Bridging Differences

Two Types of Superintendent

2010-02-09T15:02:00Z

Dear Deborah,

As I watch events across the nation, I have concluded that district leadership today falls into one of two varieties.

On one hand is the traditional superintendent, who believes that he is responsible for the schools and students in his care. He visits the schools often and consults frequently with mid-level superintendents to make sure that the schools get the resources they need. When a school is in trouble, he sends in a team of experienced educators to assess its needs and devise a plan to help the staff. If the school continues to struggle, he works harder to try to solve the problems. He may decide to remove the principal and shake up the staff. He is relentless in trying to get the school to function well. This superintendent believes that he will be judged by his efforts to help the neediest of the students and schools.

On the other hand is the new breed of reform superintendent. Whether he (or she) was a business executive, an education entrepreneur, or a lawyer, he is steeped in a business mindset. He wants results. He surrounds himself with business school graduates, lawyers, marketing consultants, and public relations staff. He focuses on management, organization, budgeting, and data-driven decision-making. He shows little or no interest in curriculum and instruction, about which he knows very little. He is certain that the way to reform the schools is to "incent" the workforce. He believes that accountability, with rewards and sanctions, makes the world go round. He plans to "drive" change through the system by being a tough manager, awarding merit pay to teachers and principals, closing struggling schools, and opening new schools and charter schools, all the while using data as his guide. He believes that the schools he oversees are like a stock portfolio; it is his job not to fix them but to pick winners and losers. The winners get extra money, and the losers are thrown out of the portfolio. When addressing the business community, he speaks proudly of his plan to give maximum autonomy to school principals, thus absolving himself of any responsibility for the performance of the schools, and then sits back to manage his portfolio. If a school fails, he is fast to close it. The failure is not his fault, but the fault of the principal and the teachers.

You can see why the reform superintendent would love the Race to the Top. It incorporates all the principles that he loves. Charter schools, accountability, merit pay, school closings, data-driven decision-making. It is the same mindset, the same belief in rewards and sanctions that we have seen in NCLB, taken to a higher level with a pot of gold containing almost $5 billion at the end of the rainbow. (I read a blog a few days ago, forget which one, that refers to RTTT as "dash to the cash.")

Now, the problem with the reform superintendent is that he usually knows very little about schooling and education. He focuses on organization and strategic planning and so on, but is in the dark about what happens in the classroom. This is why he relies so much on data. Numbers don't lie, do they?

Well, yes, they do. A major front-page story in The New York Times on February 6 described a major study conducted by criminologists who found that the numbers do lie. More than 100 retired, high-ranking police officers in New York City told them that intense pressure to produce improved crime statistics had led to manipulation of the data. For the past 15 years or so, the city boasted that its data system, known as CompStat, had brought about a major reduction in crime. But the survey said that the data system had encouraged supervisors and precinct commanders to relabel crimes to less serious offenses. The data mattered more than truth. Some, for example, would scout eBay and other Web sites to find values for stolen items that would reduce the complaint from a grand larceny (over $1,000 in value) to a misdemeanor. There were reports of officers who persuaded crime victims not to file a complaint or to change their accounts so that a crime's seriousness could be downgraded.

This is not only a major scandal, it is a validation once again of Campbell's Law, which holds that: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Anyone who wants to learn more about Campbell's law and how it applies to education should read Richard Rothstein's Grading Education and Daniel Koretz's Measuring Up. Or Google Rothstein's "Holding Accountability to Account," if you want to see what happens when data becomes our most important goal.

For just as the police officers felt compelled to game the system to meet the demands of CompStat, so educators are now gaming the system to meet the demands of NCLB. Some states have dumbed down their tests; some have rigged the scores to produce greater numbers of "proficient" students. Some districts have narrowed their curriculum and have replaced instruction with intensive test-prep. Some schools of choice exclude low-performing students. All in the service of making the numbers, making AYP, looking good rather than doing well.

Anyone who thinks that these methods will produce first-class education for our nation's children is either a fool or is fooling himself.

Diane

Why Isn't the 'Mother of Small Schools' Feeling Smug?

2010-02-04T14:46:00Z

Dear Diane,

Funny you should ask, Diane. Yes, I am still a sort-of supporter of small schools—within the right context.

I came across a big, heavy award from 2004 called The Small Schools Award: "In honor of your support, in a bold way and over the long haul of small schools that educate one student at a time." I'm frequently introduced as "the mother/grandmother of small schools." So, why aren't I feeling smug and successful? There are more urban small schools than ever before—even though small often now means 600, not 300.

Nearly 20 years ago a group of us proposed phasing out one big high school in each NYC borough and simultaneously opening six new small schools in available alternate spaces in each neighborhood. We barely got beyond doing one very successful "turnaround" in Manhattan when a variant of this idea swept city after city. NYC is going wild with "turn-arounds," and today I'm largely an opponent! Why?

Context.

When I was teaching and principal-ing I regularly had great ideas. Usually just before falling asleep. They looked a little less exciting the next morning, but I plowed ahead filling in the details and arrived at school still enthusiastic. Some worked out. Most didn't. They got shot down by the students' reactions—which were ho-hum at best, or by my colleagues' lack of interest, often accompanied by compelling reasons for their lack of enthusiasm. Greater "experts" than I have suffered this fate. Sometimes the "experts" see it as an ugly form of resistance to any change, laziness, self-interest, or a combination of such bad habits.

At some point I began to rethink the oft-accused culprit resistance. Maybe resistance is the response of choice given relative powerlessness. Suppose we had actually jumped on every bandwagon that came along? Maybe calling it "resistance" is a self-serving interpretation by true believers to explain disagreement from the ranks. Sometimes, of course, the idea might actually be great, but the resisters have embarked on another path already and now is not the time to interrupt. I always hoped it was the latter and that I could renew my great idea at a later date—if I still liked it myself. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

I reminded myself that in WWII (my pre-teen years), collaborators were the bad guys and resisters the heroes. When had we switched sides?

Once again, context is everything. The habit of "resistance" became my habitual stance, until others began to resist my best ideas. Then I became pro collaboration—with me—and founded a wonderful organization in NYC called the Center for Collaborative Education. It has since died, but I'm still on the board of Boston's Center for Collaborative Education. Sometimes I collaborate, sometimes I resist.

I recently re-read an op-ed I wrote for The New York Times in 1989. ("In Education, Small is Sensible," Sept. 8, 1989) I agree with every word of it. Except that.... It's more complicated.

So, my next blog essay will be devoted to a defense of "yes, small schools, but..." Unless I get carried in another direction by your next letter, Diane.

When and how might "small schools" and "choice" become a favorite of teachers and parents and kids rather than, as in NYC these days, a heavy-handed intruder? Ditto for choice, which for some is also a new burden that further disempowers rather than empowers them. (See my 1991 piece in The Nation: "Choice Can Save Public Education.") How did small schools and choice become the enemy of thousands of good teachers, parents, and students? Why have they launched attacks against New York's mayor and school chancellor for mandating the closing of their large neighborhood schools, in order to morph them into small schools?

