During the 2008 election, some Americans were encouraged to worry about a candidate who pals around with terrorists. Others, education reformers of a certain stripe, seemed more concerned about a candidate who palled around with Linda Darling-Hammond.
“Whether one wants to believe it or not, she spent 2008 shaping the President-elect’s thinking on education and the policies that made up his education platform,” notes Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards. That earned the Stanford professor, tapped as Barack Obama’s education transition chief, the #2 slot on our list of the most influential people in education in 2008 as judged by our panel of edupundits.
The end of the campaign only intensified the angst felt in some reform circles as the fight over the Democratic Party’s educational soul grew hotter. “The reform community is scared to death,” Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, told The New Republic. In the weeks before Chicago’s Arne Duncan was tapped to be Education Secretary, Darling-Hammond became a lightning rod, the poster girl for what David Brooks of the New York Times described as “the establishment view” of education policy. The Wall Street Journal described Darling-Hammond as “a union favorite, a vocal supporter of traditional certification [and] a fierce critic of Teach for America and other successful alternative certification programs.”
However, veteran teacher Nancy Flanagan, author of the Teacher in a Strange Land blog, observes that “in the world of academe, Darling-Hammond is high-profile, but fairly middle of the road.” She became a familiar name to millions in 2008, Flanagan notes, ”unfortunately, some of what they “know” about Linda Darling-Hammond is third-hand and at best partially correct. She represents the battle over two enormous issues in the field–What is effective teaching? How do we make more good teachers?” Darling-Hammond addressed both issues in a recent Newsweek interview:
“Other countries put a lot of energy into recruiting the best and the brightest into teaching, training them very intensely, making sure they have professional training. They undoubtedly have ways to get rid of incompetent teachers, but they put a lot of effort on how to be sure that the teachers are competent in the first place. In this country, I’ve been advocating for a long time, how do we get teachers that are highly competent in the first place. If we’re thinking about what we need to do to be competitive with other nations, we need to be thinking about building a supply of great teachers and continually improving their skills, rather than only focusing on the bad teachers when we haven’t helped them learn how to be good.”
That sounds not unlike Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, who put Darling-Hammond close to the top of his 2008 ballot. Educators concerned about curriculum narrowing in the NCLB -era will also surely be cheered to hear Darling-Hammond’s comment in the same Newsweek interview about America’s poor showing in the recent TIMSS study. “We’re not even teaching science in a lot of elementary schools, much less the kind of science that other countries are teaching,” she said. ”When I went to Singapore, at every grade level in every classroom in every school I visited, kids were coming up to show the experiments they’d designed and conducted. High-achieving countries are making sure their kids can be the inventors and engineers of the future. We have to really redouble our efforts.”
Pre-Obama, if Darling-Hammond was well-known for anything outside of narrow corridors of the academy, it was for her criticism of Teach for America. That alone was sufficient to temper enthusiasm for Barack Obama among many in education reform, including Washington, DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who admitted she voted for Obama only reluctantly. “What’s disappointing is the fact that Darling-Hammond is a staunch opponent of TFA and other alternative programs,” Rhee told The New Republic. “We get many of our best teachers through those routes. Somebody who’s coming into this with thoughts about shutting those down is extremely problematic.”
Accountability hawks seem to be making their peace with her. “Darling-Hammond has spent a lot of time studying the teaching and testing systems of high achieving industrialized countries and likes them better than ours,” Education Sector’s Thomas Toch wrote recently at The Quick and The Ed.
Among other things, she says, they teach fewer topics in greater depth; focus more on reasoning skills and applications of knowledge rather than on coverage of content; and rely heavily on open-ended questions “that require students to analyze, apply knowledge, and write extensively,” in contrast to US tests that “rely primarily on multiple-choice items that evaluate recall and recognition of discreet facts.” She’s right about that.
Darling-Hammond has also spoken and written extensively in favor of performance assessments over simple multiple-choice tests, another potential flashpoint. “So, if Barack Obama gives Linda Darling Hammond a major role in his administration,” Toch concluded, “we’re going to have a big policy debate over testing in American education and whether we should move beyond NCLB accountability to something potentially very different. Such a debate wouldn’t be a bad thing.”
Darling-Hammond seems to be viewed as not a bad thing among teachers, either. “She has a great deal to offer as a reformer, not a smasher, of the American school system,” wrote teacher-blogger Dan Brown. Adds Corey Bunje Bower, who blogs at Thoughts on Education Policy, “I’ve never seen anybody hated so much for so little.” Diane Ravitch, another whose reformist credentials are in good order, sounded a similar tone on her Bridging Differences blog.
“Many years ago, Linda Darling-Hammond and I were colleagues at Teachers College. We sometimes crossed swords over issues, but I always found her to be smart, thoughtful, and deeply devoted to the well-being of teachers and children. I don’t think that makes her a leader of the “status quo” crowd. I have always thought that she is above all interested in improving schools, helping teachers, and doing right by kids. What’s wrong with that?
What indeed?
I agree that there is absolutely no cause for vilifying Linda Darling-Hammond or associating her with the “status quo.” But I am uncomfortable with some of her ideas and her manner of presenting them.
I watched a video in which she discusses “social-emotional learning.” She made it seem that teachers are and should be socially inclined and that schools should be highly social places–places of conversation and collaboration, for the education of the “whole child.” The “factory model” is still prevalent, she says, and we need to fight that. She praises education programs for integrating social-emotional learning into many of its courses.
There is a fragment of truth to all of this–but she seems to mistake it for a whole encompassing truth. She apparently sees social-emotional learning as an unequivocal good and a top priority for any school or classroom. She forgets another side to learning, a side that is solitary, quiet, and private. She forgets that much learning requires focus and sustained thought. She forgets that the group work in ed school is often superficial and dogmatic: they put the teachers in groups to have them in groups, so that they will then believe in groups and put their students in groups.
