Education’s oddest couple–Joel Klein and Al Sharpton–take to the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal to make a pitch for charters, choice and performance pay in an open letter to President-elect Obama.
Klein and Sharpton co-chair the Education Equality Project (EEP), whose signatories include future Ed Secretary Arne Duncan and a panoply of big city mayors and urban school superintendents. Their policy pitch argues in support of NCLB’s “core concept that schools should be held accountable for boosting student performance.” They also call for “expanding parental choice,” citing charter schools like KIPP (but no mention of vouchers). “Beyond expanding federal support for charter schools, as you have proposed,” say Klein and Sharpton, “we would urge you to press forward with two other, far-reaching policy reforms.”
First, the federal government, working with the governors, should develop national standards and assessments for student achievement. Our current state-by-state approach has spawned a race to the bottom, with many states dumbing down standards to make it easier for students to pass achievement tests. Even when students manage to graduate from today’s inner-city high schools, they all too frequently are still wholly unprepared for college or gainful employment.
Second, the federal government should take most of the more than $30 billion it now spends on K-12 education and reposition the funding to support the recruitment and retention of the best teachers in underserved urban schools. High-poverty urban schools have many teachers who make heroic efforts to educate their students. But there is no reward for excellence in inner-city schools when an outstanding science teacher earns the same salary as a mediocre phys-ed instructor.
Meanwhile the Washington Post runs advice for Arne Duncan today from Diane Ravitch, who writes that NCLB “has turned our schools into testing factories, narrowed the curriculum to the detriment of everything other than reading and math, and prompted states to claim phony test score gains. The law’s remedies don’t work. The law’s sanctions don’t work.” Ravitch also flatly calls the goal of universal proficiency by 2014 “ludicrous.” No nation or state has ever reached it,” sayseducations preeminent historian.
Mr. Secretary, use your bully pulpit to scrap this ineffective set of mandates. And when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is reauthorized, as it must be, insist that schools are accountable not only for educating their students in history, science, literature, civics, and the arts, but for safeguarding their health and development.
Robert, serve as translator for Diane R.
NCLB tries to insist that schools are accountable for reading and math.
She wants to eliminate that effort at accountability.
Then reintroduce accountability for both those things, then add in history, science, lit, arts, civics, health, and “development”?
Huh?
I’ll ask Diane to speak for herself, but I don’t see those things as contradictory. For example, I think of myself as very much pro-accountability, and I don’t object to testing. The trouble is, at the elementary school level, the accountability/testing tail is wagging the educational dog. Testing has become the raison d’etre for too many schools, and the schools where kids most desperately need a well-rounded education (low-SES, urban schools) typically seem the ones most likely to reduce the curriculum to pure math and ELA in reaction to the tests.
Dan Willingham’s latest video makes the point that curriculum narrowing is is the enemy of reading achievement, and he presents a jaw-dropping stat: only 4% of first-grade classroom time is spend on science; 2% on social studies. But I don’t think it is widely understood that eliminating core subjects from the elementary curriculum is the gift that keeps on taking. We think we’re doing a good job by boosting ELA time. Even schools who “get it” seem to ramp up the ELA time and break out the Kaplan workbooks when the tests roll around.
So until we learn the lesson that more time on test prep and reading strategies is not going to boost reading achievement, I think there are very good reasons to see the narrow focus on reading and math testing under NCLB as a cure that is worse than the disease. The best solution I’ve seen proposed is to write reading tests where the reading passages will be about content covered by state standards. In short, create tests worth teaching to. Do that, and my enthusiasm for reading tests will go up. So too, I think, will reading scores.
Robert,
“…the schools where kids most desperately need a well-rounded education (low-SES, urban schools) typically seem the ones most likely to reduce the curriculum to pure math and ELA in reaction to the tests.”
Aren’t these the schools that for years were notorious for grade inflation and social promotions? Weren’t they the same schools social policy experts targeted for education reform? These are also the same schools No Child Left Behind was designed to address.