Wait and see. (Of course, if you've been reading Diane and me, you already know part of the answer.) Express your views on small schools and choice on this site. I hope, Diane, that you will weigh in, too. (You can also go to my Web site—www.deborahmeier.com—for a longer account of what happened.)

Deborah

Afterword: It has been a hard few months. Last week, one of the most thoughtful voices in education—Seymour Sarason—died. At 91. He led a long, fruitful life, wrote many books and inspired many educators, including K-12 teachers, mental health practitioners, and more. He was curious about everything, including why deliberate change was so hard to "make" happen. The more things change, the more they stay the same, he reminded us. But he didn't stop working for change. He was a friend and adviser to all those naïve enough to keep at the task. I owe him so much—even if we didn't solve the conundrum posed. Read his books, starting with Revisiting: "The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change" and including the one I read over and over before starting Central Park East Secondary School, The Predictable Failure of Educational Reform. Or Rob Fried's The Skeptical Visionary, a compilation and commentary on Seymour's work.

Closing Schools Solves Nothing

2010-02-02T13:39:00Z

Dear Deborah,

Last week, the New York City Department of Education pushed through a decision to close 19 high schools. With the encouragement of the "Race to the Top," we will surely see similar closings across the nation, hundreds or perhaps thousands of them. Entrepreneurs cheer when public schools close, as new space opens up for their ventures in philanthropy and profits.

It is odd that school leaders feel triumphant when they close schools, as though they were not responsible for them. They enjoy the role of executioner, shirking any responsibility for the schools in their care. Every time a school is closed, those at the top should hang their heads in shame for their inability or refusal to offer timely assistance. Instead they exult in the failure of schools that are entrusted to their stewardship.

The decision in NYC was probably made long ago, but the law required a public hearing by the city's school board (named the Panel for Educational Policy by Mayor Bloomberg). An overflow crowd of 2,000-3,000 parents, teachers, and students turned out for the hearing to protest the closing of their schools; some 350 people signed up to speak against the closings.

But to no avail. The panel—whose majority is appointed by the mayor and serves at his pleasure—sat impassively and listened without being moved by what they heard. The vote was taken at 3 a.m., when most of the audience had given up and gone home. As expected, the panel voted to close the schools; representatives of four of the city's five borough presidents voted against, but in vain because the mayor controls the panel. This is what mayoral control means. The mayor does whatever he wishes, regardless of the views of parents, students, and teachers. The schools belong to him, not them. Democracy at work.

The mayor claims that he could not let students remain even one more day in a failing school, so he never wavered in his determination to close schools with low test scores and poor graduation rates. His Department of Education felt no obligation to provide the resources to change those numbers.

But let's look at those numbers. For the past several years, with the support of the Gates Foundation, the city closed nearly 100 schools and opened more than 350 small ones. As large schools closed, the new small schools (and charter schools) that replaced them did not take a fair share of high-needs students, which enabled them to have better results. So the remaining large schools have disproportionate numbers of children with high needs—those who are homeless, low-performing, immigrants, non-English-speaking, or with extreme disabilities. With each new round of closures, other large schools are set up to fail.

Among the schools closed were Columbus High School in the Bronx and Jamaica High School in Queens. These are schools that had been pillars of their communities for many years. Yet in both cases, the Department of Education had overloaded them with the most challenging students, stigmatized them as "failures" (which encouraged the flight of many students), and never supplied the support and resources they needed. The more they struggled, the more the DOE abandoned them and readied them for closure. In reality, they were victims of the DOE's own policies. Now their valuable space can be turned into small schools and handed over to charter operators.

Jamaica High School, once the jewel of its community, was labeled "persistently dangerous" after a cautious principal reported every disciplinary incident. Many students fled once the label was posted. As enrollment dropped, the DOE installed a spiffy small school inside Jamaica High, whose students had smaller classes, more technology, freshly painted classrooms, and the resources denied to the larger enrollment. Jamaica High was not too dangerous for them! Marc Epstein, a teacher at Jamaica for many years, refers to the situation as "academic apartheid": excellent facilities for the few, disdain and decay for the many.

Christine Rowland, a teacher at Columbus High School, described how the school received disproportionate numbers of poorly prepared students and how it struggled to educate them. Last year, only about 5 percent of the students who entered Columbus in 9th grade were on grade level in reading, and less than 15 percent in math, a dramatic decrease over the past decade. Similarly, the proportion of special education students grew from 7 percent in 2001 to nearly 25 percent. As it was overburdened with the high-needs students from other large schools that closed, Columbus was set up for failure, as Jamaica was.

This is a great and terrible charade. It is not about improving education or helping kids. It is about producing data to demonstrate that small schools are better than large ones and that charters are better than regular public schools. The destruction of neighborhood public schools is merely collateral damage, though it may also be a goal of free-market zealots. The neediest kids will continue to be pushed out and bounced around until they give up. And the data will get better and better until the day comes when the DOE runs out of large high schools to close.

I know you are a major supporter of small schools, but this is a terrible corruption of your ideas. These new small schools are produced not by an educator with a vision, but by a bureaucracy with a business plan.

Over the course of the mayor's third term, we can expect to see more privatization, continued closings of schools (including his own small schools, six of which were closed last week), and continued disruption of the lives of students, teachers, and communities. Schools will be treated like chain stores, opened and closed in response to market forces. New York City is repeating the pattern established in Chicago, where many schools were closed, but displaced students, on average, did no better or worse, and nearly half the displaced students ended up in other low-performing schools.

Race to the Top encourages the shell games that are being played to the applause of politicians and foundations, but to the detriment of students and communities. What matters most are the data. How anyone can confuse the data with better education is beyond my understanding.

Diane

Educating the Young: Who Knows 'Best'?

2010-01-28T11:53:00Z

Dear Diane,

It was good to read your summary of our plight with my old hometown Chicago, not NYC, as the centerpiece. It's a replay of the scenario under the former Secretary of Education Rod Paige who shipped his "Texas miracle" to the nation under President George W. Bush. The result—NCLB. Only later did we discover that his "success" was based on lies, lies, and more damn lies.

The term "best practices" in education always gives me trouble. Normally I wince, but let it pass. So I was delighted when Dr. Jerome Groopman shared the same reaction regarding "best practices" in medicine in a recent essay in The New York Review of Books. (He is Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.)

Rhetoric around education reform has long borrowed from the world of business. But it has also latched onto the reforms in medicine. I've argued that neither was comparable to education, since both are easier to measure along lines that do not involve political or ideological biases. Defining good health does not divide Blues from Reds, although how to pay for it and who decides what surely does. (I was always puzzled how whole language vs. phonics became a right vs. left issue.)