She makes the mistake that many self-appointed reformers make, regardless of political inclination. By stereotyping the “traditional” school as a “factory model,” she proposes a “new” model that is just as distorted as the “old.” If there were nuance in her argument, if she recognized that education was not only social, if she acknowledged the possible pitfalls of so much talk and groupwork, I would perhaps have more sympathy for her ideas. When I watch the video, I not only disagree with her, but see too much certainty in her manner, too much belief in a partial truth. (I do keep in mind that it is just a video, and that videos are by nature skewed.)
In any case, the charge of “status quo” is not only wrong but absurd. She clearly wants to bring positive change to schools, and is looking at schools around the world for inspiration. Moreover, what is so bad about “status quo”? Who doesn’t have a bit of stake in some aspect or other of the “status quo”? Come on. Without a bit of “status quo” in our lives, we would be spinning on a merry-go-round of change, failing to recognize the familiar objects and faces as we fly by.
A lighter note on the status quo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIv5uwSKu88
And yet, most educational theorists (Dewey, Vygotsky, Bronfenbrenner, Freire, just to name a few) believe that there is a profound social component to learning. And the “status quo” insists on removing socially and emotionally unfit students from regular classrooms.
Thanks to Diana Senechal for the link to the video in the above comment. The name of Linda Darling-Hammond, so far as I can remember, was unknown to me until recently, so I have been wondering just what she has to say. Until I watched this video about all I knew about her was that she was education advisor to Obama, and a professor of education at Stanford, and was being considered for Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. It’s that second item that seemed most relevant to me. Being a professor of education, in my humble opinion, is not a good qualification for being named Secretary of Education.
It appears that some controversy about her centers on the question of whether she represents the status quo or whether she is a reformer. I wouldn’t know the answer to that, at least in conventional terms. But from my perspective it doesn’t matter. It’s a false dichotomy. Or rather it would be a false dichotomy if either of those terms, status quo or reformer, had any real substance.
I would argue that there are several things that could go under the name of status quo. The teacher who ignores the educational fads, closes the classroom door, and teaches to the best of his or her ability, can be called status quo. But there is also a good reason to call the teacher who religiously adopts every newly minted educational fad the status quo. Every newly minted educational fad is a rehash of some old progressive education idea of as much as a hundred years ago. “Reform” is the status quo. It has been for a hundred years. “Reform” has always been advocated by progressive education, and the nature of that reform has not changed much in substance over the years. Of course new vocabulary comes out regularly.
But obviously many things can go under the name of “reform”, some of which I would certainly favor. Unfortunately in far too many cases the term is left vague.
I agree that we should not vilify LDH, or education professors in general, but that does not mean we should not criticize them. It does not mean that we should not vigorously challenge some of their basic premises. It does not mean we should not call for the end of credentialing as we know it. I might be accused of vilifying education professors in my article, A Personal Indictment Of Ed School . I prefer to think I have challenged some basic premises. The above mentioned video gives me reason to apply the usual ed school criticism to LDH.
There is much that she says in the video that few would disagree with. She says that schools need to be “developmentally healthy places.” She says “Schools need to be places where strong relationships can form.” She notes that much of the basic pattern of schooling has not changed in the last century. But, at least in this video, she does not advance beyond generalities and platitudes. She commits the usual ed school sins. She talks about teaching the “whole child”. She speaks of the “factory model”. She extols the virtues of collaborative learning and project learning. All these ideas, with some difference in vocabulary, were developed early in the last century. All these ideas have some merit, and some limitations and disadvantages. To derive the benefit of these ideas, and avoid the limitations and disadvantages, these ideas must be developed, and they must conform to reality. That means we’ve got to see how they work out in actual practice.
Take group work as an illustration. Progressive teachers say it’s good. But there are problems. The essential problem with group work is that group work normally dilutes individual effort. I have experienced this many times myself. I remember experiencing it in early elementary school. There can be “additive groups”, where the group combines the strengths of the individual members. But there can also be “subtractive groups”, where the group combines the weakness of the individual members. It’s hard to get a group to really function together effectively. Frustration in groups is common, at least for the more conscientious and capable members of groups. It is frustrating to have to settle for mediocrity, which happens all the time in groups. It is frustrating to have to do all the work yourself, which also happens all the time in groups. Group effort, except in rather special cases, dilutes individual effort. Until advocates of group work recognize that and effectively deal with it, they have not progressed from the 1920’s.
Another ed school sin can be called the “program fallacy”, which can be stated, “if we don’t have a program for something, we’re not doing that something.” LDH lets the assumption stand that if we are not actively promoting social and emotional learning, in her terms, then we are doing nothing, and care nothing, for social and emotional learning. By this perspective the elementary teachers I had in the 1950’s did nothing and cared nothing for my social and emotional learning. I would disagree.
This is not to say that I can give an immediate, accurate, and comprehensive analysis of what teachers did in the 1950’s to promote social and emotional learning. It is to say that we need to look at the nitty gritty of teaching and learning. We need to accurately and comprehensively describe and analyze actual practice of actual teachers. We need to look at what is. We have done quite enough pontificating on what should be.
The essential ed school sin, in my humble opinion, is that the field of education has taken ideology, not inquiry, as its foundational basis. That is the main thesis in my article I mentioned above. In this video LDH gives me no reason to believe there is any change in that.
Of course, I do not know that this one video is a fair representation of what she advocates and believes. I have even less reason to know that it is comprehensive. I understand she has written a number of books. Does she have some good ideas in these books? Does she develop them? Are they actually new? Are they actually advancements over previous ideas? In what ways? I’ll be glad to hear what others think.