“We Must Break Free of the NCLB Mindset”

by Robert Pondiscio
April 5th, 2010

“We wasted eight years with the ‘measure and punish’ strategy of No Child Left Behind. Let’s not waste the next eight years,” writes Diane Ravitch in a  Washington Post op-ed piece.  Criticism among ed reform standard bearers of Ravitch’s book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, has largely centered on her lack of alternatives to accountability and school choice (as if there’s nothing to be gained from diagnosing the shortcomings of current preferred reform strategies).  Her Post piece lays out specific ideas to support her main thesis, that school improvement is a function of curriculum and instruction, not structural reforms.

To begin with, let’s agree that a good education encompasses far more than just basic skills. A good education involves learning history, geography, civics, the arts, science, literature and foreign language. Schools should be expected to teach these subjects even if students are not tested on them.

Everyone agrees that good education requires good teachers. To get good teachers, states should insist — and the federal government should demand — that all new teachers have a major in the subject they expect to teach or preferably a strong educational background in two subjects, such as mathematics and music or history and literature. Every state should expect teachers to pass a rigorous examination in the subjects they will teach, as well as a general examination to demonstrate their literacy and numeracy.

Ravitch also calls for principals and superintendents to bring instructional experience to their work, not merely managerial talent.  “The principal is expected to evaluate teachers,” she notes.  ”If the principal is not a master teacher, he or she will not be able to perform the most crucial functions of the job.”  Similarly, superintendents who are not experienced educators “will not be qualified to select the best principals or the best curricula for their districts,” she writes.

We should stop using the term “failing schools” to describe schools with low test scores, counsels Ravitch, who also says schools should only be closed in rare circumstances.  ”We must break free of the NCLB mind-set that makes accountability synonymous with punishment. As we seek to rebuild our education system, we must improve the schools where performance is poor, not punish them. If we are serious about school reform, we will look for long-term solutions, not quick fixes,” she concludes.

The Flawed Logic of Reform

by Robert Pondiscio
March 21st, 2010

Dan Willingham, having failed to receive the memo that ed reform is for policy wonks, not for people who, er, you know…work in education, has the temerity to wonder why people are so excited about proposed revisions to NCLB.  “The bedrock of the bill follows the flawed logic of No Child Left Behind,” Willingham writes at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog. In short, there’s a whole lot of describing what schools need to do — Raise test scores! Close achievement gaps! — and a whole lot of silence on how to do it.  Willingham writes:

To the extent that the plan includes any “how,” it’s primarily making someone else take on the job if it’s being done poorly. For failing schools, fire the principal and rehire some teachers, or turn it into a charter school. If schools can’t close the achievement gap, the state is to take over the school’s Title I funding. States have greater flexibility in how to intervene in troubled schools, which many see as positive. Again, this assumes that states know what to do.

Willingham is promising to weigh in with his proposed solutions next week.  He’d better include a heaping dose of non-curriculum prescriptions if he wants to get any love from policy types.  Witness some of the curious criticism Diane Ravitch has faced in response to her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System.  At the New Republic, Andy Rotherham says Ravitch’s book fails because it doesn’t offer a policy agenda, “outside of a call for better curriculum.”    Likewise, Kevin Carey criticizes Ravitch’s book as “painfully short on non-curricular ideas” to improve education, which is a bit like describing the armed services as “painfully short on non-military ideas to win battles.”

Ravitch: No U-Turn

by Guest Blogger
March 4th, 2010

by Diana Senechal

In The Death and Life of the Great American School System, as in her previous work, Diane Ravitch takes apart many education fads and clichés, and explains the changes in her views on testing, choice, and accountability. Now a cliche has arisen in the media about Ravitch herself: the assertion that she has made an “about-face,” a “U-turn,” or a “180-degree turn.” Reviewers, reporters, and bloggers have latched onto these phrases as though they were established truths.

As Ravitch’s research assistant, I had the great honor of reading her book many times prior to its publication and assisting with documentation and editing. In addition, I have read all the books she has written and some of those she has edited. In the spirit of her work, I will challenge the “about-face” bromide.

