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The Public Education Debate

Check out a three-part discussion on "The Public Education Debate" on the television program Consider This: http://liberalarts.iupui.edu/media/videos/. Part One is currently at the top of the list but you'll have to scroll down as new shows are added. Part 2 &3 should be posted soon. If you don't mind clicking back, comments are welcome here. Participants include Dr. Rob Helfenbein- School of Education, Dr. Jason Kelly- Department of History, and Dr. Steve Fox- Department of English

They Jacked the Message: On the Education Reform Movement

Rob Helfenbein at the event "Controversial Issues in Education" from Indiana University School of Edu on Vimeo.

The Mindtrust plan entitled "Creating Opportunity Schools: A Bold Plan to Transform IPS" is and effort at radically restructuring urban education in Indianapolis. It uses New Orleans, Rhee's model in DC, a general school choice logic as a basis to reform city schools. Notably, disbanding the democratically elected school board and shifting to a form of Mayoral control (only the "inner city" district NOT the whole city's schools), the plan is used a starting point in a more general discussion of what's being called the contemporary "education reform movement." As always, comments and critiques are welcome.

Myths of Motivation and Performance Pay

 I wonder what we might think of this in relation to the current rage of evaluating teachers and paying for performance....the lesson?  If you want higher performance give folks autonomy, opportunities for mastery, a clear sense of purpose.  Educators have been saying this forever but the business-minded reformers can't seem to get their heads around it--ironically, it doesn't work in business either.  Thoughts?

Following the Chinese Model?

U.S. Education in Chinese Lock Step? Bad Move.

 By Brian P. Coppola and Yong Zhao

The education systems in China and the United States not only are headed in opposite directions, but are aiming at exactly what the other system is trying to give up. In the United States, through programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, as well as calls for more standardization and accountability in higher education, we are embracing the sort of regimented, uniform, standards-based, and test-driven education that has dominated Asian education systems for thousands of years.

What seems to be underappreciated in this country is how actively the Asian systems are trying to embrace the values and outcomes that we appear to be so willing to abandon: specifically, the American penchant for promoting creativity, individualism, innovation, and nonconformity. In other words, for developing and nurturing the diverse talent that can result from an ethos of coloring outside the lines.

 

In China obstacles still stand in the way of rapid, comprehensive change, obstacles that are tied to the culture's long history of inflexible, standards-based, test-driven education. Nonetheless, teaching for creativity, innovation, and invention are seen there, as throughout the rest of Asia, as the holy grails of the U.S. education system.

 

Entrepreneurialism is an easy goal, and more than a few professors in China have been known to say that what is needed is the ability to prepare students who are able to generate more intellectual property for their country. And while many parts of the U.S. college system provide the freedom for this, it is predicated on our core understanding that creativity is more or less an inherent trait, and that what we need to do for our students is to get out of their way, and to provide them with the environment and resources in which they can grow.

Fundamentally, the education system in the United States may be no more capable of actively teaching creativity and innovation than the education system in China is; it may well simply be that the system in China has been more systemically effective at suppressing it. Success may be tied as much to what is not done?-avoiding the smothering uniformity of standardization-than to what is done.

In the United States, we certainly matriculate smart high-school students who are as ready to embrace memorization and regurgitation as their Chinese counterparts (although they are not nearly so good at it). In American higher education, however, at least in the highly social and networked institutions where being part of a residential campus community still characterizes the experience, we intentionally mash students together into multiple, diverse settings. We are good at systematically constructing and providing learning environments where students' inherent, and perhaps dormant, creative and inventive skills can flourish.

China is beginning to understand what our real strength has always been: By embracing a broadly divergent array of knowledge and experience, we bring diverse and unexpected perspectives to any problem or situation, allowing us to adapt rapidly to change. By not standardizing anything, we end up being able to handle everything.

