“It would have chilled Martin Luther King’s blood to see how the struggle for equality has been narrowed into a race for higher test scores in a society that abandoned Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty.’”
Them’s fightin’ words.
Tag Archive for 'education equality project'
Back in my ink-stained wretch days, I sympathized with beat reporters whose noses would get out of joint when a “bigfoot” colleague would parachute into town and write a column uncomplicated by reporting or background knowledge. So I can’t help but wonder what the New York Times’ Paul Tough thinks of his colleague David Brooks’ column about the Harlem Children’s Zone.
Tough, as you probably know, wrote the book on the Harlem Children’s Zone. Literally. Whatever It Takes looks at Geoffrey Canada’s mission to change the lives of Harlem’s children by intervening in every moving part of their lives from schools to parenting. But Le Blogosphere is up in arms this week wondering how Brooks came to conclude ”the Harlem Children’s Zone results suggest the reformers are right” in arguing that school-based approaches alone can close the achievement gap. It’s a conclusion that’s hard to support based on even a passing familiarity with Tough’s book.
I don’t have a dog in the Broader, Bolder vs. Education Equality Project (”No Excuses”) fight, which represents the quintessential ed reform false dichotomy. Like many such debates, it seems rather obvious (and utterly uncontroversial) to suggest that we need to draw from both sides to get to a solution. But to conclude, as Brooks did, that HCZ proves the “no excuses” case makes one wonder if he even read Tough’s book. As Diane Ravitch notes “there are lessons for American education, but not necessarily the ones that Brooks points to.” Corey Bunje Bower at Thoughts on Education Policy calls Brooks’ conclusion ”flat out irresponsible.” Over at Public School Insights, the usually erudite and articulate Claus von Zastrow is driven to sputtering, “What??!?”
Did Brooks really just argue that the Harlem Children’s Zone’s success supports the schools alone approach championed by “reformers”? That’s like arguing that the Surgeon General’s reports discredit the link between smoking and cancer.
“Brooks joins a long line of national commentators who are turning important conversations about school improvement into a morality play pitting the “establishment” against the “reformers.” In the process, he is promoting false and damaging dichotomies between efforts to improve schools and efforts to offset social and economic disadvantages that contribute to achievement gaps,” Claus concludes.
Just so. But back to my reporter friends. It wouldn’t surprise them to hear a columnist wrote the story one way when their reporting led in a different direction. That’s just the nature of the beast. A columnist’s job is tell you what he thinks; reporters tell you what they found out. Brooks recommends Whatever It Takes in his column. It’s a great suggestion. He should really see what Tough found out.
Mea Culpa: Aaron Pallas did a terrific analysis of HCZ’ test results last week which I overlooked. Do have a look.
Fix schools or fix communities? “From an outsider’s perspective, one of the most frustrating aspects of the education policy debate is that both sides are right,” notes The Atlantic Monthly’s Clay Risen. “It seems bafflingly obvious that change must come both inside and outside the classroom,” he writes on the Democrats for Education Reform blog. It’s a must-read.
A backstory is required. Risen wrote a major profile of Washington, DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee in last November’s Atlantic Monthly. In the new issue, there’s a letter from the University of Michigan’s Susan Neuman, a former Bush administration education official, arguing that Risen’s piece “left readers with the mistaken impression that [Rhee and other school leaders] must make a false choice between quality teachers and ‘extras.” She also writes ”there is only so much a quality teacher, adequate classroom supplies, and caring administrators can accomplish.”
The Atlantic typically allows its writers to respond to letters and Risen replied in print that Neuman is “undoubtedly correct that improving teacher quality and improving a student’s social milieu are not mutually exclusive, and are both important means to improve student outcomes. However, education policy is not made in a vacuum, and cannot be. This is where so much of education policy breaks down: there is, sadly, a broadening gulf between teacher-quality advocates and those aligned with ‘A Broader, Bolder Approach.’ Arguably, the answer lies in a mixture of the two. Whether we can find that answer depends much more on improving our education politics than on improving our education policy.” (ital mine)
Risen’s reply caught the attention of former newspaperman Joe Williams, now head honcho of Democrats for Education Reform. Knowing that space is at a premium in print, Joe asked Risen to expand on his reply in the Atlantic’s letters section. Risen notes that the “Broader, Bolder” group and the Joel Klein and Al Sharpton led Education Equality Project are both working toward the same goal and with policies that should be mutually compatible, yet find themselves at odds politically. Says Risen:
Rhee and Co. are, in my view, too eager to reject policies that addresses anything other than teacher quality and too hostile toward anything that smacks of establishment thinking, from unions to teacher colleges. And they’re not entirely wrong–I fear that while many of the signatories to EPI’s “A Broader, Bolder Approach” manifesto are well-intentioned (the list, after all, includes Education Secretary Arne Duncan), too often this wing of the education sector falls into the role of stalking horse for those who prefer the status quo to the disruptive changes that true reform would bring.
Thus a painful paradox: At a moment when education policy is making real strides, our education politics is stuck in a narrow, short-sighted, antagonistic framework in which each side would rather paint the other as anti-student than admit that it might actually have something to contribute. That’s the irony of Michelle Rhee: As a policy thinker and a force for change she is precisely what Washington needs, but she is so politically untuned, so antagonistic toward unions and teacher colleges and the City Council and anything else that might require negotiation and compromise, that she is preventing her policy vision from being realized.
Sound familiar? In selecting Arne Duncan, who signed on to both ed manifestos as his Education Secretary, President-Elect Obama “understands the need to bring all sides to the table,” Risen believes, “not to minimize dissent but because everyone has something to contribute.” But each side, he says will have to “concede certain policy principles.”
While teacher accountability is a vital element of reform, for example, it is vital to recognize that teachers are also workers, parents, and taxpayers, not automatons who can be expected to sacrifice everything to student achievement. Nor should we expect them to build lasting relationships with their students if they are spending all their time worried about their job security. While some aspects of teacher tenure and job protections should be relaxed, making them at-will employees is asking too much. On the flip side, teachers need to recognize that they are not just another class of workers, and that they cannot always make the same demands that, say, teamsters do. Districts need the flexibility to demand a little extra from them, even if it means longer hours.
It’s a political truism that conservatives seek out converts, while progressives hunt down heretics. The party labels notwithstanding, it sometimes seems the same is true in education debates–too much concern with heresy, not enough with efficacy. Risen’s “bafflingly obvious” perspective deserves a hearing. And kudos to Joe Williams and DFER for giving Risen the space to say what needed to be said.
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.
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