Groopman reminds us that what constitutes "best practice" in medicine is controversial, even when it comes to the "basics" of curing people or preventing illness. Evidence (and best practice) shifts rapidly. Doctors (looking at the same data) offer conflicting opinions and large-scale studies conducted to "settle it" produce results that get overturned 10 years later. The knowledge needed, he argues, may well best be situated in the contextual knowledge that rests between doctor and patient—plus easy access to second opinions by both parties. You have to read it all to realize how comparable the arguments are about the weight we should give The Data in either field in making decisions about "Patient X."

Groopman presents the case from two perspectives. On one side are Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Sunstein is a professor of law and Thaler of behavioral science, respectively. They seem roughly to be taking Groopman's position regarding "best practice." (He describes it as a sort of "nudge" approach, in the service of "libertarian paternalism.") On the other side is Peter Orszag, director of the federal Office of Management and Budget. (Note that none are experts in the field in review, but all are friends of Obama.) Orszag believes that behavioral economics should guide the delivery of health care; he doesn't trust doctors and health administrators to do what is "best" unless there are clear and unambiguous mandates along with "aggressive promulgation of standards and changes in financial and other incentives." (Sound familiar?) Groopman describes his own work in the field and how often his own research created 'best practice' that turned into bad practice.

There is, Groopman contends, "a growing awareness....that past efforts to standardize and broadly mandate 'best practices' were scientifically misconceived..." What was to one research scientists a "no-brainer" was to another far more complex. "The care of patients is complex, and choices about treatment involve different tradeoffs. That the uncertainties can be erased by mandates from experts is a misconceived panacea, a 'focusing illusion.' "

What Groopman suggests is not that we cease engaging in scientific research and the sharing of information, but that we remain open to the importance in medicine of interpreting the complexities of the data closer to the field of practice. Creating institutions—hospitals and departments of medicine that keep abreast, demand collegiality and good documentation of practice is what is needed to keep medicine both honest and forward-looking. In a field such as education, whose essential underlying purpose includes far more unsettled issues of purpose, including something as elusive as "character," not to mention its default position in favor of democracy with its peculiar respect for individual judgment, the Groopman argument holds up even better.

If we demand only practices that meet the "evidence-based" authorities, the critical experimental work by educators with deviant ideas will never get off the ground. Where will the ideas critical for our long-term future come from if we mandate a single path? When we think about schooling as a "race" against adversaries, with "test scores" as the only acceptable evidence, we forget that the human species is in for a long-distance run. Had we not been allowed to experiment with small schools of choice in East Harlem, the "small schools movement" might not have happened. (Which, for all the faulty implementation of the idea, is still, I believe, a powerful tool.)

The tricky role of "trust" must be confronted head on. In "In Schools We Trust," written some nine years ago, I tried to think "trust" through around one school—Mission Hill. We have much work to do to discover ways to improve education that do not further undermine trust—without which democracy and even learning the "basics" depend.

Deborah

Arne Duncan at ED: Year One

2010-01-26T14:14:00Z

Dear Deborah,

It is time to appraise the first year of the Obama administration and its impact on American education. I met with Arne Duncan in October, and I liked him very much. He is a very likeable guy. But I strongly disagree with his priorities. In a recent Education Week article about Duncan, I was quoted as giving him an A for effectiveness, and a D- for bad ideas. Let me explain.

Duncan's "Race to the Top" competition has had an enormous effect on American education. He has $4.3 billion to hand out, without any congressional authorization or oversight, and states are starved for money. Many states have changed their laws and are now prepared to privatize hundreds of schools to qualify for RTTT. Spurred on by their eagerness to get RTTT money and the largesse of the Gates Foundation, many districts now intend to judge teachers by their students' test scores.

I can't recall any secretary of education who was more effective in getting states to make changes quickly. That is why I gave him an A. But I think the changes are wrong and will not improve American education, so I gave him a D- for bad ideas.

When a leader acts as forcefully as Duncan, he has in mind a template for success. In his case, it must be Chicago. When President Obama introduced Duncan as his choice, he described dramatic improvements in Chicago during Duncan's tenure. As superintendent of schools, Duncan closed many low-performing schools and opened many new schools.

However, further analysis has shown that the dramatic improvements hailed by President Obama were a mirage. The Chicago Tribune recently analyzed the results of Duncan's "Renaissance 2010" program and concluded that "it has done little to improve the educational performance of the city's school system."

Everyone who has looked at Chicago's academic performance has reached similar conclusions, including the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, Catalyst Notebook, and the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Blogger Alexander Russo has covered this story well. So have reporters Gregg Toppo of USA Today, Nick Anderson of The Washington Post, and Sam Dillon of The New York Times. (Registration required for NYT story.)

And, of course, Chicago was among the nation's lowest-performing districts from 2003 to 2009 on NAEP.

Yet the clamor to install mayoral control (like Chicago) and to close struggling schools (like Chicago) continues.

None of the news stories and evaluations has slowed the momentum for the Race to the Top. The states need the money. In fact, President Obama plans to add another $1.3 billion to promote the same failed policies across the nation.

What is your take on the Race to the Top?

Diane

Kudos for Bridging Differences

2010-01-21T18:55:00Z

Building Bridges was recently named one of the best education blogs for 2010 by Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews. Mathews, who is also a member of the Editorial Projects in Education board, and fellow Post blogger Valerie Strauss selected a wide range of blogs for the honor. Read all about Bridging Differences and the other best blogs here.

What Kind of Achievement Should Count Most?

2010-01-21T13:33:00Z

Dear Diane,

Deciding how to measure achievement depends on first defining it. The equating of "performance" and "achievement" with whatever the ELA and math tests tell us puts us in rather an awkward position—and I include in that my colleagues and friends in the AFT and NEA. Randi Weingarten's remarks got badly reported by the press, but the actual speech makes it easier to do so than was necessary. Nowhere does it clearly state that the AFT does not accept test scores as evidence of good teaching—thus the misleading headlines.

But your argument, Diane, makes a similar mistake, almost like you are calling for more testing. The arguments against value-added testing for NYC, or New York state or any other such tests are sound—as you note earlier. They cannot now serve that purpose.

It's time we figured out whose judgment on such matters we might trust. Apparently neither principals nor teachers are trusted with the capacity to do so. For good reasons. Most schools—as Harvard's Richard Elmore noted in his essay published in 2002 by the Albert Shanker Institute—are not organized in a way that enables the adults to build a collective consensus on standards or pedagogies, nor in ways that encourage each other to review each other's work. Nor do we value the quality of evaluation enough to engage in periodic and serious external reviews. Nothing less than that, he argues, will begin to do the job.

So we've replaced human beings with scores on tests never designed for the multiple, and often contradictory, purposes they are now serving.

But the crux of the issue is defining achievement. What kind of achievement should count most in the institutions that democracy builds to ensure its future well-being?

Claiming that higher test scores and more diplomas will lead to prosperity is a sleight of hand for which well-educated reporters should not fall. The assumption that if twice as many people get a B.A. an M.A. or a Ph.D., twice as many higher-paying jobs will appear is a colossal fraud. But even more shameful is the assumption that knowing "right answers" on a standardized test is a way to judge even future employees, much less future citizens.