People who excel in our education system are comfortable with nonconformity. They understand, challenge, and reject the limits of the status quo, and they take risks. These are not easy things to measure, at least not directly, but the effects of their loss would be beyond tragic for our future. Even so, the loss of these high-value intangibles, which are essential capacities for creativity and innovation, is what the United States risks losing in a close-minded, bean-counting approach to accountability.

An appeal to reject standards and standards-based instruction and testing may seem like an invitation to embrace feel-good mediocrity, yet nothing could be further from the truth. By recognizing and finding value in the core principles of a true liberal-arts education, China is seeking to avoid the inherent problems that have accompanied its historic approach to education-problems that the United States is already in danger of adopting.

Regulation to create uniformity in education results in undesirable outcomes, and these are showing up in our classrooms. Deviation from the norm becomes at least undesirable, if not "the wrong answer." Where once we embraced the free thinker, we now seek to correct that person according to a government-dictated knowledge base. Students and parents will routinely reject time that is spent on enrichment for enrichment's sake, particularly on nonutilitarian skills that do not directly and explicitly train for testing relevance, including programs in reading, music, and the arts.

Learning activities that require long-term investment to create integrated and diverse understanding are rejected in favor of those that can result in short-term gains, quick fixes that can result in high test scores tomorrow, even if that information is effectively forgotten the day after tomorrow.

In the United States, we are seeing evidence of an increase in something that the Chinese have long had a name for, and which they can point to and say needs to be rejected: gaofen dineng. This term describes the undesirable situation of "high scores with low ability." It's not a new idea. Researchers in the United States are the ones who have studied this the most, and the correlation between high standardized-test scores and shallower understanding has been documented.

Certainly there are students who will do well for the right reasons; however, the education-research community is clear about what China has known for years: Gaofen dineng can be an outcome that not only relates to a student's limited understanding, but also has an adverse affect on the entire learning environment, including the performance of teachers who lose their spirit, passing on the inevitable standards of uncontested authority and a regression to mediocrity.

The United States needs to think seriously about and then learn from the changes happening in the Chinese education system. In their enthusiasm to understand and emulate our perceived strengths, our Asian colleagues are holding a compellingly interesting mirror up to us, reflecting exactly those things that have given us a pre-eminent position for so long.

In addition, we need to replace our misplaced enthusiasm for test-based content standards with understanding, articulating, and measuring the value-added features of the American character that have served us so well for so long.

 

Here are a few recommendations for the United States in the context of an emergent and increasingly competitive China:

*  Resist any temptation to standardize and overly regulate higher education in the name of accountability. For various reasons, including the low employment rate of college graduates, the fraudulent practices of some for-profit higher-education institutions, and reports of low-quality graduates, there is an increasing effort to impose government regulations and external standards upon colleges. These seemingly responsible actions will inevitably bring more regimentation, standardization, and testing, ruining what has made American higher education the envy of the world-and what Asian countries are eager to emulate.

       

*  Incentivize the teaching profession. Even without the social and non-normative skills gained by students educated in the United States, students entering college in China have an inarguably stupendous knowledge base, and this reflects well on their teachers and the corresponding system of teacher edu?cation. The United States needs to attract more of our best students into teaching. Even in this era of budget austerity, we need creative, strong, visible, compelling, and cost-effectiveways to make the teaching profession more appealing. One drastic measure would be to make primary and secondary teaching an income-tax-free profession.

       

*  Reintegrate the disciplines and teacher education. Schoolteachers in China receive a high level of discipline-centered education. A system of normal schools, long abandoned by the United States, has grown in China into a set of full-fledged universities where science teaching and science research are done together. While the United States will never return to the normal-school system, some way of putting teeth into the requirement for our disciplinary and education faculties to work together on this problem is needed. To this end, we should simply require, as a condition of accreditation, a meaningful collaboration between college disciplinary units (chemistry, physics, and so on) and schools of education in the early identification, recruitment, and preparation of future teachers, including programs for engaging precollege students and putting them on this path.