She has changed some views and retained others, and the change has not always been 180 degrees (sometimes more like 45, 90, or 115 degrees). Or perhaps, like many of us, she has several concentric circles, some staying still, others rotating. She has always been critical of rushed reforms and educational fads. She has always supported a strong, rich curriculum and warned about the pitfalls of standardized tests. And she has a profound understanding of the challenges that teachers have faced over the past century.

In chapters 18-20 of her first book, The Great School Wars (1974), Ravitch described how policymakers rushed to expand a reform model without adequate thought and planning. In the spring of 1914, NYC Mayor John Purroy Mitchel visited Gary, Indiana, to see the reorganized schools, where students spent the day in workshops in large spaces rather than classrooms. He liked what he saw and approved a pilot plan at a school in the Bronx, based on the Gary model. Soon afterward, a Brooklyn school was added.

Despite the skepticism (and, later, the scathing report) of Superintendent William Henry Maxwell, despite parent concerns about the weak curriculum, despite growing protests in the community, Mayor Mitchel insisted on expanding the plan throughout the city. “Why the haste to install the Gary plan?” Ravitch asks. “The Mitchel administration had decided that it was the answer to the problem of overcrowded schools and had stopped the school-construction program.” The expansion was both rushed and academically unsound—two recurring characteristics of reforms that Ravitch criticizes in her new book.

Throughout her career, Ravitch has repeatedly criticized the tendency of reformers to latch onto the newest educational idea without regard for the substance of a curriculum. In The Troubled Crusade (1983), and later, in Left Back (2000), she describes the curriculum revision movement of the early decades of the twentieth century: it typically began with an administrator learning that “his own school’s program, no matter how successful it might seem, was outmoded.” The efforts to bring the school in line with the times invariably destroyed the academic curriculum. In her latest book, too, she shows the futility of reforms that ignore the substance of learning.

Many assume that Ravitch was previously an ardent supporter of accountability and testing and has switched her views completely. But she has warned over the decades that standardized tests could narrow the curriculum. In her 1984 essay “The Uses and Misuses of Tests” (included in The Schools We Deserve), she observes:

Overreliance on standardized testing may be dangerous to the health of education. It is certainly dangerous to the integrity of the high school curriculum. The introduction of the SAT, which (in its verbal component) is curriculum free, left many high schools without a good argument for requiring students to take history, literature, science, or anything not specifically demanded by the college of their choice.

A decade later, after serving as assistant secretary of education, she wrote in National Standards in American Education (1995):

The SAT tested linguistic and mathematical power and had no connection to any particular curriculum, which left secondary schools free to require whatever they chose. The literature curriculum, which had been anchored by the college entrance examinations for many years, was completely abandoned by the SAT, allowing secondary schools to teach whatever books they wished and even to drop the traditional classics altogether.

Ravitch’s work shows compassion for teachers and understanding of their extraordinary responsibilities. In “Scapegoating the Teachers” (1983, in The Schools We Deserve) she points out that “the most common response to the current crisis in education has been to assail public school teachers.” This is unfair, she argues, because there are “many guilty parties still at large”; moreover, “as teaching conditions worsen, it is teachers who suffer the consequences.” In Left Back, she describes the overwhelming demands on teachers over the past century, as one drastic movement replaced another. These themes recur in The Death and Life of the Great American School System.

Yes, Ravitch has undergone a significant transformation. For those who insist on reducing her views to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” her change may resemble a 180-degree turn. She herself describes the change as wrenching; in the first chapter of her new book, she recalls her own bewilderment: “But why, I kept wondering, why had I changed my mind? What was the compelling evidence that prompted me to reevaluate the policies I had endorsed many times over the previous decade?” She freely admits: “I too had fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures; I too had drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems.” This is not to be taken lightly. But there is much more to her views than a flip or a turn. There is wisdom, scholarship, and a sense of the complexity of education. If her changes can be reduced to a U-turn, then the earth does not orbit, nor does a room have shape.

