I finally read Diane Ravitch’s bestselling The Death and Life of the Great American School System which came out in March, and it’s a must for everyone involved in public education.

Ravitch presents a searing counter-narrative to the overwhelming tide of corporate-style edu-rhetoric sweeping the country’s editorial boards, superintendents’ directives, and Obama administration press releases. The subtitle cuts right to it— How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education.

Ravitch, a venerated historian who was appointed as Assistant Secretary of Education by a Republican administration, argues that our public school system is “a fundamental element of our democratic society” and that the current march toward privatization, shutting down neighborhood schools, and a myopic focus on unreliable and reductive basic skills standardized tests are weakening that democratic society.

Education policy today is prodded more than ever by foundations (especially the Gates and Broad Foundations) whose largesse comes with strings attached. These foundations are accountable to no one and their preconditions for funding can be misguided and even destructive.

One example: The Gates Foundation’s $2 billion fixation from 2000 to 2008 on restructuring high schools that affected 2,600 schools in forty-five states and Washington, D.C. Ravitch writes:

“It was never obvious why the Gates Foundation  decided that school size was the one critical reform most needed to improve American education. Both state and national tests showed that large numbers of students were starting high school without mastering basic skills… the root causes of poor achievement lie not in the high schools, but in the earlier grades…”

The massive small schools initiative by the Gates Foundation was disastrous, and discontinued. Many community high schools were irreversibly closed. Gates turned to pumping money into “advocacy” and quickly had big bucks invested in virtually every major education policy organization and publication around. (Ravitch includes a staggering list with accompanying dollar amounts.) They own everybody. When I was invited to the (now-defunct) Gates-funded Strong American Schools’ one-day “Ed in ’08 Blogger Summit” in Washington, they put me— a twenty-seven year-old teacher— up in a swank Kimpton hotel for two nights. At the time my ears were wide open to whatever Strong American Schools wanted to tell me about their platforms.

Regrettably, the foundations’ education initiatives— practically all based on corporate-style privatization and a deification of data— aren’t necessarily helping kids prepare for the world beyond school. Quite the opposite, Ravitch argues.

What’s more alarming is that the power-brokers on both sides of the aisle in Washington are parroting this privatization mantra. During the presidential transition, editorial boards howled with disgust that President Obama might select Linda Darling-Hammond— someone who defended teachers’ right to collective bargaining and had criticized Teach For America’s ability to rescue public education— as Education Secretary. They claimed she was not a “reformer,” because she did not tout charter schools, anti-unionism, and merit pay based on high-stakes test scores. The editorial boards got their way, and since then, Secretary Duncan and President Obama have joined the torrent of “reformer” voices conflating test scores with achievement. Ravitch argues that a total faith in data is misplaced in public schools. It’s easy but wrong to think you can measure “value-added” for students based on year-to-year proficiency tests.

Ravitch’s chapter of No Child Left Behind is terrifying. She describes curriculum distortion and excessive focus on testing, but her fiercest critique is aimed at the law’s impossible goal of 100% proficiency for all students in the year 2014. Each year, every school’s benchmark for achieving “Adequate Yearly Progress” will go up until it hits 100% in four years. We’re not going to make it. Each year, more and more schools fail to meet AYP. In Washington, D.C., 49 made it last year. This year it’s only 15. By 2014, maybe it will be just one or two. All the rest can be cleaned out.

The consequences of not meeting this ludicrous, politically concocted dream are terrifying; all schools will be subject to takeover and privatization. There’s no evidence private entities can run existing schools better; in fact there’s plenty of evidence suggesting otherwise. It’s a set-up for failure, destruction of public education, and a wild west landscape for profit-seeking carpet-baggers.

What do vulnerable students really need to get ahead? Not the “reforms” of today that empower any outsider to crunch data and clean house. I’m pleased that the book is still selling briskly—Amazon ranks it #483 overall and #1 in education policy as I write this. I hope that the messages of this book reach everyone holding a stake in public education, a system Ravitch compellingly portrays as poised for execution.

When Waiting
for Superman rolls
out in cineplexes across the country this September, many moviegoers will leave
their theaters convinced that teachers’ unions are criminally responsible for
building and defending a bureaucracy that denies many students a good
education. The only recourse, audiences will conclude, is both to eliminate
teachers’ unions and to look to privately run charter schools, the only beacons
of hope for the vulnerable kids in the movie.