       

*  Make higher-education partnerships a priority. In a recent editorial, Stanford University's Richard N. Zare suggests approvingly that "we want China to be an ally, not an enemy." To these ends, the United States should create as many bilateral education collaborations as possible with China, in which educators from both sides spend substantial time teaching in each other's classrooms. Direct experience is an uncompromising teacher.

       

*  Do not forget that the slope of a curve has a magnitude as well as a sign. Only 30 years ago, universities in China reopened after a 30-year hiatus in which higher education itself was held in disdain under Mao's rule. Modern China has emerged from an almost completely agrarian society since then. Not only has change happened, but it also continues to happen-rapidly.

 

As higher education in the United States continues to move toward centralized accountability through a system of standards and testing, which already defines the precollege education system, it risks losing the advantage that it invented. Let's not lose our penchant for questioning the status quo, for valuing and rewarding those who see things differently and have the freedom and opportunity to tell their story, and for embracing the simple act of rebellion that comes from coloring outside the lines.

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Brian P. Coppola is a professor of chemistry at the Universityof Michigan at Ann Arbor and associate director of the UM-Peking University Joint Institute. Yong Zhao is associate dean for global education in the College of Education at the University of Oregon.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sunday, February 5, 2012. See http://chronicle.com/article/US-Education-in-Chinese/130669/

Growth Models and Teacher Evaluation

Join the conversation here on teacher evaluation....useful links. So often we see assessment models being used for things beyond what they were designed to do and it seems one of the things that education scholars can do is point to these flaws.  Comments?

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On a note related to new teacher evaluation methods, Bruce Baker at Rutgers has written on the appropriateness of using Student Growth Percentile models (such as the Indiana Growth Model) for making inferences about teacher or school quality. His main critique is that the tool itself is intended to be descriptive, and makes no steps at all to account for teacher or school effects, thus making it a poor fit for including in policy issues such as teacher assessment. Given it is in blog form, it is a bit more accessible than most writing on these subjects, though still a bit technical. http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/take-your-sgp-and-vamit-damn-it/ <http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/take-your-sgp-and-vamit-damn-it/>   This, of course, is a problem with the overall state requirements but I think very important to consider when building these sorts of systems and considering how we create “meaningful evaluations that give [teachers] the feedback and support they need to improve their craft”. The links included in the post are very helpful for those interested in a more in-depth parsing of the issues.

Subject: NYT Debate on Teacher Evaluation

Here’s a link to an interesting debate on teacher evaluation. I especially appreciated the point made by Sydney Morris: “Lost in this back and forth are the voices of real classroom teachers who want meaningful evaluations that give them the feedback and support they need to improve their craft.” I hope that we can craft a system that ultimately focuses on supporting teachers to feel more certain about the impact of their instruction on student learning.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/01/16/can-a-few-years-data-reveal-bad-teachers

Still missing the point in Education Reform

Why Are the Rich So Interested in Public-School Reform?

They want to remake America's students in their own high-achieving image, but they're overlooking socioeconomics

It was perhaps inevitable that the political moment that has given birth to the Occupy movement, pitting Main Street against Wall Street and the 99% against the financial elite, would eventually succeed in making some chinks in the armor of the 1%’s favorite feel-good hobby: the school reform movement.

It’s been a good decade now that the direction of school reform has been greatly influenced by a number of highly effective Master (and Mistress) of the Universe types: men and women like Princeton grad Wendy Kopp, the founder of the Teach for America program, her husband, Harvard graduate Richard Barth, who heads up the charter school Knowledge Is Power Program, the hard-charging former D.C. schools chancellor (and Cornell and Harvard grad) Michelle Rhee and the many hedge fund founders who are now investing significant resources in the cause of expanding charter schools. Excoriating the state of America’s union-protected teaching profession and allegedly ossified education schools, they’ve prided themselves upon attracting “the best and the brightest” to the education reform cause, whether by luring recent top college graduates into challenging classrooms or by seducing Harvard Business School or McKinsey-trained numbers-crunchers away from Wall Street to newly lucrative executive positions in educationally themed social entrepreneurship.