The youngsters who live in communities in which the adults they know who are employed is precipitously declining. Kids know this. The fact that decent-paying jobs for high school graduates, graduates of two- or four-year colleges, and even M.A.'s are fast disappearing, and prisons are housing more and more of our young people can't be a secret to most adolescents. No, Virginia, jobs do not magically appear because B.A.'s do.

The AFT & co. need to lead a campaign of education, along with others, that credibly confronts the myths and lies that abound. The new media hasn't the investigative staff, nor the audience to fulfill this task.

But, even the best reporting can't do a lot if we avoid the real question: what do we want from schools—other than "higher test scores"? If that's all we want, we'll get it, and we will continue having a test prep system. The rich as well as the poor will pay a price for such a shabby goal—and guess who will continue to be better at it? (Meanwhile, more colleges have made the SAT voluntary since FairTest began to push that idea, but more high schools are prepping teenagers for SATs at a younger and younger age!)

Let's place the definition of being well-educated—"higher test scores"—against a few other old and new alternatives. Then we can begin to ponder how we could reasonably make any judgments about which purposes we want to design schools—and assessment—around. We might even agree to disagree.

A reader of these columns, Ogden Hamilton, wrote me, in response to a quote from Alice in Wonderland in last week's blog, with the following:

"I've heard the folk wisdom put that if you don't care where you're going, you cannot get lost. It's always used like the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." Seems to me that in education, not knowing where we are going may keep us from admitting that we're lost, but it cannot ameliorate the terrible consequences of not knowing where we are going and acting as if we do. Our situation just screams for pluralism now, not national standards."

He sums up where I stand these days so well that I'll end here.

Almost.

I'd like to pass a second Meier's Law, and a third. (The first: Those who require students to take a standardized test must be required to take it, too, and make their scores public.)

Law Two: Before anyone writes a new law or creates a new commission, we all agree to read at least some of what's already been written. Even if we don't agree on "standards," maybe we can agree on a lean list of our favorites. Then after we've read them, let the conversation begin.

Law Three: Meanwhile, whenever we see the word "achievement," replace it with "test scores"—unless other evidence is cited.

Deborah

How the Media Garbled Randi's Message

2010-01-19T13:47:00Z

Dear Deborah,

I am sure you were as surprised as I was to read the headlines in the newspapers saying that Randi Weingarten proposed that teachers should be evaluated by their students' test scores. This is a contentious issue. In New York, at Randi's urging, the state legislature passed a law preventing districts from doing exactly this. Now, to qualify for the so-called Race to the Top, the state must roll back this legislation.

We know the downside of evaluating teachers by student scores. It is neither a fair nor an accurate way to judge teachers, and it produces unintended negative consequences. It compels teachers to teach to the test. This in turn narrows the curriculum to what is tested. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has acknowledged, the current tests should be replaced by better tests; why then use them for high-stakes decisions? If there is one principle on which all testing companies are agreed, it is that tests should be used only for the purposes for which they are intended. A test of 4th grade reading tests the reading ability of a student in 4th grade, not the ability of the teacher. There is a plenitude of research demonstrating that value-added assessment is not ready for prime time. Those who defend it should look at the NAEP scores of Tennessee, where value-added assessment has been used for many years. Tennessee has remarkably high state scores, but has made little, if any, improvement on NAEP. No value-added improvement there, despite years of implementation.

If anyone needs evidence of curriculum narrowing, go to the New York City Parent Blog where Steve Koss writes about the sharp decline in the number of New York City public school students who qualified as semifinalists in the Intel Science Talent Search contest. In 2002—before the double whammy of NCLB and mayoral control—New York City averaged 46 Intel semifinalists every year. But last week, when the winners were announced, the city's public schools had only 15 semifinalists! In our new age of data-driven instruction, science doesn't matter anymore, just reading and math, because they are tested, and science is not.

As it happens, Randi did not propose what was widely reported in the press. When I went to the AFT Web site and read her remarks, I discovered that she actually made a very thoughtful proposal. It will not satisfy the simplistic demand to fire teachers if their students' scores don't go up. But she made some very good points, and I wonder how many districts will be willing to take her advice; it won't be easy or inexpensive.

Before they can fairly evaluate teachers, she said, states must adopt professional standards that spell out "what teachers should know and be able to do," so teachers know what they will be held accountable for. Then, the evaluation itself should use "multiple means," including "classroom observations, self-evaluations, portfolio reviews, appraisal of lesson plans, and all the other tools we use to measure student learning—written work, performances, presentations, and projects..." Then she says, "Student test scores based on valid and reliable assessments should ALSO be considered—NOT by comparing the scores of last year's students with the scores of this year's students, but by assessing whether a teacher's students show real growth while in his classroom."

She adds that principals and superintendents should be held accountable for successful implementation of the evaluation plan. She also insisted that the purpose of evaluation is to help teachers, not just to judge them, so every district should have a program to "support and nurture teacher growth," including mentoring, ongoing professional development, and career opportunities that "keep great teachers in the classroom."

Randi said that the AFT would work with any district that was prepared to commit itself to implement an evaluation system with these components and a due process system aligned to it. To say, as the headlines did, that Randi supports evaluating teachers by student scores is misleading.

How many districts now test students at the beginning and end of each school year, as Randi proposes? My guess is that most schools follow the NCLB template, testing each cohort once a year for purposes of comparison. This leads to comparisons of unlike groups and a lot of useless data. Randi's recommendation might lead to more testing, but at least it would show a student's progress over the course of a year in the same classroom.

What do you think?

Diane

Redefining Achievement

2010-01-14T16:34:00Z

Dear Diane,

Thanks you for that deft summary on charters! Once we forget the public purposes of education, it's easier and easier to forget about the defects of the marketplace as a way to address the common good.

One of the concerns raised about the schools I founded was that such schools bred selectivity—even unintended cherry-picking on some subtle basis. At the time I argued that tracking within large neighborhood schools did much the same, and usually far less fairly. We need, I contended, to tackle issues of tracking under both approaches.

The major concern I had was with the trade-offs between what were often called "magnets" and the preservation of neighborhood-rooted schools. Separating schooling from the political community might be more damaging for democracy than I recognized. On the other hand, communities that crossed racial, language, and class barriers were not easy to find. Post-WWII housing policy had successfully undermined the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Then as now we thought we could increase equity in schooling without tackling equally fundamental issues of race and class.

There must be a healthy balance between localism and centralism. Leaning too far in either direction risks losing the best of both. When decisions get made further and further away from the action we get scenarios like the one below in which NYC's Department of Education has bought an assessment system called Acuity from CTB/McGraw-Hill. This is how the DOE describes Acuity on its Web site:

"Acuity (by CTB/McGraw-Hill) includes Predictive, Instructionally Targeted, and Item Bank Assessments. Predictive Assessments simulate New York State Tests and measure student growth. Instructionally Targeted Assessments (ITAs) were designed with New York City educators to measure skills commonly taught within a specific instructional period, and may be further customized by individual schools. The Item Bank may be used by educators at any time to build assessments or create classroom assignments."