I like
charter schools. I teach at one that is singled out and celebrated in Waiting
for Superman, and
I give that charter school my blood, sweat, and tears. I’m not a member of a
teachers’ union.

However,
liking my charter school (and many other good ones) doesn’t mean that it’s a
good idea to make the expansion of charter schools the centerpiece of education
reform in America. Charter schools are little islands. Like other kinds of
private companies, plenty are terrible and shouldn’t be in business. Also like
other kinds of private companies, they aren’t scaleable enough to meet the
needs of enough students to truly take over public education— the way Waiting
for Superman
guides us to believe it must. 

Some
numbers: There are about 55
million K-12 students in the U.S. Only about 1,536,000 are enrolled in
charter schools. That’s 2.8% of all students.

KIPP, the charter school network
famously started by two Teach for America teachers, is everywhere in the education
media. Bill Gates is a
huge fan.  KIPP has 82 schools
serving about 21,000 pupils. 
That’s great news for those 21,000 students. It also leaves out 99.96%
of American students. The answer is not to multiply KIPP or a similar private
model. It's not scaleable.

There’s
no special educational magic in non-unionized business models for schools. What
makes schools work is an ability to provide what students need. 

Students
need the following things: a safe and stable environment for working hard and
taking risks, appropriately rigorous academics, a sense of belonging, exposure
to new ideas, LOTS of reading, individualized opportunities (conferences with
teachers, counselors, and tutors), and teachers who are competent, supported,
and accountable. Extensive standardized test prep is not on the list.

These things can and do exist in public schools across the
country.  Pressing a pro-charter/
anti-public school ideology doesn’t help our nationwide need for mass
improvement in schools. The just-released “Evaluation of
Charter School Impacts” by the National Center for Education Evaluation and
Regional Assistance, a branch of the U.S. Department of Education, found: “On
average, charter middle schools that hold lotteries are neither more nor less
successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement,
behavior, and school progress.”

Many
members of the power class (Waiting for Superman director Davis Guggenheim, pop
star John
Legend) support individual charter schools and can point to inspiring work.
That doesn’t mean it can or should sweep out the infrastructure and human
capital in our public system.

Last
month in the Washington Post, principal and executive director of the Forum for
Education and Democracy George Wood explained
it best when he spelled out how his school improved over his 18-year
tenure. I wish Wood’s ideas got airtime in Waiting for Superman and in the national discourse.
His points speak so concisely that I don’t want to edit them:

For the past 18 years I have worked as a high
school/middle school principal alongside a dedicated staff and a community
committed to improving a school.

In that time we have increased graduation and
college going rates, engaged our students in more internships and college
courses, created an advisory system that keeps tabs on all of our students, and
developed the highest graduation standards in the state (including a Senior
Project and Graduation Portfolio).

But reading the popular press, and listening to the
chatter from Washington, I have just found out that we are not part of the
movement to ‘reform’ schools.

You see, we did not do all the stuff that the new
‘reformers’ think is vital to improve our schools. We did not fire the staff,
eliminate tenure, or pay teachers based on student test scores. We did not
become a charter school. We did not take away control from a locally elected
school board and give it to a mayor. We did not bring in a bunch of two-year
short-term teachers.

Nope, we did not do any of these things. Because we
knew they would not work.

There is no evidence that firing staffs and using
the turn around strategies that failed when Education Secretary Arne Duncan was
in charge of Chicago’s schools is suddenly going to work (here’s the evaluation from Duncan’s supervisors).

Tying teacher pay and tenure to scores on the
current batch of narrowly constructed tests has never worked and will not work
now, as Thomas Hilton, former researcher at the Educational
Testing Service notes.

Charter schools do not do any better than good old
public schools. And there is no evidence that eliminating democratic
involvement with our schools through elected school boards improves educational
opportunities for kids.

While I applaud the commitment of the young people
who see programs such as Teach for America as a way to serve the nation, it is
a shame that we think the best we can do for kids in our most challenged
communities is a steady diet of inexperienced short term teachers. (And it
might not be all that effective, according to a new report examining the academic achievement
of students under the instruction of TFA staff.)

So would somebody please explain to me why the new
reform agenda is made up of so many unproven or failed strategies?

