were having a decreasing correlation. (And alas rich people couldn’t escape being victims of bad drivers too.)

Unfortunately there is no real life definitions of being “well-educated.” In education we have literally mistaken the test for the real-world measure, and then cut off opportunities for those who didn’t perform well on the test. There is no road experience to fall back on. In fact real experiences with the subject under study is less and less fashionable.

If we judged musicians on the basis of paper-and-pencil simulations, we wouldn’t need musicians to train future musicians either. That would make school music programs easier. Think how much we could save if we didn’t even need instruments to play on, and could teach music testing skills in a large lecture hall, or via distance learning programs.

Is there an alternative? Yes. Of course. But it would take teaching intellectual, social and moral habits with the same seriousness as we teach soccer, tennis or the piano—when we want excellence. No other field of endeavor except K-12 education has such absurd ratios of “supervisors/teachers” to pupils, has such little respect for “hands-on” expertise, or cares so little about the side effect of its instruction. We haven’t even stopped “doing” reform for a few hours to ask what the purpose of schooling is, above and beyond incarcerating youth for 12 years and then sorting them out at the end.

Shame on you, Mr. Gates.

Shame on you Mr. Hiatt for assuming that Bill Gates is an expert on education.

–Deborah

© 2009 Deborah Meier

Obama's Secretary of Education

2008-11-12T20:29:00.007-05:00

Obama’s victory is an amazing if belated triumph. It’s been a long time since we’ve had someone who is as thoughtful, reflective, responsible, and knowledgeable in the presidency of any color or party. Obama is an intellectual in the best sense of that word.

And, one of the ideas Obama’s been playing with just so happens to be one I too am fascinated by. How do top-down and bottom-up join together to make policy, not just run campaigns.

It’s pleasing to see the names of people like Diane Ravitch and Linda Darling –Hammond come up as possible Secretarys of Education. They do differ on many issues but they are open, experienced, and independently thinking leaders who understand the needed tension amongst local, state and federal authoritie. When I read that the list might include Joel Klein of NYC and others like him beholden to top down reform and to simple minded test accountability, I shudder.

The so-called New York miracle is as phony as the Houston, Texas miracle that ushered Rod Paige in. We cannot afford a repeat of this. NYC’s “reform” has been at best a waste of precious years, and at worst a disaster. Test scores have not risen, nor have graduation rates, nor has the content of education (which has merely been narrowed to test prep), nor the culture and climate of our schools, nor the achievement gap, meanwhile economic and racial segregation have grown apace. We’ve got hard data to demonstrate all of this.

The folks Joel Klein hangs around with are not leaders in the field of schooling, education, or youth building but precisely the folks who gave us our current fiscal crisis. Their knowledge of accountability, even in business, is shabby at best. There is very little first-hand knowledge of the public schools that educate the vast majority of our children among his associates and those he hires to make big decisions. The voices of parents, teachers and principals have been drowned out by a system that makes clear they do not know or care what “they” think.

If we are to capitalize on this time of hope, we most raise our voices as to the need of an education leader who understands and is willing to rectify the imbalance between “we the people” and those who want to tell the people what to do.

There are lots of steps for folks to take now. Signing petitions (see below) is only one; and that's if you agree with me! Writing influential people you know in your own voice is another. But the choice of key people in D.C. is on the agenda right now because we're in transition time and people do count. The real message of Obama's victory is not to wait for Obama or anyone else to tell us when and what to act on, but, to organize where we are on issues that count in our own terrain.

http://www.petitiononline.com/campd227/petition.html

Best, Deb

Mayoral Control

2008-10-24T22:15:00.000-04:00

October 2008

The following column is based on my remarks from a recent New York State Legislative Hearing on continued Mayoral control of schooling in NYC.

I sometimes wonder: What would have happened if the Governor or State Legislature had wiped out all the School Boards in the state, and replaced it with a system controlled lock-stock-and-barrel by the Governor, under the slogan of accountability? Lots of citizens, like those in my hometown upstate, gripe about their local school board, but you and I know there would be hell to pay if we abolished their voice in their schools. Why is it, then, so easy to eliminate lay voices only in our big cities with predominantly low income students of color as our school clientele? Who are we afraid of?

We are in the midst of a period in history that has profound disrespect for experience and knowledge—and those who whine most about our incompetent teachers and schools are leading the parade. Auto companies are run by people who know nothing about cars, and schools by people who know nothing about schools. Even as a principal it was hard not to fall into that trap: those neat ideas I had as I fell asleep, that fell apart under the scrutiny of my colleagues who might have had to implement them. How odd that the folks who have been advising the Mayor represent some of the most unaccountable players on the American stage—resisters to the most basic forms of oversight.—NYC’s business and finance community. (And by a mayor who publicly argues in the NY Times that there should be no, zero, “oversight” of his powers.)

But let me switch to some truths from a very old-timer, one who spent nearly 30 years as a teacher and principal in some of NYC’s most innovative and successful schools. Me. Reform did not begin with Bloomberg; and in fact there is not a scintilla of evidence that overall the children of NYC are better off today than they were before he became Mayor. I am sympathetic—the problem is pretty huge and no other city has solved it; except that he either really believes he has succeeded or has tried to convince all of us of that there’s been a small miracle under his leadership. Neither graduation rates nor test scores confirm his enthusiasm for his own reign.

