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Standardized Children?

Published July 21, 2011 on Schools 1 Comment
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Have you ever met a standard child? Just one in your entire life? Were you, perhaps, a standard child yourself? No? Neither have I met one nor was I one. So what is it then with the idea of, the concept of, Standardized Tests for children? I am here making a distinction between early childhood education, let’s say from nursery school thru middle school. In the news on July 16th, 2011 a story is a about a cheating scandal in Atlanta, Georgia. The cheaters were not school children but teachers fudging the standardized testing such that No Child Would Be Left Behind nor would any teacher be tossed out or penalized because one of their students had failed the standardized test. Apparently teachers colluded to, among other things, erase wrong answers and replace them with correct ones. Are you surprised? I’m not.

The Georgia state report published this past June indicated that the cheating had been going on since 2001 and named 178 teachers, 82 principals and affected tens of thousands of children. According to the report the schools, as a result of the pressures of the No Child left Behind business, operated in a culture of “fear, intimidation, and retaliation,”. It is telling that teachers were told that even children entering middle school who were reading at a first grade level had to pass the standardized test at the middle school level or else!  Teachers were intimidated by administrators with humiliation and threats of dismissal.  So much for professionalism, so much for comprehending the innate abilities of children as individuals. So much for education whatever that might mean to the designers of No Child Left Behind which, in my opinion, was one of the many scams perpetrated during the Bush administration.

A clarion call? Perhaps.

At the July 2011 biennial conference of the American Federation of Teachers, AFT president Randi Weinegarten exhorted teachers stand up and push back against the new self-anointed education experts who seem to be coming out of the political woodwork around the country, Ms Weinegarten raised many important and critical issues including the destructive rhetoric being deployed against teachers and the cuts to education budgets among others. She made very good points including criticizing the making of testing “targets” more important that education. More of this needs to be heard and it needs to be addressed to parents as well as the general public.

We are not talking about utopia here we are looking at the cold hard realities of the state of public education today. In a July 10, 2011 article in the Sunday NY Times, Paul Tough, offered the following prescription for school reform.

“It means supplementing classroom strategies with targeted, evidence-based interventions outside the classroom: working intensively with the most disadvantaged families to improve home environments for young children; providing high-quality early-childhood education to children from the neediest families; and, once school begins, providing low-income students with a robust system of emotional and psychological support, as well as academic support.”

This prescription falls short of my own beliefs in several ways one of which is that it is not only disadvantaged children who are disadvantaged. Middle-class children have problems of their own that interfere in their educational lives and those concerns must be addressed as well. The whole of school reform encompasses much more than what happens in school and within families. School reform must be a sustained national priority.

A dismal vision of the future.

We are becoming to a large extent a society that puts a price on everything and knows the value of nothing. With regard to education, the most dismal outcome of this dynamic would be, in my opinion, the taking over of public education by private corporations, billionaires and their politicians and lawyers – their hired hands. Why are they promoting the privatization of public education? Not because they want to improve education for the masses you can be certain of that, but because they smell a profit. What then, if they succeed? What happens to children whose families cannot or will not pay – kids from homes where parents are themselves barely educated, indifferent or discouraged? What happens to schools in impoverished neighborhoods?

The first and foremost objective of the school privatization activists will be the elimination of teacher’s unions. Their next objective will be greater social control of students and the composition of school populations by economic class distinction. Poor kids will go to poor-kids schools and well off kids will go to well-off kids schools. The net result – even greater social polarization and alienation than we now see and much less commitment to the whole of society – to a viable national social contract. The privatization of public education has more to do with greed than altruistic feeling about improving education for all. It is about social control as well; standardized children are an essential component of that venal dystopian vision.

Getting down to basics.

Published June 27, 2011 on Schools Closed
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Try to imagine, if you would, a professional football team having budget problems, and management’s solution is to lay off players but hang on to the front-office staff. As a result, they can field only a 10-man team. How would that work out? Does it make sense if their purpose is to win games? How could they win a game?

No professional football team in its right mind would attempt to pull off a stunt like that, but school systems seem not to give it much thought at all. Laying off teachers is no different from laying off players in this scenario.