 

Diana Senechal taught for four years in the New York City public schools and has stepped back to write a book on the loss of solitude in schools and culture. Her writing has appeared in Education Week, GothamSchools, the Core Knowledge Blog, Joanne Jacobs, the Answer Sheet, and Common Core.

 

“No Daylight Between Us”

by Robert Pondiscio
March 3rd, 2010

Diane Ravitch’s new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, has tongues wagging from one end of the edusphere to the other.  The New York Times’ Sam Dillon weighs in with a profile of Ravitch, which gives play to the overhyped “I was blind but now I see” angle that’s dominating reviews so far

Checker Finn files a review of the book over at Forbes.com, and he makes an important point about Ravitch’s putative reversals.  When it comes to curriculum, Ravitch’s views haven’t changed a bit:

Diane and I go back a very long way–three decades, give or take–and in addition to the personal friendship we have, during that period, shared a basic diagnosis of what’s awry in U.S. education. It boils down to this: Most kids aren’t learning nearly enough of the important stuff that they ought to be learning.  That was true in 1981, when we jointly launched the Educational Excellence Network, and it’s still true today. Our view of the central problem needing to be solved has, I believe, remained constant, and there is no daylight between us on that score.

Where Finn parts company with his friend is on where we go from here.  “She has become more conservative,” Finn writes, “while I have become more radical.”

Diane Ravitch: A Prophet Without Honor

by Robert Pondiscio
February 26th, 2010

Last summer I had the great privilege of reading Diane Ravitch’s new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System in draft form.  It’s a splendid book and a must-read for anyone who cares about our schools and our education policy.  I have been eagerly anticipating the release of this book and the reaction to it. 

At Washington Monthly, Rick Kahlenberg frames his review as Ravitch’s return to her liberal roots, noting she has become “one of the nation’s leading critics not only of conservative educational policies like vouchers but of more centrist ideas too, like charter schools, testing, and merit pay for teachers.”

The new Ravitch exhibits an interesting mix of support for public education and the rights of teachers to bargain collectively with a tough-mindedness that some on the pedagogical left lack; she supports a strong core curriculum and a no-nonsense approach on discipline, while casting a skeptical eye on efforts to artificially prop up student self-esteem….Ironically, Ravitch’s return to the left comes precisely as centrist ideas are consolidating their hold on Washington. Even left-of-center thinking—at the Obama administration’s Education Department, leading foundations and think tanks, and the editorial pages of the New York Times—has galvanized around greater emphasis on charter schools and performance pay for teachers based on test score gains.

At the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, Valerie Strauss urges readers to pick up the book and focuses on its most important takeway: Ravitch’s strenuous pushback against data-driven, business-minded reformers who ”imagine that it is easy to create a successful school.”

“They imagine that the lessons of a successful school are obvious and can be easily transferred to other schools, just as one might take an industrial process or a new piece of machinery and install it in a new plant without error. But a school is successful for many reasons, including the personalities of its leader and teachers; the social interactions among them; the culture of the school; the students and their families; the way the school implements policies and programs dictated by the district, the state and the federal government; the quality of the school’s curriculum and instruction; the resources of the school and the community; and many other factors. When a school is successful, it is hard to know which factor was most important or if it was a combination of factors.”

“Amen,” Strauss chimes in.  “The U.S. public school system would not be as troubled as it is if most of the reformers of the past few decades really understood this.”

Amen, indeed.  It has been dispiriting to see some in the ed reform community, including some I otherwise respect, dismiss Ravitch in the past several years  (no links; you know who you are) accusing her of anything from apostasy to idiocy.  Being right is the best revenge, however, and I suspect when some future Diane Ravitch writes the history of this era in education, he or she will wonder why more attention wasn’t paid to our best and clearest educational historian.  Too often a prophet without honor, she has spent the last several years of her career acting as a one-woman counterweight to the worst excesses of the ascendant, 0ften-wrong-but-never-in-doubt brand of ed reform.  The Death and Life of the Great American School System is her clearest and most powerful statement to date.

100 Years of Solipsism

by Robert Pondiscio
February 8th, 2010

There is a significant shortcoming in Susan Engel’s much-discussed and widely lauded vision of what children should do in school all day, writes Dan Willingham at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog, and it’s that content is never mentioned.  “It’s all about process—reading is a skill, science is all about observing and finding patterns, and so on,” he writes.