Meanwhile, the DOE is closing schools or moving them about with some centralized strategy in mind. High on the list is more and more subsidizing of charter schools by locating them in existing public school space for free. For small schools of choice—unless their clientele is very powerfully connected—this is hard to fight. But the wholesale decision to redesign school boundaries, close schools, break big schools into littler ones, and move schools from one location to another has produced strong community-led opposition—maybe based as much on how the decisions were made as how much love there is for the schools involved. It's good to see that citizen resistance has not disappeared. But centralized decision-making certainly does its best to discourage a community's sense that it has a voice.

As I read your loud and clear piece to the bitter end, Diane, I was struck by the fact that in criticizing charters, friends and foes alike fall back on math and reading scores to prove their point. It's hard not to. As one who has never believed that our school system was "great"—as your book title suggests—I've struggled mightily to show other and better ways to "measure" schooling. Yes, these ways are more complex—but, then being well-educated is about dealing with complexity and can't be "measured" otherwise.

What we face is a point in history in which the longstanding failings to educate the "masses" are increasingly creating intolerable consequences for our economy and, even more so, for our democracy. The job market has been refigured so that large portions of the population are excluded from decent-paying work. In part because there are simply fewer decent-paying jobs, and diplomas are a helpful screening device for those that exist. As the working-class jobs of yore stopped paying good wages (de-unionization, outsourcing, etc), only workers "accustomed" to being paid poorly were needed, wanted, or willing to accept such work. Schools couldn't solve that, although a better-educated democracy might.

Can this whole set of dilemmas be "turned around"? Not easily. But neither can we "turn around" our large-scale public schools so that everyone gets a BA and good jobs magically appear.

The real crisis is that we haven't the foggiest idea of what "achievement" means except for test scores. Or, why the country would be better off if we were all better-educated. That's what the late Ted Sizer so boldly took on 25 years ago in "Horace's Compromise." He was hardly the first to do so, but he had the humility to offer both a different definition and a willingness to see if it was do-able. He undertook to match his ideas with real, living examples of schools operating around a different definition of achievement.

He largely lost the battle, but hundreds of schools in this country, mostly in places where "Deweyian" ideas were once entirely absent, have embraced the vision he set forth, and have tentatively, nervously, but hopefully redefined achievement in keeping with Sizer's 10 Common Principles. Principle No. One: "learning to use your mind well" around matters of importance to oneself and others. What students must demonstrate to their communities is the ability to exercise judgment about matters of importance based on publicly accessible evidence, not the number of years they've conscientiously and passively sat in class.

Every time the word "achievement" or "academics" is used to mean test scores we cheapen the meaning of both terms. We have set up dichotomies that chill me—so that the concept that play is children's work has morphed into play is a luxury that the poor cannot afford. "Rigorous" and "Powerful" have been pulled apart so that a course of study is considered worthy only if we have in mind its dictionary definition—rigid, harsh, difficult, unbending—rather than that it tackles powerful ideas. The intellectual play of the mind—that 0-6 year olds take to so naturally—is abandoned just when it could begin to focus on more and more complex phenomena—the stuff that "academia" intends to uncover for us. We need to join together the idea of academic smarts and practical smarts—the latter having been a hallmark of America's genius.

Otherwise, even if small schools are likely to be more humane, they can still be as mindless as the big ones Sizer described. Until we repack the word "achievement" with things worthy of achieving, matters adults truly respect, we will keep running back and forth from one fad to another without ever moving forward.

Deb

P.S. I've just lost another good friend of mine, and of good schooling for all—Mary Anne Raywid. Read this if you didn't know her. And if you did, you know what a wonderful human being we have lost.

The Secrets of Charter School Success

2010-01-12T14:43:00Z

Dear Deborah,

In my new book, coming out in early March,* I devote a chapter to examining the research about choice from a historical perspective. Leave aside vouchers for now, and let's look at charters, which are all the rage among the movers and shakers, including President Obama, Secretary Duncan, the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and business leaders.

The charter idea was born in 1988, when two men—unknown to one another—converged on the idea. One was an education professor in Massachusetts named Ray Budde. The other was Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers. Both saw charter schools as a sort of R&D program to help public education. Neither saw charters as competition for public schools. They thought that the lessons learned from charters would help to solve difficult problems of curriculum and instruction, while shedding light on issues of organization and student motivation.

As we both know, the founders' vision has been replaced by a totally different conception of charters. Now they are the leading edge of an effort to replace public schools and to oust teachers' unions. Knowledgeable insiders have told me that more than 90 percent—possibly 98 percent—of the nation's 5,000 charters do not have unions. Most are staffed by young teachers who work 50-60 hours a week and burn out after a few years.

There have been many research studies about charters and there will, of course, be more as they expand in number. Last fall, a study by Caroline Hoxby captured the media's attention by claiming that students who spent nine years in a New York City charter school would close the achievement gap between those in the poorest and the wealthiest districts. Now comes another New York City charter study, this one by Margaret Raymond of CREDO at Stanford University. Last spring, CREDO released a national study showing that only 17 percent of charter schools had better results than traditional public schools; 83 percent of charters produced gains that were no different or significantly worse. This study sent shock waves through the charter school world.

But now Raymond has produced a study of NYC charters that presents a far brighter picture than her national study. In contrast to Hoxby's NYC study, which seemed to suggest that any charter school was superior to any public school, Raymond's study is positive, but nuanced. She matched students in charter schools with students in traditional public schools by gender, grade, race/ethnicity, free-reduced price lunch status (a proxy for poverty), prior year test score, grade repeater, special-education status, and English-language learner. Raymond found that 51 percent of NYC charters produced significant gains in math, but only 29 percent did so in reading.

Since Raymond's 2009 national charter study was so bleak, charter advocates pounced on the NYC findings and celebrated. But a closer look should moderate the cheering.

Aside from the fact that Raymond's study showed that 49 percent of charter schools produced no significant gains in math, and 71 percent produced no significant gains in reading, she also reported that students who were in special education or who were English-language learners experienced no significant gains or losses in charters. She also found that charter students who had been retained in grade made no gains in reading and were outperformed in math by their peers in traditional public schools.

Neither Hoxby nor Raymond—both brilliant economists and leaders in their field—factored in the contextual factors that affect whether students perform well on tests of reading and math.

Charters in NYC may get better results than charters nationally because many or most have rich sponsors, hedge-fund managers or philanthropists with deep pockets who donate millions of dollars to their schools, enabling them to have smaller classes and more resources than the local public schools. (Tom Toch noted in an article in the December/January Kappan that the SEED charter school in Washington, D.C., which has been hailed as a national model, spends $35,000 per student yearly.)