Many of these schools which produced deplorable results prior to education reform, required academic triage and almost all have concluded math and ELA were their top priorities. In order for these schools to provide a “well-rounded” education, they decided to first provide a basic education, where they believed prioritizing mathematics and reading came first.
In a six hour day, and a hundred eighty day school year, teachers in these schools concluded within these parameters they better get as much of the basics in as time permits.
I realize it is not congruent with the way things are done in Core Knowledge schools but I’m not totally convinced what they’re doing can’t also be construed as a genuine attempt to rectify a legacied disaster.
Fair points all, Paul. I hope what I said was in no way suggesting that NCLB created lousy schools. Just lousy in a different way. The school where I taught was the lowest scoring elementary school in the lowest scoring district in NYC the year NCLB became law. And unlike others, I didn’t (still don’t) see NCLB as a stalking horse for privatization. I think it was well-intentioned policy that has had too many unintended consequences. The one that concerns me most is curriculum narrowing because it’s self-defeating.
I would also dispute (nicely, politely, but firmly) your suggestion that there is a difference between a “basic” education and a “well-rounded” one. A basic education IS well rounded. That false dichotomy is why NCLB has run upon the rocks. It forced otherwise sensible people to view basics as nonessential. In communities where out of school hours are not filled with enrichment, this is fatal.
Back to my school. The sense of urgency created by accountability –again, which I support in principal — led to test scores, if memory serves, going from 16% on or above grade level in 2002 to somewhere in the 30s, five years later. Big success right? Funny, it didn’t feel that way. It felt as if we’d crawled out of the toilet and achieved the ability to peer over the rim. It was still not a fit place for anyone’s children. And instructional time given to subjects other than ELA and Math was essentially zero.
I’m still sympathetic to the overarching aims of NCLB. But let’s not blind ourselves to its faults either.
For all the time devoted to ELA under NCLB, the “Balanced Literacy” approach has stood in the way of sound instruction. This approach demands a focus on reading strategies, as Robert has mentioned. In other words, your lesson is not supposed to focus on the intrinsic qualities of a story or the logical structure of an essay; instead, you are supposed to teach a general skill or strategy such as “finding the main idea” or “making an inference,” using the text at hand as an example. Then the students go off into their groups to apply the same strategy to texts of their choice (or leveled texts assigned to them).
This is misguided in a number of ways. For one thing, a good text holds more than such a minilesson will reveal. The teacher should be able to delve into it with the class, so that the students may see and understand more in it than they saw before. Also, it is important to know specific works well: to memorize and interpret poems, to read plays out loud, to tackle the riddle of a story or novel, to carry passages in your mind. You can’t do that with a strategy focus. Not to mention all the benefits of reading nonfiction carefully: coming to understand the topic better, learning the language of the subject, perceiving the gist of an argument, locating its tricky points or flaws.
Some might say, “Well, none of this is possible if you can’t read in the first place.” True. That’s the other big mistake of Balanced Literacy: its emphasis on the “whole language” approach. Students don’t learn to decode when they should. They learn to use a lot of picture clues, context clues, etc. just to figure out what the word is. They need a good grasp of phonics, spelling, and grammar. Balanced Literacy allows for some of this, but not nearly enough. Also, in Balanced Literacy the teacher is told not to correct the student explicitly. Corrections supposedly “inhibit” the budding writer. And god forbid you use a red pen!
Take a specific, challenging, interesting, and beautiful curriculum in language and literature (like that of CK or similar). Combine that with reading in each subject, and you’ve got the material for solid literacy instruction and subject matter instruction. Then teach it in the way that suits the lesson best, be it drill, discussion, project, lecture mixed with activities, quiet reading, or another method. Let no one say, “you must use the workshop model” or “the students must always have a hands-on activity.” Teachers must have room to use good judgment and teach the material without impediment.
Diana Senechal
Robert,
Also, spot on with your experiences and comments. It’s simply a brutal road to recovery for these kids, their teachers, and their schools.
On my way out. I’ll attempt to expand later this afternoon.
I still struggle to understand the basic argument.
Pre-NCLB, inner-city schools delivered nothing – no literacy, no basics, and certainly none of the deeper content knowledge.