I would even sympathize with that if he was not such a zealot for so-called “hard” data. There is no hard data that says he has moved us forward. Not that he has not tried, changing plans every few years, and so have all his subordinates. I know first hand all the ways in which principals are capable of giving their bosses the hard data they want. They could not give it to him because it was not there. The hard data simply does not show what he claims it does. But saddest of all is how easy it is to fool a lot of people a lot of the time—to invent myths that become common wisdom.

I heard one in D.C. last week about China—as a well-meaning congressman asked how it could be that China now graduates 97% of its young people, when we graduate only 50%. Of course the reality is that 90% of the Chinese do not even start high school. But like everyone else, I did not correct him. We’re just too damn polite. And after a while, we’re not merely polite, but we pass the myth on. We forget it was nonsense. And so it has been for decades about our schools; and NYC is a prime example. We are not alone, but not far behind the Texas or Chicago miracles—whose myths collapsed as soon as the next politician inherited the mess.

We pay a price for the lack of an open process of governance. Democracy is not a sure-fire cure—for sure—but it is the one and only possibility. And even if it is not, it is the one we claim allegiance to. It’s what our schools are all about teaching us about.

Here is another example closer to my life story. The claim is that Mayoral control may appear centralizing, but that, in fact, at its heart is decentralization down to the school level, the empowerment of principals! Right? What principal dares to stand up and say it ain’t so! It is unanimous. I became a principal in 1974 of a K-6th grade school, and of a second in 1978, and then of a third, a 7th-12th grade secondary school in 1985. There is not a single power that current principals now have that I did not have, and a lot that they do not have that I did! And I was hardly alone—just ask some of my old colleagues. Some used their powers, some did not; and it is true neither the Central nor the District boards encouraged them to do so. It is a myth that principals had their hands tied in the bad old days. Yes, there was a lot of bureaucratic tangle. And there still is! Yes, we did not solve the question of how to take advantage of the best wisdom available to us in open and transparent ways. And we still don’t. Yes, we couldn’t get rid of people without due process; and I wouldn’t want it otherwise.

But the union that the Mayor complains about eagerly embraced our ideas, and moved to change the process of hiring – and they convinced their members and changed the contract. The first major example of high school reform of an existing failed secondary school was the joint project of the union and management who together championed a process that led to the Julia Richman Educational Complex—one of the leading examples nationwide of successful big school to small schools reforms—and which is now under threat of closure, by the Mayor.

It is when we are not afraid that we find it easiest, not hardest to talk truth to each other, take some risks. When we want dictatorial power is when unions are most needed, not least.

At Central Park East Secondary School, and the other schools we worked closely with, we had control over our budget, our curriculum and our assessments. We designed, with the assistance of city and state and union, a challenging process for determining graduation standards that led to unprecedented success in a student body of largely so-called “at risk” students. We graduated 90% of whom 90% went on to 4-year colleges.

There was in the late 80s and early 90s, the beginning of a stunning opening up of ideas about schooling. An ever enlarging alternative school division, encompassing 50,000 high school students, was thriving with some of the least likely students, and proposals were on the table for spreading these ideas across all five boroughs—with the union’s support!

The mayor has found a solution to that that we had not dreamed of. Change the population. District 5—central Harlem—looked bad. Ditto for East Harlem. Now they are being gentrified, the poor being pushed out. The Bronx—which if it were a city has a school record equal to D.C.—will apparently have to wait a while for gentrification to improve their schools. Meanwhile, all over the city the wonderful idea of small schools of choice has evolved into small schools for different kids. Are small schools still a good idea? Yes, but it began under decentralization, not Mayoral control, and it is time to reassess it’s impact on equity.

I am not calling for a return to the good old days.

What’s changed? There are still oasis of good practice, amidst public hype that suggests vast improvements. Hard working colleagues continue to struggle, and they make a difference. But they are handicapped for many of the same reasons—not enough power—or even voice—in the hands of those who can best make a difference. Mayoral control has moved us further and further away from hearing the voices of citizens or professionals, parents or teachers, much less kids! It has moved us further and further from the kind of mutual respect and trust that allows expertise to be used well, and the voices of those who know the most to reach the voices of those with power. The further apart these two are, the greater the suspicion, fear and dysfunction.

Mayoralty controls need to be rethought, root and branch. We need ways to insist that schools be responsible for decisions that are best made inside schools by the people who are most affected. We need to look at Boston’s interesting work with “pilot schools,” for example. We need to enlist school people, not Wall Street experts, to design wiser ways to hold people accountable. We need to remind ourselves that democracy itself was invented as a way to hold leaders accountable, not the enemy of accountability.

Before we decide whether it is okay to pay children (and teachers) to learn and do well in school, we need to ask who has the right to make such decisions on our behalf?

I came back from China—the real one—a year and a half ago, and I am intrigued by how many ways NYC is beginning to remind me of Beijing, and alas it is not a happy thought. We are not ready to trade in our democratic voice in the raising of our children in the hopes that the Mayor’s friends will have better ideas than we all collectively do.