Compare the impact on children and on the quality of instruction between laying off 50 administrators and laying off 50 teachers. Lay off teachers, increase class sizes and complain when kids don’t learn? Oh, then test the kids and, presto, you have a self-fulfilling scenario in which you can now declare that schools are failing. Got it?

I learned in the Air Force as a strategic air command combat crew officer that the mission must always come first. Those who carry out the mission are the priority, which means functionality outranks administrative services. On a SAC base the base commander was subordinate to the wing commander and nothing was allowed to trump the combat crews and their equipment – in other words, mission first.

Translating this to schools would properly mean teaching and learning are the mission and teachers, as the “mission” personnel, would have priority. Ideally, teachers would set the school’s priorities and establish the operational policies.

The administration would be subordinate to the needs and priorities of the teachers. Parents would be held responsible for both the physical and the mental attendance of their little darlings.

We can imagine a flat organization in which teachers and administrators are at the same level but with different responsibilities and functions. Regardless of the formal arrangements, the administration’s only reason for being must always be to support the mission of the school – that being educating children, which means providing teachers with what they need to carry out their responsibilities to the children.

The hierarchy would be defined by the mission and not by a person. Could this work? Of course it could, if people would set aside their ego issues and subordinate themselves to the mission. Administrators would have to get over their “front office” syndrome, work cooperatively and put teachers and children first.

This essay first appeared on nmPolitics.net

School reform? First we need parenting reform.

Published June 16, 2011 on Schools 2 Comments
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School reform? First we need parenting reform.

We are presently witnessing an historical moment of truth as one state government after another begins a budget massacre. Getting the axe first will be the softest target of them all – public education. Aside from the obvious, immediate damage this does to public education, it shows how deep the belief in education goes in contemporary American society. The “real” social value of education to the public and to politicians these days is revealed – when budget cutting is the current issue, education gets it in the neck first. The only reasonably intelligent question that can be asked is, “Why?”

One possibility is that education is no longer as valued a part of the national belief system as it once was. Education seems to no longer be held as an investment in the future, but more of a fungible line item in a strained budget. Why should it be this way? Here are some of the arguments being expressed:

– Has education made getting a job easier or even possible?

– Teachers are merely putting in their time to retirement.

– Teachers have too much prep time.

– Schools have too much vacation time.

– Teachers are paid too much and there are too many of them.

– Kids aren’t learning how to read as well or as quickly as the new “experts” tell us they should, and that is, no doubt, the fault of teachers.

Schools, we are told, need the guidance of “experts” like Jeb Bush of Florida and Hanna Skandera in New Mexico, neither of whom has a background in education. Apparently they don’t need experience or background. I suppose we could all be grateful they aren’t interested in doing brain surgery.

Easier to pick on teachers

Why have public schools and teachers become the soft target of the moment? One reason, I believe, is because schools are simply vulnerable to this sort of attack; they are easy to criticize and difficult to defend. Not all kids learn at the same rate nor do they all have the same motivations to learn – they are not production-line widgets; hence, their achievement progress is not uniform. Children too often come from homes where parents are more interested in big screen TVs, sports, recreational activities – anything but learning. Research has shown that many children come from homes where there are scant if any reading materials at hand. Oh, and let me suggest one more reason – parents’ lack of interest in assuming responsibility for their kids’ performance in school.

If politicians and the new educational experts were to pick on parents the way they pick on teachers, it would be a parlous situation for their political ambitions. If the new self-anointed experts spoke up about curriculum and instruction, it would be too obvious that they don’t know what they are talking about. So, the response is to require more testing and pick on teachers – much easier. Imagine, if you can, one of these politicians standing up before an audience of parents and saying, “These are your children, dammit, and you are responsible for them.” Not in this lifetime, I assure you.

Parenting reform

Where can we go from here? We cannot even begin to discuss school reform until we deal with parenting reform. How can we convince parents that they are the front lines of education? I would suggest one first step would be to stop the politically motivated rhetoric. Next, stop the eye-wash and propaganda about testing. Seriously, folks there is no better indication that you don’t know what you are talking about when you promote more testing as educational reform. An experienced classroom teacher is never not testing. Never!

Next we need political leadership that instructs – yes, instructs – the public about their role in the process of educating their young. (See above.) We need public dialog that elevates teachers and teaching to the same level as firemen and cops. Have you ever heard a politician mouth-off about firemen and policemen on a par with what we hear about public schools and teachers? I doubt it. Teachers, for their part need to get their backs up and start educating the public – not just parents, but the body politic.

