Lots of blogging lately about the 21st Century skills movement. Now, E.D. Hirsch, Diane Ravitch, Dan Willingham and Ken Kay, the President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills will have at it at a panel discussion in Washington, DC on Tuesday, Feb. 24, titled “What is the Proper Role of Skills in the Curriculum? A critique of the idea of 21st century skills.” Details on the program, which is hosted by Common Core and moderated by its co-chair, Antonia Cortese are here. If you’d like to attend send an email to info@commoncore.org.
Tag Archive for 'Diane Ravitch'
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.
“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
–George Orwell, Animal Farm
I think of Animal Farm when I hear the terms “conservative,” “progressive,” “reformer,” and “establishment” tossed back and forth between one group and another. Lo and behold, they mean everything and nothing. Between David Brooks’ recent column in the New York Times and Alfie Kohn’s commentary in The Nation, we’ve got quite a bit of muck to filter. Brooks crudely contrasts “reformers” with “establishment”; Kohn, supposedly questioning such categories, uses false categories of his own. He argues that the “reformers” are allied with “conservatives,” then, instead of defining either term, proceeds to defend his argument in language that is equally imprecise.
Each of Kohn’s statements is internally confused and based on muddy language and reasoning. I’ll take his statements one by one.
1. There is no evidence that alternative forms of assessment are more “authentic.” To the contrary, they can be every bit as contrived as standardized tests, if not more so. While I recognize the need for a combination of assessments, I dispute the assertion that one is more “authentic” than another.
2. “Top-down” mandates are not inherently bad. It all depends on what is being mandated. A mandated curriculum such as Core Knowledge, which specifies what should be taught but not how, can help ensure a solid education for students without limiting the teachers’ craft or the students’ creativity. By contrast, a mandated pedagogical model like Balanced Literacy can cramp both the process and the content. Yet any policy needs to be implemented thoughtfully in order to work. It should allow for the intelligence of teachers and students.
3. What is “rote” learning? I learn a poem’s meaning as I memorize it; I start to understand its structure, meaning, rhythm, and tones. My mind plays with it. It comes to me in different parts, from different angles. Memorization (of poems, language, and math facts) allows for deep learning. Yet I rarely see schools requiring students to memorize anything (except perhaps their “learning goals”). This is a shame.
4. About the “behaviorist” model: much of education is based on behaviorist assumptions. Kohn needs to distinguish between behaviorism (which has some degree of truth) and a “model” that places it at the center. Also, the use of cash rewards has problems beyond “behaviorism” itself; it sends children the message that they need not do anything for which they are not paid.
5. “a corporate sensibility and an economic rationale for schooling”–too vague and lumpy. I recommend that he separate “corporate sensibility” from “economic rationale.” They are not one and the same. And there is a world of difference between employing some degree of “economic rationale” and adopting a “business model.”
6. Charter schools–again, there’s a world of difference between having a few charter schools (or alternative public schools) and moving toward a charter school “model.” He should acknowledge the difference. Also, he needs to explain the difference between nonprofit and for-profit charters. The question of profit in education is troubling and complex and goes far beyond charters themselves (to test-making, textbooks, pedagogical programs, etc.).
With muddy language in each of his points, it’s no wonder that he makes the equally muddy association between these principles and conservatism. But what is conservatism? There are different strands. As Diane Ravitch points out on Politico,
“There is an enduring message of conservatism that makes sense for our times: fiscal conservatism, respect for the Constitution, preservation of our values and our culture, protection of individual rights and freedoms, concern for national security. This version of conservatism has enduring appeal for a large swath of the population It is not the same as the cramped, narrow, biased expression of contempt for people who are different (e.g., homosexuals); it is not the same as me-first economic policies; nor is it the same as being hard-hearted towards those with less.”
Such conservatism has much in common with certain kinds of progressivism. Instead of using jargon and false logic to pit “conservatives” against “progressives” (or “reformers” against “establishment”), we could use careful language and logic to find common ground and draw up a good policy or two.
