Bridging Differences

Let's Slow Down & Consider Our Path Carefully

2009-11-19T15:59:00Z

Dear Diane,

Someone calling himself "natturner" had a sharp reply to Jay Mathews' column on closing big high schools. Even though I was part of such an effort many years ago, and still brag about the results, I think natturner made a good rhetorical point in his comment on Mathews' blog:

"Mr. Mathews, I just can't figure out why you confine your sagacity to just America's public education system. Your philosophy seems relevant in so many bigger ways.

For instance, about a year ago the banking system collapsed, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it had failed. And rather than the U.S. taxpayer financing a banks turnaround to the tune of $700 billion, they should have, as you recommend for inner-city schools, been terminated! Terminating the banks, has a nice ring to it don't you think?"

The context, I like to believe, of our effort (pre-Klein/Bloomberg) was different, as were our allies in the work. But I'm uneasy about some of my earlier adventures as I see them turned into something that feels quite different. I wish we would learn from our history rather than rushing from fad to fad at the speed of light. Step One would be making transparent our purposes. Both for education writ large and for the reforms themselves. But I fear you are right, Diane. Many "reformers" have an agenda and will keep churning out "data" to prove their point. Thanks for the counter-data, once again. But meanwhile we have to counter their agenda with our own.

I like the late Ted Sizer's definition of the purpose of education: "to help young people use their minds well." He reminded us that this involved developing habits that weren't easy to sustain in face of the obstacles placed before us by so many powerful distracters right there inside our schools! That's what Horace's Compromise intended to demonstrate. Horace was compromised from doing his job by the regularities of the very school he worked in.

If this were the purpose of schools, argued Sizer, then we would need to "measure" our success in ways consistent with our goal. We should ask kids to "show us" their minds at work so that we can judge the claims made on their behalf. Seems simple enough. But then we get into trouble. Somebody (in fact several millions of such) thought Sarah Palin, and George Bush before her, were the kind of leaders they desired. That was a judgment which you and I might question, so how dare we leave ourselves open to such judgments when it comes to what constitutes a good education and a well-educated person? So we generally retreat and seek measurements that compare something, whatever, but not our exercise of intellectual judgment.

I know of no easy answer to this. At CPESS and Mission Hill we tried to construct a different "compromise"—by creating a process that over-weighted professional expertise, but included other voices. We also went to great lengths to make the work of the judges transparent, through an archive that contained both the student's work and a sampling of videos of the live process itself.

There is plenty of room for measurement error in this process. But is the rate of error any greater than it is using standardized tests? We concluded that it wasn't, and our view was reaffirmed by a panel of experts selected by N.Y. State Superintendent Mills to judge 35 public high schools that developed similar practices to replace tests and credit hours.

If we are educating young people in the art of exercising judgment, then maybe we have no choice but to measure them through a respectful process that honors judgment. In the process, most important of all, our students come to value what we honored.

I'm not naive enough to think we are about to take that path writ large. But, like you, Diane, I'm hoping that we will slow down a bit and reconsider the one we're presently pursuing. If Michele Obama weren't good at standardized testing, and if she sent her children to schools that do not define children in that way—why must "being realistic" (as she argues) mean that we must keep doing it to the kids we send to public institutions?

In Yong Zhao's new book, Catching up or Leading the Way, he tackles precisely this issue from the standpoint of China's long obsession with tests. He concludes the book by noting that he has hopefully shown "how the current reform efforts are the result of a history of flawed reasoning based on incomplete information, driven by unfounded fear, and influenced by politics." He includes a quote from Yogi Berra that sums it up well—"The future ain't what it used to be."

Fixing our schools through more deeply embedding an old outworn mechanism designed for a different age and purpose (sorting, ranking) will be a disaster, which we can still avert. I hope we don't conclude, as the Chinese have, that the roadblock is democracy itself, our ultimate form of accountability. Am I whistling in the dark, Diane?

Deb

P.S. How do Klein/Bloomberg explain why large high schools rated by their system of measurement as "A" or "B" be eliminated?

Obama and Duncan Are Wrong About Charters

2009-11-16T18:12:59Z

Dear Deborah,

The legislators who passed the Elementary and Secondary Act in 1965 repeatedly assured their colleagues and the American public that the federal government would never interfere with state and local control of schools. The purpose of the law was clear: To provide additional funding to the nation's neediest students.