Teachers, weed out the deadwood

Teachers also need to clean up their profession and weed out the deadwood. Stop hunkering down and denying the obvious – there are ineffective, lazy people in the teaching profession, and teachers and their unions are the only ones who can properly get rid of them. Be proactive, get over the notion that protecting the deadwood protects you – it does not. In fact, you will all look better when you give those guys the boot.

When I was a member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, I never saw a bad carpenter protected by anyone. The best were separated from the good, the good from the bad, and the bad eliminated. It wasn’t the employers who enforced the standards either, it was the union.

The carpenters and joiners are a strong and respected union because they insist on excellence. If they can do it, so can the American Federation of Teachers. Come on Randi*, get with it!

* Randi Weingarten, AFT president.

This essay first appeared on nmPolitics.net

The Problem With Skandera

Published June 9, 2011 on Schools Closed
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It seems obvious, given her complete lack of educational credentials and her political background, that Hanna Skandera is a foot soldier in an ideological war taking place right now against working people – teachers and other unionized workers. This is the national agenda of the organizations she is and has been affiliated with. The children of New Mexico ought not be used as pawns in a national political strategy.

Her political credentials and affiliations aside, Ms. Skandera can offer absolutely no professional qualifications to be New Mexico’s or any other state’s secretary of education.

She has no background in curriculum and instruction, yet she feels competent enough to suggest a policy of assigning letter grades to classroom teachers as a solution. Skandera has never had the day-to-day experience of being in charge of a classroom with elementary school children herself, yet she feels competent to evaluate trained, experienced teachers.

So, then, why is she being vetted as the New Mexico secretary of education? Most likely the answer is because she was recommended to our new governor by people outside the state who are fronting a national political agenda that is antithetical and indifferent to the needs of the people and children of New Mexico.

This national agenda played out in Wisconsin and, if those behind the movement have their way, New Mexico will not be far behind.

Not grounded in experience

It is not new information that coercive programs like “No Child Left Behind” and other similar “great ideas” put forth not by educators but by people with political agendas have failed and failed badly. Now here comes Ms. Skandera advocating the simplistic notions that holding children back in grade promotion or assigning teachers letter grades are the magic bullet. Apparently no informed thought has crossed her mind that socially stigmatizing children for things that may be beyond a child’s ability serves no useful purpose, but only a destructive one.

Further, what possible rational train of thought could lead someone to believe that assigning teachers letter grades based on the achievement of their students will lead to a better educational outcome? No good purpose is served by humiliation – there are better ways to achieve educational goals.

Why do grand schemes such as these proposals fail? They fail because they are not grounded in informed educational experience and are not founded by educators but by politicians selling the public on easy answers to problems caused by “them.”

There are effective ways to deal with the teaching of reading, for example. One of these is based on a great deal of evidence that trying to teach reading to children who come from homes where parents do not read, where there are scant if any reading materials, where learning is not a family value is, at best, a futile endeavor.

In spite of parents’ desires to hold teachers responsible for their little darlings’ academic performance they, themselves, are the most responsible parties in the education of children. Blaming teachers is a convenient passing of the buck but is patently false. The valuing of education starts in the home, as does discipline.

A carpetbagger who is ignorant of our state

The people of New Mexico are being asked to hire a carpetbagger who is ignorant of our state, its history and its people. Why is this when we have plenty of qualified people residing here who could and would do an outstanding job if they could be assured their efforts would not be undermined or second-guessed for political purposes?

Teachers need community support and resources, and parents need to be held responsible for their children. It will take several years of concerted effort to bring everyone, children, parents and educators, on board with that idea.

Approving Ms Skandera’s appointment will be a step backwards in that endeavor. I will wager that this appointment would generate more resentment than reform, more heat than light.

It is always useful to recall  Governor Lew Wallace’s wisdom: “All efforts based on experience elsewhere fail in New Mexico.” It was as true then as it is true today. Relevant experience must be New Mexico, not California or Florida, based.

And individuals vetted for important positions ought to have at the very least minimal backgrounds, training and qualifications for the intended position.

This essay first appeared at NMPolitics.net

What Does It Mean To Educate?