Another important factor in the success of New York City's charters is that Chancellor Joel Klein has placed 70 of the city's 99 charters in public school space, subsidizing the charters' facilities, utilities, transportation, custodial services, food services, and whatever else is provided to the regular public school. This policy has ignited angry battles between the parents of charter school students and those at public schools that lose their computer room, their art room, their dance room, and classroom space to the favored charters. Parents and teachers in New York City public schools grumble about "academic apartheid" and "separate but equal" when they see the care and attention showered on charters located inside public schools that have long been neglected.

Then, too, most charters in New York City have lotteries for admission. The least informed parents never apply for a lottery, so the lottery acts as a screening mechanism. (Hoxby eliminated this factor by comparing students who won the lottery with students who lost it.) Thus, charters enroll few homeless students; there are some 50,000 homeless students in New York City's public schools, but only about 100 are enrolled in charters. When charters admit special education students, they tend to be those with the mildest disabilities because charters are not equipped to meet the needs of those with extreme disabilities. In addition, charters are able to "counsel out" students who are "not a good fit," who then return to the traditional public schools.

The United Federation of Teachers of New York City reported that charters serve less than 4 percent of English-language learners, compared with a citywide average of 14 percent; that less than 10 percent of charter students require special education, compared with a citywide average of 16 percent; that charters enroll fewer Hispanic or immigrant students than the regular public schools; and that while they have the same proportion of students receiving "free and reduced-price lunch," they have about 10 percentage points fewer of students eligible for free lunch (that is, the poorest students). The gaps are even larger when charter schools are compared with their neighborhood public schools, rather than citywide averages.

As one considers studies like those of Hoxby and Raymond, it is important to bear in mind that students in charter schools and public schools are not on a level playing field. Those in charters attend school with small classes and other motivated students, while those in public schools attend schools in overcrowded classrooms with a full range of students, including those who left charters. Charters demonstrate that "peer effects" matter.

If charters are going to be the models for public education in the future, we may have to roll back many civil rights laws and court decisions that prevent schools from excluding or limiting certain types of students. Or, charter schools should be required to accept the same range of students who attend regular public schools. Or, in return for their unusual freedom, some of them might dedicate themselves to educating the neediest students instead of avoiding them.

With the Race to the Top, the Obama administration is pushing states to remove all limits on the number of charter schools. Is this a signal that the equity agenda of the past half-century is dead?

Diane

*The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Basic Books).

Keep Your Eyes on the Money

2010-01-07T14:50:00Z

Dear Diane,

Do we hope our children leave school placing truth above money? Good ideas over "the Race to the Top"? Or, that they just "follow the money"?

Recently, Laura Pappano wrote in The New York Times about a new world of jobs in education: "...new education leadership jobs: running charter schools, directing turnarounds of troubled schools and founding nonprofits with creative answers to education challenges. Such work demands educators who are more M.B.A./policy-wonk than Mr. Chips, which is why universities are unveiling degree programs that pull professors from schools of education, business and public policy... While such programs include public policy training (school change can be a political minefield), the emphasis is on business. That's because more money is flowing into education."

So, yes indeed, keep your eyes on the money, Diane. Recent events in the 'marketplace economy' have not affected Arne Duncan et al's belief that there's a correlation between having money and being smart. They don't see how one individual earning $1 billion while another takes home $35,000 makes them unequal as citizens.

In December, the American School Board Journal, interviewed seven people on Duncan's approach to education. Liberal Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy is optimistic. Liberal Andrew Rotherham praises Duncan for taking on the "vested interests." Reform will move faster, he says, after "they take care" of those people (unions and teachers and bureaucrats). I used to count on the true conservatives to oppose a centralized agenda, so I was happy to see that some (Frederick Hess and Eric Hanushek) still favor decentralized schools. And, then there's you! Short and simple: "We are on the wrong track and heading in the wrong direction."

It's not easy to line folks up on today's education issues. I like that. Conservative constitutional fundamentalists should be up in arms—nowhere were the founders clearer about who leads who re schooling. But there don't seem to be any Tea Parties in the offing. Perhaps Christian fundamentalists have been persuaded that charters will serve their parochial purposes?

You probably know Alan Ryan's Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education whose liberal biases seem close to mine—and still closer to yours. I find myself saying "Diane would agree with this, but maybe not that!" As one of the great experts on this, I'd love to hear your view of Ryan, Diane. Having gone from Antioch College to the University of Chicago, I lived the tensions Ryan describes between the two faces of Dewey. In deciding that education in and for democracy is essential to its survival, John Dewey (like Jefferson, Mann, Lincoln, DuBois) knew we could not simply replicate schools designed for a small ruling elite and expect it to serve democracy.

My friend Vito Perrone in the closing essay of Roots of Open Education in America (1976) reminded us that,100 years earlier, most Americans dropped out of school before 5th grade. In the Dakotas, half didn't even make it to 2nd grade and only 1 percent completed high school. Nationwide, people of color couldn't even start school! Perrone also reminded us (as you do, Diane) that the fight between centralization and decentralization goes way back, as do the arguments for and against field trips, lockstep curriculum, traditional readers, rote learning, and spelling bees. Small vs. large schools, ideas vs. skills vs. facts, and academia vs. vocationalism have had proponents and opponents over and over. But the context has changed—in 1820, most political decisions occurred close to home.

I suspect that these contradictions don't cross the minds of Joel Klein, Arne Duncan, or Michael Bloomberg. The latest idea, that science and modern technology has provided us with a whole new way to decide on Truth is a cop-out—one Dewey sometimes fell into. In fact, even psychometricians have been largely excluded from the accountability discourse about the instruments they design, in ways that would have once been scandalous. When it comes to accountability by test scores, neither testing experts nor citizens make the decisions—we rely on accountants.

If I had known more about this history, would I have been more cautious about the reforms in NYC's District 4 in the 1970s and '80s—with its promotion of small self-governing schools of choice? I hope not. I believed then as now that the experience of a face-to-face-sized democratic community is vital for developing understanding of democracy's complexity. Raising democrats is thwarted in large, anonymous, "tracked" schools where democracy is—at best—a charade. Such schools stifle the intellectual and moral discourse between adults and adults and adults and kids. The complex trade-offs and compromises are necessarily ignored. Instead, such factory-style schools sow seeds of distrust in the democratic idea.

Democracy, I argue, is not "natural." It develops best in settings where vigorous defense of the absurd idea that human beings can be "smart enough" to overcome democracy's flaws must be reexamined over and over. If all people may not be "equal" nor "deserving" of respect, why do we insist that we "act as if" they are or could be? Yes, we'll have moments of despair and disbelief.

You and I have different "pedagogical" views about the best way to get there, and a different interpretation of the history that got us to where we are. This is why I do not favor prescribing my favored curriculum or yours. But both of us are deeply suspicious of a society that sees self-interest—in the form of money—as the primary mechanism for making decisions. The power over others that the "advantaged" seek to perpetuate may be "natural"—but democracy depends on human inventiveness to create a system that reduces the advantages that distort democracy's potential.