The chief promise of their brand of reform — the results of which have been mixed, at best — seems to be that they can remake America’s students in their own high-achieving image. By evaluating all students according to the same sort of testable rubrics that, when aced, propelled the reformers into the Ivy League and beyond, society’s winners seem to believe they can inspire and guide society’s losers, inoculating them against failure with their own habits of success, and forever disproving the depressingly fatalistic ’70s-style liberal idea that things like poverty and poor health care and hunger and a chaotic family life can, indeed, condemn children to school failure.

And yet as schools scramble to keep up with these narrow demands, voices are emerging to suggest that perhaps the rubric-obsessed school reform game, as it’s been played in the Bush and Obama years and funded and dressed-up by the well-heeled Organization Kids, is itself perhaps due for a philosophical shake-up.

(MORE: Andrew J. Rotherham: Cheating on the Hard Work of School Reform)

Earlier this year, S. Paul Reville, the Massachusetts Secretary of Education, blogged in Education Week that reformers need now to think beyond the numbers and “admit that closing achievement gaps is not as simple as adopting a set of standards, accountability and instructional improvement strategies.” In Massachusetts, he wrote, “We have set the nation’s highest standards, been tough on accountability and invested billions in building school capacity, yet we still see a very strong correlation between socioeconomic background and educational achievement and attainment. It is now clear that unless and until we make a more active effort to mitigate the impediments to learning that are commonly associated with poverty, we will still be faced with large numbers of children who are either unable to come to school or so distracted as not to be able to be attentive and supply effort when they get there.” Reville called for “wraparound services” that would allow schools to provide students with a “healthy platform” from which they could begin to work on learning.

Diane Ravitch, the education policy specialist and reformed charter school advocate, made the same argument in a trenchant New York Review of Books article this fall, where she enumerated the many reasons that school reform as we’ve come to know it needs to be called into question. For one thing, like so much else “the best and the brightest” have brought us in recent years, many of the reform movement’s results don’t stand up to scrutiny. After reviewing the data, she writes: “Most research studies agree that charter schools are, on average, no more successful than regular public schools; that evaluating teachers on the basis of their students’ test scores is fraught with inaccuracy and promotes narrowing of the curriculum to only the subjects tested, encouraging some districts to drop the arts or other nontested subjects; and that the strategy of closing schools disrupts communities without necessarily producing better schools.”

Striking a serious blow to the contention that it’s bad teaching — not bad luck in life — that makes some American students perform much worse than others (and all of them much worse than students in other countries), Ravitch noted that on a recent international test, the Program for International Student Assessment, “American schools in which fewer than 10% of the students were poor outperformed the schools of Finland, Japan and Korea. Even when as many as 25% of the students were poor, American schools performed as well as the top-scoring nations. As the proportion of poor students rises, the scores of U.S. schools drop.”

In other words, more than good teachers, more than targeted testing, more than careful calibrations of performance measures and metrics that can standardize and quantify every aspect of learning, it’s the messy business of life — where a child comes from and what he or she goes home to at the end of the day — that really determines success in school. This message flies in the face of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-boostrap individualism, the extreme emphasis on private (read: teacher) responsibility that has animated the school reform movement in recent years. It demands a complete rethinking now of what our public response to the perennial crisis of public education in America should be.

(MORE: Warner: Overmedicating Foster Kids: The Cost of Skimping on Care)

Fortunately, there are some programs in place that have had real success in providing “wraparound services” that help children come to school ready to learn. In Northern California, for example, the Making Waves Foundation has for decades run a program providing tutoring, academic advising, college counseling, after school enrichment programs, mental health services, nutritional food, transportation and parent education to more than a thousand low-income children, selected by lottery. In Cincinnati, where more than 70% of children live in low-income households, a program called the Strive Partnership coordinates services and support for school children that include mentoring, health care, arts programs, quality preschool and financial aid for college — and the result, according to a new report from the independent think tank Education Sector, is that, over the last four years, Cincinnati schools have made greater gains than any other urban district in Ohio and have had the most success in reducing the percentage of its students who score at the very bottom on achievement tests.