Published June 9, 2011 on Schools Closed
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To be motivated to learn requires something to be “out there” that appeals to someone’s “in here” – something that holds promise and that, to achieve, requires interest, effort and personal discipline.

Certainly, among the tasks of public schools is to train children to become successful in the essential skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, but are schools also responsible to motivate children to learn? While some will argue that teachers are the principal source of motivation, this seems to me to be unreasonable and mainly a sloughing off of a responsibility proper to parents.

While the society as a whole certainly has a part, valuing learning is first and foremost a family matter, and children need to come to school with that sense.

I think it cynical, if not irresponsible, to foist onto teachers what is essentially a role of parenting. Parents must understand and agree that they have an essential participatory role in the education of their children.

Time to have a public dialogue about ‘educating’

Once in school, a child’s education does not rest solely upon acquiring the basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic. To teach only skills is not to educate but to train, and that is an issue schools and society must come to grips with. Education and training are not the same thing, and it is important to know and understand which of the two is going on; it is a matter of definition and of “first principles.”

What do we mean when we say “educate?” What does it mean to be “educated,” as differentiated from being “trained?” If we don’t have clearly defined first principles on this matter, we have no clear intellectual, moral or social compass. And this may explain why public education has been so long susceptible to pillar-to-post oscillations from one new great idea, reform, innovation to another and another over the past century and longer.

In fact, John Dewey raised this same issue in 1896! Perhaps the time has come to have a public dialog that is not about charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, magnet schools, free schools, grading schools and teachers, ending social promotion, corporal punishment, and so on. Perhaps the time has come to stop all of that and talk about what we mean when we say we want to “educate” children.

A contemporary ‘OK Corral’

More people experience public education than don’t in the United States, and its influence on social attitudes is pervasive. Common to that experience is the generally accepted organization and structure of curriculum and instruction that was pretty well laid down in modern times by Ralph Tyler in his widely influential 1950’s book, “Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction.”

According to Tyler, children are in school to be “developed,” teachers are the transmitters of development, and administrators determine if the transmission has taken place. Is this what we want education to mean?

Well, yes, with certain qualifications. This is the training-in-essential-skills component of a child’s education. Essential skills, however, cannot be said to be the whole of a child’s education. For government to prescribe public testing for discrete skill acquisition as its sole measurement of educational achievement is to betray a fundamental responsibility of any civilization worthy of the name – to properly educate, not merely to train, its young.

Today’s emphasis on public testing and grading of schools has no pedagogic justification – its intent is cynically political. When, in self-defense, schools must “teach the test,” the political agenda dehumanizes the educative process and robs it of meaning and any sense of intellectual purpose. And herein lies a contemporary “OK Corral,” where public education meets politics and where teachers and children generally lose.

The moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it this way: “If life is to be meaningful, it is necessary for us to be in possession of ourselves and not merely to be the creation of other people’s projects, intentions and desires.” (Alasdair MacIntyre, “After Virtue,” 3rd Ed., University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)

This essay first appeared on: nmPolitics.net

Despite Flaws, Public Education Shows Resilience

Published June 9, 2011 on Schools Closed
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Public Education has long been a “soft” target for political opportunists on both sides of the aisle. Why? Because it is especially vulnerable, difficult if not impossible to properly quantify and defend. Anyone who thinks that test scores alone measure academic achievement is seriously misinformed.

Also, public attention to education manifests as either love or hate, bouncing between the two pillars usually in concert with the economy.

In a February 1980 article titled “Doomsday for Public Education,” political pundit James J. Kilpatrick cited yet another pundit (you could call this a “double dose” of punditry, I suppose), George Will, as predicting that, by 1990, “Public Education in the United States will have deteriorated beyond significant recovery.”

Kilpatrick went on to identify some of the causative factors contributing to the inevitable demise: the overblown structure of the “educational establishment,” the stifling influence of government (sound familiar?), and the U.S. Supreme Court. Both of the pundits identified incompetent teachers, teacher unions, court intervention in general and the educational bureaucracy.

Interestingly, The Economist of March 19, 2011 seems to echo most of the two pundits’ theses. So we can take it, I suppose, that in some peoples’ eyes, from 1980 to the present, public education has suffered the same ills, the same causative factors that should have led to its inevitable deterioration. On evidence, public education is remarkably resilient in spite of its pronounced shortcomings, evading one doomsday after another. The monster is such that society seems to have no choice but to complain while, at the same time, paying for it.