Diana Senechal teaches theatre and ESL at P.S. 108, an official Core Knowledge school in New York City. She has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale. Her translations of the Lithuanian poetry of Tomas Venclova appeared this fall in a new volume, The Junction.
Diane Ravitch applauds the Gates Foundation’s decision to shift the focus of its educational philanthropy, while reminding us that their effort to transform high schools into smaller learning communities is a cautionary tale of seeking a “magic bullet” solution. “We must give the Gates Foundation and its founders credit for their honest self-scrutiny,” Ravitch writes on Forbes.com. ”Most proponents of education reform defend their ideas against all critics, regardless of what evaluations show.”
“The press for small schools, now taken up by almost every big-city district, has diverted our attention from the need to strengthen curriculum and instruction, beginning in elementary schools. Whether a school is small or large, the essential questions in education cannot be ignored: What should students learn? How should they be taught? Are classes too large, especially for struggling students? Are teachers well-prepared in the subjects they teach? Do teachers have the resources they need? Do students arrive in school ready to learn? Until we answer these questions, the size of schools is not a relevant issue.
It’s good news, Ravitch concludes, that Gates is pledging to devote its attention to what happens in the classroom. “The first thing it will learn is that there are no quick fixes. If it targets its dollars wisely, exercises a measure of humility, and continues to evaluate its efforts rigorously, it can make a positive difference,” she says.
The current economic climate make it unlikely that President-elect Obama can enact the full range of education intitiatives his campaign promised, but one pressing issue cannot be deferred, writes Diane Ravitch on Forbes.com. The reauthorization and redesign of NCLB. Six years after its bipartisan passage, she notes, we have nothing to show for it.
NCLB has turned every school into a test-preparation factory, focused solely on reading and mathematics. They are the only subjects that count in a school’s ranking, so teachers routinely reduce attention to history, science, foreign language, literature, geography, the arts and other non-tested subjects. With this narrowing of the curriculum, students may be getting dumbed down even if their scores go up. Do we really want a society where our fellow citizens know nothing of history, literature, science and the arts?
First, Ravitch says, the Obama administration should “eliminate the goal of universal proficiency by 2014, because it is unattainable. Period. No state or nation has ever achieved 100% proficiency.”
Second, it should recognize that the federal government is best at providing accurate information, such as what children in each grade need to know to be abreast of international standards (that is known as the curriculum) and whether our children are meeting those standards (that is, testing); third, the administration should expect states and districts to fashion appropriate reforms and remedies for their schools.
Congress, Ravitch concludes, is not the right place to decide how to fix our schools. And more money isn’t the answer if we don’t have the right vision for improving education.
Add KIPP founder Mike Feinberg to the chorus of voices calling for national standards and assessments. In an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, Feinberg calls on President-elect Obama to choose an education secretary who is “committed to accountability and public school choice.”
President-elect Obama should pick a secretary of education who deeply understands the issues of funding and accountability on the federal, state and local levels, and who is passionate about student achievement and growth. Having one national test with one rigorous set of national standards will ensure our children can compete in the global marketplace as well as help parents know how well their children are progressing in school.
I’m increasingly convinced Diane Ravitch has the exact right approach to this with her recent call for national testing based on coherent curriculum standards, but without stakes or sanctions. “The federal role should be to provide accurate information about student performance,” she wrote recently. “It should be left to states and districts to devise sanctions and reforms. If states and localities don’t want to improve their schools, then we are in deeper trouble as a nation than any law passed by Congress can fix.”
In his op-ed, Feinberg also calls for streamlined pathways to the teaching profession, the growth of public charter schools, and a focus on pre-K and early childhood education.
In India, Diane Ravitch notes on Forbes.com, students compete for admission into “cram schools,” paying up to $1,500 to prepare for exams that might get them into India’s highly regarded technology colleges. This puts in sharp relief the increasingly common strategy trying to persuade students to care about school with everything from cash rewards to New York’s planned “Game High School.”