The Obama Administration hasn’t been blind to these initiatives, and has committed $40 million to a new Promise Neighborhoods program that seeks to link family support services to schools. But, the Education Sector report notes, that initiative is unlikely to receive the $150 million the Administration requested for 2012, given that its 2011 budget request of $210 million was cut down to $30 million.

Thinking structurally about social ills, rejecting excessive individualism for community-based, it-takes-a-village-style responsibility, has been out of favor in America for a long time. In education reform, what’s been in style instead is vilifying teachers and their unions. For some schools, making the grade has meant cooking the books to show results. Let’s hope that the time to reform this business-modeled mindset has finally come.

Warner, a former contributing columnist for the New York Times, is the author, most recently, of We've Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication. The views expressed are solely her own.

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/09/why-are-the-rich-so-interested-in-public-school-reform/#ixzz1inNAKsFA

Safe Protest Zones on Campus?

Real questions surround how universities are responding to the Occupy movement and students' attempts at free speech, assembly, and protest.  The stories presented here paint a troubling picture about the shifting role of universities within a larger civil society and it would be interesting to see how others think about the campus responsibility for freedom of expression.

"There are probably a handful of institutions in the United States where what I would call the neoliberal shift - as a larger term for a move away from social welfare democracy to a greater kind of free-market structure - is evident and dramatic. One of them is Wall Street. Another is higher education."

Occupations are read the Riot Act by havens of free thought

Call for 'safe protest zones' as demonstrators face violence on US campuses.

 

Credit: Reuters

International outrage: a campus police officer at the University of California, Davis, deliberately aims pepper spray at seated, unresisting protesters, resulting in calls for the chancellor's resignation

Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan has become familiar as the epicentre of the American protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street.  But when demonstrators left the site last month, their destination was not the financial district, City Hall or the neighbourhoods where the city's wealthy "1 per cent" (the protesters call themselves "the 99 per cent") live in buildings guarded by doormen.

The marchers headed instead to the City University of New York's Baruch College campus, pledging on the way to stop repaying their student loans, and trying to interrupt a hearing at which the university's trustees were considering yet another tuition fee rise.

Forcibly evicted from the public parks it had occupied for weeks in cities from Boston to Oakland, California, the boisterous Occupy movement shifted suddenly and dramatically on to university and college campuses. At the same time, it added to its many grievances the skyrocketing cost of higher education, complaining about everything from student-loan debt to lofty presidential salaries and benefits.

Its shift of focus, physical and ideological, has not been welcomed.

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Mobilizing Urban Communities

The powerful educator Charles Payne recently comments on urban education and reform.  His book So Much Reform, So Little Change: The Persistence of Failure in Urban Schools should be required reading for anyone interested in the current discussion.  Comments welcome!

 

Occupy Our Schools

The Occupy Wallstreet Movement has indeed been fascinating, most notably for me in that the mainstream media cannot seem to make sense of it. It's interesting to think about that there may be some lessons learned here as folks are increasingly dissatisfied with today's education reform. This article is being emailed around but perhaps folks here have thoughts?

Occupy Our Schools by Rick Ayers

Something is happening here but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? The sea change that is Occupy Wall Street does not have to do with the list of demands. It does not have to do with Obama's election chances. In a perfect example of conflicting narratives, the cultural gatekeepers find it impossible to understand something that is right in front of their faces.

Occupy Wall Street is action. We have had talk, talk, talk for years, decades even. The right -- the think tanks, big media outlets, politicians, foundations -- thunders its dogma on a regular basis. The left - community organizers, unions, educators, activists -- refute their arguments, though with a much smaller voice and very few dollars. But it has all just been a conversation.