“Skills and knowledge are actually not separable, and it’s a mistake to base a curriculum solely on skills. The response, I expect, would be that the content will come along naturally, as part of the authentic activities. But it hasn’t in the past. 

Citing Diane Ravitch’s Left Back, Willingham points out that Engel’s ideas are not fresh and new, nor are they based on “modern developmental science” as she claims.   And they’re not necessarily bad ideas.  However, they are nearly impossible to implement effectively.

Progressive curricula are characterized by “authenticity.” Authenticity means that the underlying principles that the child is supposed to learn are seldom overt. To learn about ecosystems, the child might grow tomatoes. It is simply harder to ensure that the child is thinking about ecosystems and not about tomato sandwiches, or that worms are gross, or that his shoes are muddy. It can be done, assuredly, and it’s wonderful when it is, but it presents real challenges.

“Done right, progressive methods are terrific. All the benefits — student engagement, understanding that is more closely tied to out-of-school contexts — do accrue. Done wrong, progressive methods turn in to fluff, into kids horsing around a greenhouse,” he concludes.

Over at Teacher in a Strange Land, the redoubtable Nancy Flanagan comes to Engel’s defense.  Sort of.  Flanagan shows she understands the complexity of successful project-based learning.  If Engel gets it, her piece gives no clue.  Rather she leaves the distinct impression that everything worth knowing can be arrived at by diligent inquiry, which is a tall order–especially for young children. 

Me?  I’m grateful for the Pythagorean Theorem.  And even more grateful that someone explained it to me rather than leaving it to me to discover on my own.

E.D Hirsch on Standards: “First, Do No Harm”

by Robert Pondiscio
January 15th, 2010

EdWeek’s Quality Counts special report offers a comprehensive catch-up on the issues surrounding the soon-to-be-released work of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  Lots of great reads:  Sean Cavanagh’s overview looks at the history of academic standards, unresolved issues, and (thank you!) the perpetual confusion between standards and curriculum.  Stephen Sawchuk’s piece looks at the issues for teachers.  We’ve always had national standards, writes Diane Ravitch in a commentary, citing the de facto standards created by textbooks and college entrance exams in the early part of the 20th century.  Comparing the current intiative to those predecessors, Ravitch observes,

The two greatest risks of the current effort to set common standards are that they will be so prescriptive they will be resisted, or they will be so vague that they can easily be ignored. Either course would be likely to end in failure, and neither would promote the rich, full education that our students need.

E.D. Hirsch, Jr. provides the lead commentary in EdWeek’s package and both praises and buries the initiative.  He compliments the draft document’s insistence that students must command a “base of knowledge across a wide range of subject matter by engaging with works of quality and substance.”  Less commendable is the continued insistence on viewing reading as a transferable, how-to skill

…thus repeating the error of current state standards of encouraging main-idea hunting and “inferencing.” There is no good scientific basis for believing that exercises in logical inference from texts or main-idea finding can significantly raise language abilities. Inference in language is not chiefly a formal skill. Untrained people are able to make very good inferences from texts when they already know something about the subject. But they cannot reliably draw correct inferences from texts about unfamiliar subjects.

“At the very least, then, language standards need to say clearly and forcefully that standards in reading, writing, speaking, and listening are not intended to be explicitly taught as skills. Rather, even these preliminary standards need to stress that academic content—in literature, history, science, and the arts—must be taught coherently and cumulatively in order to impart the requisite language competencies,” Hirsch writes. “There is no other way to verbal competence. The formalistic approach has failed for many years and will continue to do so,” he concludes.

We Americans have had an allergy to tackling the content problem at any level—ignoring the fact that somebody (mainly textbook makers) must always be dictating content in the schools, even if it is trivial, fragmented, skills-based content. If the crafters of our standards don’t encourage or require content coherence and cumulativeness (just to name two necessary elements), they will have failed the most basic requirement of this task: First, do no harm. And they will have done little to improve the unacceptable stasis in American education.