Everywhere I turn the mantra is the same—fire
teachers, close schools, start charters.

Even from people who should know better.

One more thing, I also find it interesting that
some of the more powerful pushers of these ideas are the so-called titans of
Wall Street—the Broad Foundation, Bill Gates of late, and Democrats for
Education Reform (a bunch of well-funded venture capitalists). Hey, private
capital did such a great job with the economy (and oil wells), why not turn
over our public schools to them?

While legislators and opinion writers seem to have
drunk deeply from the ‘reform’ Kool-Aid, I believe the people who work with
kids at the school level know better.

What we know is this: To turn around a school and
keep that success going requires a commitment to staff development and teacher
support. You cannot just keep hiring rookie teachers or threaten veteran
teachers with ‘death by test scores’ and hope somehow to create a culture of
learning and engagement.

At our school we rely on weekly if not daily staff
development activities, school wide learning strategies, and staff evaluation
focused on improving instruction and cultivating the leadership skills of
teachers to help and coach their colleagues.

There is no incentive linking pay to performance or
threats of termination; rather we rely on collaboration and the collective
wisdom of the teaching staff to improve student achievement.

Ensuring that every young person learns means
constant reassessment of the curriculum, multiple measures of student
achievement, and support systems throughout the school.

We cannot rely on the archaic standardized tests we
use today to judge student learning as they dumb down and narrow curriculum.
And we must make sure that every student has equal access to the conditions to
learn in every school.

For every student rise to his/her potential we must
use our communities, through internships, mentoring, and, yes, school boards
that hold educators accountable to the local community.

I know this is no longer thought of as reform. And
as I get ready to shake the sweaty hands of my 18th graduating class, I have to
admit to being part of the educational establishment.

But would somebody please explain to me how the
success of my staff, and many schools just like ours, is no longer of value to
a nation that seems to still want a good public education system?

Maybe we
just don’t have a good press agent.

While the world helplessly watches the consequences of BP’s astonishing recklessness and skewed priorities in the Gulf, similar corporate-owned nightmares are playing out in education.

This week, Florida offered the mind-boggling announcement that its testing contractor for the high-stakes, all-important FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) is totally incompetent. NCS Pearson will be six weeks late in delivering test results, meaning that the scores will come after the end of the school year.

Bummer for the students and teachers who focused all year on test-score-related goals. As Broward Schools Superintendent Jim Notter put it: “Think of the angst our kids go through just to sit down to take the test. Now all of a sudden it's likely that they're going to be on summer recess before their scores come back.”

Here’s another hand-wringer, with both the state and the contractor responsible:

In order to save money, the state opted to have the writing exams graded by one judge instead of two.

The tests are graded on a 1-6 scale; a 3.5 is needed in order to pass. Graders are only allowed to assign whole numbers. With two graders, the scores would be averaged. Last year, more than a third of students statewide received half-number scores, records show.

But under the new system, with only whole-number scores, results were skewed.

``There is something critically flawed with having a proficiency level that is impossible to attain,'' Carvalho said.

The whole number issue is not the only thing that’s critically wrong here. Todd Farley, the renegade test-industry-insider/author of Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry responded appropriately:

[N]ow decisions about student writing are being made based on the snap decision of only one newly-hired and lowly-paid temporary employee, instead of the  minimum of two that historically used to read the essays… with only one reader, there can be no statistical reliability of any kind regarding these results.  There can only be blind faith in the pure motives of a for-profit company.  Yeah, let's allow those guys to make decisions about American students, teachers, and schools.

It’s a freak-out-worthy scenario. And remember, this is happening in Florida, the state that came within a hair’s breadth of enacting a law tying teachers’ jobs almost solely to test scores. (An eleventh-hour veto from Gov. Charlie Crist, at just the right moment for his political career, was the only thing stopping NCS Pearson from effectively wielding total control over teachers’ jobs.

The problem is not just in Florida. As Van Jones pointed out on this week’s Real Time with Bill Maher, when you see one cockroach, you know there are a thousand just barely out of sight. Today’s New York Post reports on brazen score inflation in New York State math exams. Carl Campanile and Susan Edelman report:

[S]tudents got "partial credit" for wrong answers after failing to correctly add, subtract, multiply and divide. Some got credit for no answer at all.