Interesting, isn’t it, that while students in other countries are paying $1,500 a year for the chance to learn more, many American students will be paid that same amount just to do what they ought to be doing in their own self-interest? Does the future belong to those who struggle to better themselves, make sacrifices to do so and work hard? Or to those who must be cajoled and bribed to learn anything at all?
To be fair, to use the most ambitious students and families in India and elsewhere as an exercise in contrast is probably a bit unfair. There are no shortage of strivers in the U.S., the give-me-Harvard-or-give-me-death parents, for example, who push their kids into competitive schools and line up hot and cold running tutors in a bid for achievement or prestige. And no doubt, there must be indifferent and unmotivated studentsin India. Still, Diane’s larger point about what we stand for–and what we won’t stand for–is compelling.
The child that needs extrinsic motivation to act in his or her own best interest is at a decided long-term disadvantage to the kid who sees education as a means to an end. I suspect when the final analysis is in, pay for play will be to education what aspirin is to health care–something to mask the symptom rather than treat the disease.
The traditional educational battle lines among the political parties are being redrawn, notes Diane Ravitch on her Bridging Differences blog, which makes a welcome return following its summer hiatus. Historically, she notes, the Democratic party advocated more funding for disadvantaged students and policies that promoted equity. The Republican party advocated choice, privatization, merit pay, and accountability, and criticized the teachers’ unions as the main obstacles to reform.
In this election cycle, that familiar divide has changed dramatically. The Republicans still advocate choice, privatization, merit pay, and accountability and are still critical of the teachers’ unions. But now there is a significant movement within the Democratic party that advocates the same positions as the Republicans.
Ravitch is concerned that ”the mantle of ‘reformer’ has passed to those who would dismantle public education, piece by piece.
Update: USA Today’s Greg Toppo picks up a similiar theme in this morning’s paper, noting, “A funny thing happened to the Democratic Party on the way to an education platform: The party has visibly split with teachers unions, its longtime allies, on key issues.”
The drumbeat for national curriculum, standards and assessments gets a little bit louder today with a strongly worded New York Times editorial.
Congress has several concerns as it moves toward reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. Whatever else they do, lawmakers need to strengthen the requirement that states document student performance in yearly tests in exchange for federal aid. The states have made a mockery of that provision, using weak tests, setting passing scores low or rewriting tests from year to year, making it impossible to compare progress — or its absence — over time.
“The country will have difficulty moving ahead educationally until that changes,” opines the Times, noting that complete lack of a relationship between states that report strong performances on their own tests and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The Times concludes:
Congress needs to take the testing issue head-on. It should instruct the NAEP board, an independent body created by the government, to create a rigorous test that would be given free to states that agreed to use NAEP scoring standards. Then the federal government could actually embarrass the laggard states by naming the ones that cling to weak tests. Without rigorous and consistent testing, there is no way to know whether our children are getting the education they deserve and need.
Sounds an awful lot like what Diane Ravitch was talking about last week.
There are several important threads — the need for national standards and assessments; rethinking the difference between a highly qualified teacher and a highly effective one — at the ongoing NCLB discussion at NewTalk. But one comment raised by CK Board member Diane Ravitch jumps out:
My own preference would be for Congress to authorize national testing (à la NAEP), based on coherent curriculum standards, but without stakes or sanctions. The federal role should be to provide accurate information about student performance. It should be left to states and districts to devise sanctions and reforms. These jurisdictions are closer to the schools and likelier to come up with workable reforms. If states and localities don’t want to improve their schools, then we are in deeper trouble as a nation than any law passed by Congress can fix.
We assume accountability needs teeth to be truly enforceable, but Diane is right — an apples to apples comparison of how schools fare against each other seems likely to pour more sunshine onto what’s really happening than 50 states racing each other to the bottom by lowering proficiency standards. Sometimes the best solutions are the simplest.
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