The Best and Wisest Parent

by Robert Pondiscio
October 27th, 2009

Invoking John Dewey’s maxim that a community should want for all children what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, Diane Ravitch wants small classes and the presence of the arts in schools that are physically attractive and well-maintained.  At Bridging Differences, she notes none of these ideas are driving education policy at present.

The president’s Department of Education will dispense nearly $5 billion, not to reduce class sizes, not to expand access to the arts, and not to improve the beauty and functionality of our public schools, but to incentivize the workforce with merit pay; to increase the privatization of struggling schools; and to compel teachers to teach to admittedly poor tests by tying teacher pay to students’ test scores.

If we’re making lists, I want my child to attend a school that sees itself as a place of learning first and foremost, with a rich, well-rounded curriculum; a view of reading as a means to academic achievement rather than an end in itself; and teachers and administrators who are not afraid to be grownups.

Why Send Kids To School?

by Robert Pondiscio
September 27th, 2009

“The single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why we educate,” observes Diane Ravitch. ”Faced with this lack of consensus, policy makers define good education as higher test scores.”  Ravitch’s comments come in a forum published by the New York Times Magazine, which also features input from Tom Vander Ark, Geoffrey Canada, Charles Murray and others.  Ravitch writes:

Why do we educate? We educate because we want citizens who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives and for our democracy. We want citizens who understand how their government works, who are knowledgeable about the history of their nation and other nations. We need citizens who are thoroughly educated in science. We need people who can communicate in other languages. We must ensure that every young person has the chance to engage in the arts.

Reflecting on the theme of “How to Remake Education,” Vander Ark stumps for more attention to technology.  “By 2020, I believe most high-school students will do most of their learning online,” he writes.  “It shouldn’t take that long, but it will.”  Charles Murray argues we should “discredit the bachelor’s degree as a job credential”; while Canada believes we should lengthen the U.S. school year, which is “one of the shortest school years in the industrialized world.”

I’m with Diane. There is a clear failure of vision in American education at present, especially in poor, urban schools.  We have narrowed the definition of what it means to be educated in America.  When affluent parents choose a school for their children—when they enroll in a private school or buy a home near specific schools–reading scores are simply not part of their calculus.  It is assumed that in a good school every child will learn to read, and then read to learn.  That’s simply what schools do. When policy makers, education reformers and even teachers and administrators evaluate what makes schools in poor, urban neighborhoods good or bad, however, a single litmus test applies: performance on standardized reading tests.  For the children of the poor, a good grade on a state reading test has become what it means to be educated.  The contrast could not be clearer:  we set the finish line for other people’s children where we set the starting line for our own.

Plus ça Change

by Robert Pondiscio
September 15th, 2009

Diane Ravitch takes to the op-ed page of the Boston Globe to urge Bay Staters not to be seduced by 21st century skills hucksterism.   Her singular contribution to education is historical memory in a field where it’s famously lacking.  Whether it’s the “Project Method” of the early 20th century, the “Activity Movement’ of the 20s and 30s, the “Life Adjustment Movement’’ of the 1950s, or  “Outcome-Based Education’’ in the 1980s, Ravitch reminds us that we’ve seen this movie before. 

None of these initiatives survived. They did have impact, however: They inserted into American education a deeply ingrained suspicion of academic studies and subject matter. For the past century, our schools of education have obsessed over critical-thinking skills, projects, cooperative learning, experiential learning, and so on. But they have paid precious little attention to the disciplinary knowledge that young people need to make sense of the world.

“For over a century we have numbed the brains of teachers with endless blather about process and abstract thinking skills,” Ravitch concludes. ”We have taught them about graphic organizers and Venn diagrams and accountable talk, data-based decision-making, rubrics, and leveled libraries. But we have ignored what matters most. We have neglected to teach them that one cannot think critically without quite a lot of knowledge to think about. Thinking critically involves comparing and contrasting and synthesizing what one has learned. And a great deal of knowledge is necessary before one can begin to reflect on its meaning and look for alternative explanations.”

My neck hurts. Must have injured it nodding vigorously in agreement.