"They were giving credit for blatantly wrong things," said an outraged Brooklyn teacher who was among those hired to score the fourth-grade test.

What a farce. But what’s the way out? We’re addicted to BP’s oil, and we’re addicted to high-stakes testing. In his column today, Jay Mathews sighs: “Test scores will deliver the final verdict [on the success of school reforms], as far as the public is concerned. Tests are flawed measures, but they are pretty much all we have.”

There’s accountability and assessment beyond corporate-controlled high-stakes testing. This year my school implemented “presentations of learning,” an Essential Schools-inspired performance-based assessment. Each student collected evidence of learning from throughout the year and shared it in a 45-minute presentation accompanied by a well-organized binder. It was impossible for a student to fake his way through it. Between a student’s grades, his teachers’ comments, a portfolio of work products, the presentation of learning, and—yes— some test scores, one could see a truly authentic picture of the student’s learning and growth.

This is the tip of the iceberg. Many organizations, with the National Center for Fair and Open Testing as a leader, have been developing quality authentic assessments for years.

Tests aren’t all we have. Edu-corporations aren’t indispensable.

Let’s wake up from these corporate nightmares and make some changes.

The second part of the MetLife Survey of the American Teacher, focusing on student achievement, is out, and it’s a compelling read. Most notably for me, the survey digs into how students and educators view post-secondary education.

I’ve jumped into the ideology of college for all. It’s a high and important aim to set early. Jared Bernstein, chief economist of Vice President Biden, pushed me over the edge. Mr. Bernstein visited my students earlier this year and distributed a simple bar graph titled “Learn More, Earn More.” The stark numbers on how education pays were eye-opening to many of the juniors and seniors. Here are the average American salaries based on levels on education:

$20,246 – High school dropout

$27,963 – High school graduate

$48, 097 – College graduate

$58,522 – Masters Degree

$87,775 – Professional Degree

This was news to students at my college-prep DC charter school. If they don’t know about the concrete financial rewards of education, then their counterparts around the country in less college-prep-intensive environments surely don’t.

They need to. As the Survey points out, “An estimated 85% of current jobs and nearly 90% of fast growing and well paying jobs depend on some form of postsecondary education.”

College is crucial. It’s a jolt to read in the Survey related that only 50% of teachers expect that their students will attend a two- or four-year college. If this is still the case in ten years, that will be very sad. We need to put in place the structures (early reading initiatives, intimate learning environments, personal connections to positive role models, substantive college counseling…) to place young people on what Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada calls “a conveyor belt” to college. Students can’t afford not to go. The disparity in wages between a high school grad and a college grad over a forty-year career approaches a million dollars. That million dollar boost from a college degree represents the chasm between a middle-class life and a life that is often one misstep away from catastrophe.

It’s also alarming that while only half of teachers expect their students to attend college, 79% of students say they plan to go. (Sixty-nine percent have a four-year college program in their sights.) Why the disconnection between teachers’ expectations and students’ hopes? It’s easy for critics to leap on teachers for a “soft bigotry of low expectations,” as George W. Bush put it. Brash rhetoric, though, doesn’t change the reality that not all students today demonstrate the basic tools (time-management, fundamental reading/writing skills, self-advocacy, personal responsibility, etc.) to succeed in college.

However, students’ tools are not immutable. For example, a tenth-grader who rarely submits assignments and mouths off in ugly ways to her teachers may, by graduation, pull together the skills and motivation needed to go after the right carrot. I have massive reservations about some of my students’ abilities to handle the academic rigor and independence of college life. However, I try to press forward with my school community with the goal that we can right the ship and minimize the collateral damage of lost time. Metamorphoses can occur. I expect 90% or more of my 11th and 12th-grade students to go to college. I expect almost all of them to finish. Are my expectations legitimate or fantasy? The Washington Post tells me that only 9% of D.C. high school freshman graduate from college.

College graduation rates may be the strongest indicator for America’s economic future, and I think White House economist Jared Bernstein agrees. It’s time to make college readiness a centerpiece in all of our country’s schools. As the Survey points out, gaps between students’ plans and teachers’ expectations may be perpetuating an underachieving cycle that needs breaking.

Finland
has an education system with its priorities in the right places and the results
to match. It’s time for our leadership to take a look over there and say, “Yes!
I’ll have what they’re having.”