Considering for a moment the sheer number of “magic bullets” that have been proposed (and dodged) to save public education from itself, we must conclude the monster is bullet-proof.

Persistently gullible

Among the magic bullets proposed over the years are vouchers, magnet schools, charter schools, free schools, teacher and school grading, and so on – all of which (Yes! Just say it!) have failed to produce any significant long-term perceived or measurable “improvement” in the education of America’s children.

What has always amazed me has been the persistent gullibility of politicians and the public as they whip-saw one another from pillar to post trying to tame the beast. Can it be the case, really, that public education is impervious to politically satisfactory (that is to say, measurable) improvement?

I have to come to believe it is and, for as long as it exists, public education will remain a natural “soft” target for political demagogues of all stripes.

In fact, until public educators and teacher unions stop being their own worst enemies and own up to a few inconvenient truths (that are some bad teachers and bad schools) they will always remain in the crosshairs of political opportunists. Well, they probably will no matter what actually happens, but so it goes.

A question

Let me end this essay with a question. If you were a typical youngster in New Mexico, why would you believe disciplining yourself and getting a “good” education would lead you to a happy and prosperous life? Looking around at the world as you see it, hear it, and live in it on a daily basis, what out there would sufficiently motivate you to discipline yourself to study and to achieve in school?

I believe the foregoing may be unanswerable; nevertheless, it is a valid question, and one that must be confronted because it speaks to what is without doubt the most fundamental single force in education and instruction: motivation.

This post appeared originally on NMPolitics.net

What Do Mastodons Have To Do With Education?

Published June 8, 2011 on Schools Closed
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To instruct and teach the young has been a part of the human social contract since long before our ancestors swung down from their trees on the African savanna. And isn’t it just amazing that we are, in 2011, arguing about what education is and how best to go about it?

Survival was the initial motive, and the necessary skills having to do with food gathering, defense, procreation and so forth had to be passed on. While killing mastodons isn’t in the current curriculum, teaching children to survive remains critical. The requisite skills early on were obvious, the process and the necessity clear and certainly not contentious as such matters have now become.

Today’s necessities seem not to be so plainly indicated and are open to contention and to competing views. What isn’t? What skills and knowledge will  children starting school today need when they complete their public education? What exactly will they need to know to be successful, fully-functioning adults?

In April 1983, the report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education stated the following:

“Our Nation is at risk. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

The June 2011 issue of Atlantic magazine reported on the tenure and experiences of Joel Klein as chancellor of the New York City Schools, who is lamenting exactly the same issues today. In fact he even went so far as to cite the above report. I think it fair to ask: What’s been going on in these past 28 years?

Our schools, schooling, and, consequently, our graduates are deficient. Here in New Mexico, according to an April 6th, 2011 article in the Santa Fe Reporter, 91 percent of local high school graduates entering Santa Fe Community College were determined to have “weak academic skills” and were assigned to remedial classes.

What gives? Do we, as a society, really care about education? Do we see any value in it other than keeping kids occupied from kindergarten through 12th grade? Is it the case that this is because we are no longer a cohesive society with a community of interests?

My educational beliefs

Obviously, the unanswerable question is, what will the world be when today’s children graduate? There remain, indisputably, certain basic skills that will always be useful, if not required. And here I wish to be clear that I am speaking about skills and proficiency in mathematics and computation, and reading and language, as opposed to factual knowledge.

However, children are not standardized, assembly-line putt-putts to which schooling attaches skills as though they were headlamps, bumpers, motors and so forth until the completed products, monitored by the quality control department, are ready to roll out onto the streets of adulthood.

At the top of my list of essential skills are critical thinking, along with the ability to reason and the ability to learn, all of which will carry children into any possible future.

My educational beliefs are not prescriptive and not about methods and techniques. They are about attitudes and values:

* Being educated is not a terminal condition.

* Human beings have an innate desire to learn.

* Critical thinking is the most subversive of all skills.

* Education is the fundamental method of social progress. (John Dewey)

* To prepare (children) for the future life means to give (them) command of (themselves) … that (they) will have full use of all of (their) capacities. (John Dewey)

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