Now action obliterates the deadlock. Whatever we have been waiting for -- Obama, common sense, karma -- we realized it was never coming to help us and it is time for action. Action creates facts, and facts are essential -- they create possibilities and new words, fresh vocabularies. The silenced majority, the 99%, has finally been pushed so far that it is pushing back. Every movement is improbable until it happens; after the fact it so clearly was inevitable.

The bankers intone, "These people don't understand the work we do." The right wing bloggers ask: "Are they going to take the money away from the wealthy?" The talking heads warn, "Do they have any direction?" The answer, in brief, is we do, we will, and we have. We do understand what bankers and investors do: they run a three-card-Monte game where only they can see under the cards. They don't add wealth to the economy, that's done by people who go to work all over the world. They simply siphon it out. And yes we are coming to take the money from the wealthy. These people are not job creators. They are parasites who have stolen from those who actually create the wealth. And finally, we have a direction. It's . . . oh, just watch and see.

The same type of bold action could be applied to schools. The privatizers, those who would strip down our schools to being test-prep factories training only for compliance and passivity, have made their case with all the volume that billions of dollars can buy. Wallmart's Broad Foundation trains corporate executives with no educational experience to be school superintendents. The film Waiting for Superman articulates a demand for the destruction of teacher's unions and the creation of privately operated schools that take public money. Secretary of Education Duncan calls for a "Race to the Top," pitting student against student, teacher against teacher, school against school, and state against state in a Social Darwinist fantasy game worthy of Ayn Rand.

And of course we, educators and community members and students, patiently and thoroughly counter and disprove their arguments. Their data are false, from claims about charter success to attacks on teachers. Their goals are sinister, cloaked in a thinly disguised rhetoric of equity. Read Linda Darling-Hammond, Pedro Noguera, Debbie Meier, Monty Neill, Diane Ravitch, Bill Ayers, Kris Gutierrez, Anthony Cody. The list goes on and on.

But so far it has only been a conversation. It does not matter if we defeat their arguments over and over. They still have the purse strings, the foundations, and the big megaphone. The time has come for action. Take over these schools. Occupy them. Sit in. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We built these schools with our taxes, our labor, our commitment to students and communities. They are not just playthings for overfed business dilettantes. Instead of taking marching orders from Wall Street, we need to take these schools and make them institutions of liberation.

With students, community members, and teachers in these buildings, imagine the possibilities. Poetry workshop in one room; free clinic in another; science lab in a third. Food production. Critical pedagogy class. Strategy meetings. A kind of education that embraces deep meaning, knowledge for people's needs, and participatory democracy. Watch these young people step up. In a liberated space, the bored and resistant students in the back of the room will be transformed. You will see them taking responsibility for their education, demonstrate their desire for ethical action, for sacrifice for the common good, and for a future they can believe in.

Can we do this? At one site? At a hundred? You can be certain that this is a discussion popping up all over the country. This is the kind of action that would trump the endless, and ultimately losing, debate we have been locked in over the past years. We can't talk our way out of the problems in education. But we can act, together, because another world is possible.

The Shock Doctrine & Education Reform

I've written about this in other places and the model holds.  Think about the chorus of folks (Republican and recently Democrats) all suddenly in unison that "public education is broken." Flagrant in the disregard of data in a so-called data-driven age drives the drum beat but the question remains: how profits from all of this?   Check out the article, but come back to Newteacher to share some ideas....

The "Shock Doctrine" comes to your neighborhood classroom: Corporate reformers use the fiscal crisis and campaign contributions to hype an unproven school agenda

BY DAVID SIROTA

"Let's hope the fiscal crisis doesn't get better too soon. It'll slow down reform." -- Tom Watkins, a consultant, summarizes the corporate education reform movement's current strategy to the Sunday New York Times.

The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism.

Though Klein's book provides much evidence of the Shock Doctrine, the Disaster Capitalists rarely come out and acknowledge their strategy. That's why Watkins' outburst of candor, buried in this front-page New York Times article yesterday, is so important: It shows that the recession and its corresponding shock to school budgets is being  used by corporations to maximize revenues, all under the gauzy banner of "reform."

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