Linda Darling-Hammond’s indispensable new book The
Flat World and Education profiles three
countries-Finland, Korea, and Singapore— that had struggling education systems in the 1970s
but have aggressively revamped them into superior national systems. I plan to blog more on
Darling-Hammond’s opus, but for now, I want to focus on Finland.

Finland has much to teach us, if only we pay
attention. They didn’t arrive at an equitable, world-class system through our
current measures of privatization or accountability via high-stakes testing.
The Education
System of Finland’s website spells out its mission in a way that starkly
differs from ours. (In fact, I couldn’t find any corresponding mission
statement on the U.S. Department of Education site—
only endless links and a blog.)

Here are a few highlights from Finland:

Competent teachers On all school levels, teachers are highly
qualified and committed. Master’s degree is a requirement, and teacher
education includes teaching practice. Teaching profession is very popular in
Finland, and hence universities can select the most motivated and talented
applicants. Teachers work independently and enjoy full autonomy in the
classroom. 

This is the ace. What isn’t even mentioned is that
all teacher training and degrees are fully paid for by the government, making
teaching a competitive and attractive profession. Endless research points to
quality teachers in every classroom as the most crucial helper for students;
Finland actually invests in making that happen. In the U.S.’s fragmented
system, so many teachers enter the classroom with minimal training, heavy
student load debt, and a sink-or-swim attitude from their school leaders.
Naturally, many would-be competent teachers decide not to even bother. Finland
doesn’t have a teacher turnover crisis; quite the contrary, they have a
well-trained, highly talented corps of teachers. This is excellence— although I
can already anticipate loud, insipid criticism from the American right about
government-supported teacher training as a recipe for socialist indoctrination.
We need to get over ourselves and realize that investing in teacher training is
not optional for developing a sustainable, robust school system. We don’t have
that now and it’s killing us.

Encouraging assessment and evaluation The student assessment and evaluation of
education and learning outcomes are encouraging and supportive by nature. The
aim is to produce information that supports both schools and students to
develop. National testing, school ranking lists and inspection systems do not
exist.

The last line is clearly a knock at the U.S.’s
ideological march toward high-stakes testing as the sole relevant indicator of
student and school achievement. We need to shake off the addiction to
corporate-assembled tests for our students, and pay attention to implementing
rigorous assessments that support, not deaden, kids’ interest in education.

Significance of education in society Finnish society strongly favours education and
the population is highly educated by international standards. Education is
appreciated and there is a broad political consensus on education policy. 

Darling-Hammond mentions an American tradition of
under-investing in preparation. President Obama has committed unprecedented
billions to education in his Race to the Top program, but the money is tied to
the reforms du jour of tying teacher
evaluations to test scores and green-lighting more charter schools. In effect,
we’ll get more testing (and practice testing) and more privatization. So much
high-stakes testing sucks the soul out of education and charter schools are interesting
innovations at the fringes of the system. We cannot privatize our way to a
world-class education system that serves all American students. We need a
dramatic, bipartisan re-commitment to education. Finland did this, and we can
see where it got them— number-one status.

My long-distance love affair with Finland continues: it is
ranked by Forbes as the second-happiest
country in the world. (Side note: it has a single-payer public health care
system and 88% of
its citizens are satisfied with it. The EU national average for health care
satisfaction is 41%.)

Perhaps the U.S./Finland contrast is best elucidated by
Finnish policy analyst Pasi Sahlberg, who is cited in depth by Darling-Hammond:

The [No Child Left Behind] legislation… has led to
fragmentation in instruction, further interventions uncoordinated with the
basic classroom teaching, and more poorly-trained tutors working with students
and teachers. As a consequence, schools have experienced too many instructional
directions for any student, with an increase in unethical behaviors and a loss
of continuity in instruction and systematic school improvement. The difference
between this and the Finnish approach is notable: The Finns have worked
systematically over 35 years to make sure that competent professionals who can
craft the best learning conditions for all students are in all schools, rather
than thinking that standardized instruction and related testing can be brought
in at the last minute to improve student learning and turn around failing
schools.

Much of Darling-Hammond’s examination of Finland can be found
here
in a 2009 article for Voices in Urban Education, but I recommend getting the book. We’d be fools to ignore what
really works on a national level.