How sad that we've gone from a slogan with roots in democracy—No Child Left Behind—to an essentially divisive race to the top? Top of what? And why?

Deborah

The New Era of Greed

2010-01-05T13:43:00Z

Editor's note: Bridging Differences returns today after a two-week holiday break.

Dear Deborah,

I want to wish you and our readers—and most especially our editors at Education Week!—a happy, healthy New Year. The times are challenging indeed, and all of us should try to be as kind as possible to others and do whatever we can to bring about a world where kindness and civility are the norm.

As I see it, our mission this year will be to keep a close watch on the "reforms" that are now in vogue. In light of the nearly $5 billion that the federal government is using to promote its version of "reform," there will be quite a lot for us to talk about. None of these "reforms" have been validated by experience or experiments, but we'll talk more about that later. They just happen to be the ideas that Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, Joanne Weiss (previously COO of the NewSchools Venture Fund, now director of the Race to the Top fund), the Gates Foundation, and the Broad Foundation want to impose. Someday we will find out if they make a difference.

I want to kick off 2010 by talking about the new era of greed. Not a pleasant topic, to be sure, but there's no time like the present.

Living as we do in a market economy, we all understand that the profit motive rules in most private transactions. That's okay with me. I don't mind if the guy who sells me a car makes a commission, and the auto manufacturer makes a profit. I expect that there is a profit margin built into everything I buy, whether it is shoes or groceries or office supplies. This is no surprise.

Most people, however, feel uncomfortable at the idea of the profit motive becoming a regular part of public education, unless referring to vendors of materials. I know I do. I recoiled when I first heard the idea that children would be paid for raising their grades and test scores; I saw this scheme as undermining the core value of intrinsic motivation. If we pay children to study, will they continue to study if the pay stops? Without intrinsic motivation, education is a lost cause. My discomfort with the profit motive in public education is another reason I dislike merit pay. Merit pay assumes that teachers will not work hard unless they are paid more. It has been my experience that the overwhelming majority of teachers are working as hard as they know how; they will be happy to get more money for their efforts, but they have not been holding back and waiting for a bonus to spur them to greater effort.

Now, the Obama administration, with its odious Race to the Top, is welcoming entrepreneurs into public education with the expectation that the profit motive will lift achievement. This is arrant nonsense, though it is likely to take a decade before we see how little we have gained by this venture. A few weeks ago, my friends Checker Finn and Rick Hess published an amusing little essay called "Greedheads' Christmas: The Seedy Side of Entrepreneurial Education Reform." They acknowledged that many of today's "for-profit and non-profit operators are self-promoters out to make a buck—and some are little more than snake oil salesmen." The Race to the Top, they note, "has become a red light district for lusty charlatans and randy peddlers."

The new era of greed doesn't trouble them, because they believe that the world of public education has long been dominated by a government monopoly that serves the interests of adults, but not children. They believe that the only thing worse than a marketplace of greedy vendors is a government monopoly that is sluggish and bureaucratic.

Yes, there will be many greedy vendors in this new marketplace. Adult interests will be very well served. I know of charter school leaders who are paid between $400,000 and $500,000 annually. These are not principals, but entrepreneurs. Some of their schools enroll no more than 1,000 students. I read about a charter school founder who owns a for-profit company that supplies all the goods and services needed by his charter school; he clears a profit of over $1 million yearly. Who says that education doesn't pay?

As the states remove their caps on charter schools, the entire sector will expand rapidly and become the Wild West of entrepreneurship. As more students are handed over to the private sector with public dollars, there will be financial scandals. It is inevitable. Greed is a powerful motivator.

During the 1930s, educators debated whether the schools were reflections of society or whether they might lead the way to social change. I think it is pretty clear that the so-called "reform" movement reflects the dominant values of an earlier decade. Remember how policymakers became excited in the early 1990s by the idea of reinventing government, outsourcing, and deregulation? The formula for success, they believed, was choice, competition, and accountability. Charter schools were born in this era and are only now becoming the Great Hope for the Future of Education, the darling of the big foundations and the Obama administration, as they were for the Bush administration.

Look what deregulation did for our nation's financial institutions. Over the past year or so, we have seen the ruin that unchecked greed unleashed on our society. Let's see what it does to our nation's public education system.

Diane

2009-12-18T12:58:48Z

Editor's note: Bridging Differences begins a well-deserved holiday break today. Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier will return to their blog on Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2010. See you in the new year!

The 'Alternative?' Transparency & Honest Data

2009-12-17T17:57:00Z

Dear Diane,

Time to rest up and maybe start 2010 in a more hopeful mood.

I just put down an article in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande entitled "Testing, Testing." But it's not about schooling, but medical tests. The author is a doctor at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and grew up in Athens County, Ohio (his parents were doctors, not farmers). He uses his experience and inquiring mind to think about the advantages of not having a master plan for curing our ills. He describes the history of the government's role in agricultural reforms and suggests that maybe the hodge-podge we call our latest medical reform plan might lead to interesting places if we pursue the trial-and-error pilots that the bill proposes.

Assuming, which many don't, that we trust that most school people (and parents), like most doctors and farmers, want to do their best, and even think they are, what can we learn from Gawande's ideas, Diane? What would happen if we spent more time and money on actual trial-and-error pilots and then neutrally spread the word about what happens when....? If we collected honest data, not to bribe folks or to get them to comply, but on the assumption that information is desirable, sought after, and needs no bribe? Or, at least, that enough people don't need bribes or mandates to spread the best ideas—over time.

That was our idea in NYC when we proposed the Annenberg Network for School Renewal. It was the idea behind Boston's Pilot Schools. It was the idea behind—going back still further—Ralph Tyler's Eight-Year Study, Lillian Weber's Open Corridor program, the Central Park East schools, and the networks that grew out of them. Suppose these experiments had been supported wholeheartedly. Suppose we had visited each other, not competitively, but supportively. What if we had initiated a climate of inquiry into "what works"—which would have required (and, this is where medicine and agriculture may have it easier) laying out our different definitions about "what works" means? The Annenberg project, incidentally, did not include only "progressive-style" educators. Our alliance included New Visions (eclectic, lots of moneyed backing, etc), the Manhattan Institute (conservative, even pro-voucher), and a few nascent schools connected to ACORN's community organizing work and Ted Sizer's Coalition schools. What if we had learned the lesson economist Paul Samuelson talked about? (See "P.S. 2" below.)

The mindset behind this work requires three essential agreements: (1) that our purpose is not to mandate "our approach" vs. "your approach," (2) that we make the work transparent and public, and (3) that school decisions be responsive to their own constituents. It would require that schools and "networks" have a lot of flexibility and autonomy, and that the central authorities mostly be in the business of collecting data, making it accessible, bringing people together, plus monitoring basic financial, health, and civil rights compliance to state law. A very thin master contract between management and labor—such as was agreed to by UFT locals in Boston and NYC—supplemented by schools developing their own work agreements. The data we collect—none of it high stakes—could include exams of many sorts—perhaps one that we all use—alongside sampled data on potentially intriguing practices and experiences and a Tyler-type study of long-term impact. I'm laying this out for the umpteenth time because people keep asking me: "What's the alternative?"