Then NCLB. Schools that would score, arguably, 20 out of 100 points on some random quality scale went up, on average, to 30 out of 100. Still brutally bad. Some stayed at 20. Waste-of-time “old” classes gave way to “waste-of-time” test prep.
Some schools, however, went from 20 to 40.
Can anyone defend a 30 out of 100 caliber school? Of course not.
Except to say that NCLB gives a framework for that 30 to go to 35…
And eliminating NCLB, and calling for the old way — claims of rich curriculum and deep evaluation measures and transparency (just like before), delivery of ABSOLUTELY none of it in a meaningful way (neither the curriculum, the accountability, or the transparency) — will push those schools back down to 20….
I don’t see that anyone’s calling for a return to the “old way,” Mike. Perhaps that’s where the disconnect is. It’s not a binary thing — NCLB or back to what was. Diane Ravitch emailed me with this comments, which I post with her permission:
“Mike should read E.D. Hirsch and he will understand that teaching skills alone is not sufficient. It is not good education. It is certainly antithetical to the principles of Core Knowledge, which recognize the value of science, history, the arts, literature,and other liberal studies as crucial beginning in the earliest years.”
Speaking of frameworks for improvement, I still think Diane was on to something when she suggested some months ago national assessments but no sanctions. Let every kid, coast-to-coast, take the same test. No more proficiency illusions with states racing each other to the bottom. Then, as she observed, if localities aren’t exercised enough to improve lousy schools, we have worse problems than ed policy can solve.
There happens to be “good research” that the Fed’s own Institute of Educational Sciences conducted and then swept under the rug.
The “Reading First Impact Study,” a $40 million study concluded:
“The study finds, on average, that after several years of funding the Reading First program, it has a
consistent positive effect on reading instruction yet no statistically significant impact on student reading
comprehension.”
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094038.asp
That’s like saying an impact study affected doctors but had no effect on patients. The “positive effects on reading instruction referred to” are largely that teachers are spending more time on EAL–crowding out other instruction, exactly as Diane and a lot of other people have reported.
The other relevant study is the “Haan Foundation Study,” a $10 million study of remedial reading instruction at Grades 3 and 5. It was hailed as the “largest and best educational experiment ever conducted.”
http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/disadv/title1interimreport/vol2.pdf
Essentially what the study found was that a year of instruction with the 4 “best” reading “interventions” didn’t teach kids to read at either grade 3 or 5. Even scarier is that several scores of the matched control groups that received “regular instruction” were actually worse at the end of the school year than at the beginning of the school year.
NCLB, like most other “educational reforms” has been a non-event. Text Publishers didn’t change their texts. They just declared that the texts suddenly became “research-based” Test Publishers didn’t change the practices of constructing instructionally insensitive tests. They just set arbitrary cut scores and termed them levels of “proficiency.”
That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s technically feasible to teach virtually all kids who can speak in full sentences and participate in everyday conversation how to read any text containing words within the kid’s vocabulary and to get the job done by Grade 2 for most kids and by Grade 3 for the rest.
If CK keeps developing its Reading Program, it will have one such alternative. Meanwhile, there are other alternatives.
But there are very powerful interests who are feeding on the status quo. The President, the Congress, and the public have received very faulty educational intelligence to date. Whether the President- and Congress- Elect will “change” remains to be seen. “Yes they can!” The question is whether “they will.”
Robert,
Sorry. It was a long day.
My earlier attempt to rationalize NCLB’s emphasis on math and reading was meant to suggest; many of these folks were not familiar with the CK philosophy or related disciples.
Pragmatically, many competent teachers can and do teach math and/or reading in their science or social science lessons. It’s not a big deal, as I’m sure you’re aware. Good schools also make certain the art, music, and phys ed teachers incorporate as much math and reading into their lessons as possible. It all helps. It celebrates the community in the school and lets kids know that everyone is rowing in the same direction.
The math and reading emphasis in many poor/minority urban schools is merely another negative by-product of a list of negatives which unfortunately emanated from NCLB.
I hope we don’t wind up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.