Why not?? It was Rudy Crew and Richard Mills who vetoed our plan after we had gotten the go-ahead from their predecessors. State Commissioner Mills said that it would have worked in his old job in Vermont (a small state), but wouldn't work in N.Y., so why experiment? Crew said he was in too much of a hurry to have an impact on NYC to wait five years, but that he would borrow some of our ideas.

It is painful to think of where we might now be if we had 15 years worth of such data collected by NYU and Teachers College, not to mention the city and state! Now the states are rushing to reinvent public schools in the model of privately managed chains of schools. (The Massachusetts state Senate has passed a shocking bill to that effect. Massachusetts was one of those states whose test data outperformed virtually all international competitors before NCLB and charters!)

Two recent books bring together the two ends of my obsession with schools. Sam Chaltain's American Schools: The Art of Creating a Democratic Learning Community, and Elizabeth MacDonald and Dennis Shirley's The Mindful Teacher. Chaltain tackles the Big Issue through specific experiences in democratic communities, and MacDonald and Shirley start with a close look at what good teaching and learning is about, and tease out its implications for schooling writ large. Both suggest some "practical" directions.

Meanwhile back at the ranch (NYC's schools): Mayor Bloomberg will be holding one evening public meeting before the vote to close 22 mostly neighborhood high schools, move a bunch of other schools to new sites, implement new rules for procuring supplies, and new regulations regarding the role of parents and communities in their schools' operations. Speakers will have 45 minutes to comment on one and all, followed by a vote by the mayor's largely hand-selected semi-board. Then—"it's done."

He has won his election, and nothing will stop him, not even a state law requiring greater participation by parents and the public under mayoral control. Democracy may be a fragile and utopian idea at best. But this is "democracy" as satire.

Deb

P.S. The Mass Transit Authority (MTA) has just voted for a budget that would eliminate free and reduced transit fares for NYC schoolchildren. Since schools Chancellor Joel Klein and the mayor have built their master plan around kids being able to travel from "x" to "y," this means their initiatives would now be restricted to those families ready to pay nearly $1,000 a year per child in transit costs!

P.S.2: According to a WBUR report, the late Nobel economist Paul Samuelson "lamented that the financial industry's blind faith in numbers helped cause the current recession. 'Fiendish, Frankenstein monsters of financial engineering had been created,' he said at a forum at Boston University. 'A lot of them at MIT. Some of them by people like me.' " And, now, it seems number-obsessed financiers are taking over our public school system! Who could have believed that the very hedge-funders who have gotten us into our current financial and unemployment crisis are now going to use their smarts to rescue and remake our educational system—in their image?

The Race to Nowhere

2009-12-15T15:14:00Z

Dear Deborah,

I understand why you were taken aback by that article in the "Style" section of The New York Times last week that described how charter schools have become a must-have among hedge-fund managers, billionaires, and other members of the social elite in New York City. The article bothered me, too. In fact, the more I think about it, the more it worries me. Having written the history of the New York City public schools, I was reminded of the origins of free schooling in certain northeastern cities in the early 19th Century, when wealthy men decided that it was their civic duty to help civilize the children of the poor. In their view and in their day, they were doing good deeds, but their schools were stigmatized as charity schools for children of paupers and were avoided by children of the middle class. Outside of big cities, public education emerged as a community response to a community's need to school its children, not as a charitable venture.

Today, with the proliferation of charter schools, we may be seeing a resurgence of the historic pattern as public schools are privatized and taken over by very rich men (and women) who see themselves as saviors of the children of the poor. Naturally, you find this a repellent portrait because it undermines the democratic foundations of public education. It means that our society will increasingly rely on the good will of wealthy patrons to educate children of color. It means that education is seen as a private charity rather than as a public responsibility. Let's hope that the new owners who have taken over these schools are able to sustain their interest. After all, having 500 children in your care is not the same as having a stable of polo ponies or a vineyard in Napa Valley. If the children don't produce results that make the sponsors proud, they may pick a different hobby.

Though the rise of the hedge-fund managers as charter school operators may distress us, it thrills others because it dovetails so perfectly with the Obama administration's Race to the Top. I don't know about you, but I am getting sick of the rhetoric of the Race to the Top, as it implies the very opposite of "equal educational opportunity." But "equal educational opportunity" is so...yesterday, so now we shall all "race to the top," to see who can get there first. Who can privatize the most schools? Who can close the most public schools? Which district can replace the most public schools with charter schools? Who can compel their teachers to focus intently on those pesky math and reading test scores? Who can boot out the most teachers whose students didn't get higher scores than last year? Who seriously believes that this combination of policies will produce better education?

We try not to be New York City-centric, but so much is happening in this city that it is hard not to see it as a bellwether. After all, NYC not only was a faithful representation of No Child Left Behind, but it is now outfitting itself to be a faithful representation of the Race to the Top. This is not a hard transition because NLCB and the Race to the Top are really the same, except that President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan's "Race" has nearly $5 billion as a lure to persuade states to climb aboard the express train to privatization.

In the past few days, Chancellor Joel Klein has announced that he is closing nearly two dozen public schools. Some of these schools are the anchor in their communities; some have long histories as gateways for immigrant children. In recent years, the Department of Education decided that it does not like large high schools, so it has been closing them down and sending their lowest-performing students to other large high schools, which then have lower scores and more disciplinary incidents. Some of the large high schools were beyond saving, but most could have been improved by a thoughtful plan of action, including smaller classes, better supervision, and the kinds of resources that hedge-fund managers pour into "their" charter schools. Unfortunately the data-driven MBAs at central headquarters know nothing about instruction and curriculum or about any strategies that might improve a school. They have no school-improvement strategy. What they know best is how to shut down schools, and in this they will find funding and encouragement from the Obama administration.

As soon as the central administration decides to close a school, it is a fait accompli. New York City has a rubber-stamp "board" of 13, with a majority appointed by the mayor, serving at his pleasure; it approves every executive decision, with only a single dissenting vote (the heroic Patrick Sullivan, a public school parent). Public hearings are pro forma; no decision is ever reversed. Parents and teachers may protest 'til the cows come home, and they can't change a thing. Their school will be closed, the low-performing students will be dispersed, and either new small schools or charter schools will take over their building. Some of the schools that will close are, funnily enough, small schools that were opened by Bloomberg and Klein only a few years ago.

Does anyone believe that this sorry game of musical chairs will improve education? Does anyone in Washington or at central headquarters grasp the pointlessness of the disruption needlessly inflicted on students, families, teachers, principals, and communities in the name of "reform"? Do these people have no shame?

Diane