Of course, that vow did not preclude federal intervention to abolish racial segregation, because segregation was one of the sources of inequity and there was a Supreme Court decision requiring an end to state-sponsored segregation.

Now, we see that the original promise has not only been forgotten, but broken. Today we see the Obama administration using federal dollars to bribe states to pursue remedies that are highly contested and whose results are uncertain. They do this in the name of "reform," but today anyone with a plan—good or bad—calls himself or herself—a "reformer." Calling something a "reform" does not mean that it will improve education.

Here is some news. I went to the NAEP Web site and used a function called NAEP Data Explorer (http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/). This made it possible to compare charter schools and regular public schools on the NAEP 2009 math assessments, which were released a few weeks ago. No one else has done this, so our blog will be the first place in which these results appear.

As you know, charter schools have been assessed by NAEP since 2003. They have never outperformed regular public schools, and their defenders say it is because they enroll more disadvantaged students. Fair enough.

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But over time, we have heard, charter schools will close the achievement gap. This is not happening, at least not yet. In fourth grade, students in charter schools were six points behind their peers in regular public schools in 2003; now the gap is eight points. In eighth grade, the gap favoring public schools was 10 points in 2005; now it is seven points.

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In cities, the gap favoring public schools in 4th grade was six points in 2003; now it is nine points. Also in cities, the gap favoring public schools in 8th grade was three points; now it is eight points.

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Overall, public schools continue to outperform charter schools. The public schools' performance is significantly better overall and in cities, and among students who are not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (the federal measure of poverty in school data). Among other groups—those eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, whites, blacks, and Hispanics—the test scores of public schools and charter schools are not significantly different.

Don't get me wrong. I am not opposed to charter schools on principle. My beef with charter schools is that most skim the most motivated students out of the poorest communities, and many have disproportionately small numbers of children who need special education or who are English-language learners. The typical charter, operating in this way, increases the burden on the regular public schools, while privileging the lucky few. Continuing on this path will further disable public education in the cities and hand over the most successful students to private entrepreneurs.

My own view, which you will see in my new book, is that charters should educate the children who are most at risk, rather than drawing away the most motivated. That would make them collaborators, rather than competitors, with the regular public schools.

Partisans of the current approach to charters point to the recent study by Stanford professor Caroline Hoxby as proof of the superiority of the charter sector. Hoxby claimed that the charters in New York City were so remarkable that students who completed grades K-8 in a charter would almost close the gap between Harlem and Scarsdale (the most disadvantaged and the most advantaged communities). Editorials in many newspapers hailed this study as the last word proving the superiority of the competitive market model.

What the editorialists did not realize was that the study had not been peer reviewed. The first peer review was released last week, by Stanford professor Sean Reardon. He found statistical flaws in the Hoxby study, but, to my eyes, of greater importance was his point that the Hoxby study rests on extrapolations of data. In other words, the study does not represent the real accomplishments of real students, but rather statistical projections. There may or may not actually be a cohort of actual students who attended a New York City charter school from grades K-8 and in fact almost closed the gap. Unless someone is able to call a meeting and produce the 12, 25, 200, or 2,000 students in this miraculous cohort, we should suspend judgment on the miraculous findings. (As you know, I have never believed in miracles, especially in education.)

No doubt we will hear more about this in the future, as Hoxby (a brilliant economist) responds, and other peers weigh in with additional reviews of her study.

The Obama administration is using its unprecedented billions to advance a strategy of deregulation and deprofessionalization. This strategy will push American schools into untested waters, with thousands of untried leaders, and with results that are far from certain. This is not a reform strategy, but a risky strategy. My own view is that the federal government should not mandate or bribe states and districts to take actions unless there is a clear Constitutional imperative or an undisputed research basis. Neither exists in this case.

Diane

Defining Achievement as More Than Test Scores

2009-11-12T17:25:44Z

Dear Diane,

The bad news does seem to overwhelm the good news of late.

For starters, when talking about education, we need a new vocabulary. The term "achievement" has become synonymous not with the intellectual tasks of schooling, the "using one's mind well" as Ted Sizer put it, but with whatever is measured by multiple- choice tests. The more answers right the better—of course—but otherwise there's little of intellectual quality being measured.

If it's "using one's mind well" that should be at stake, then one might imagine we need tests that rest on demonstrations of how students use their minds! That should be at the heart of any "high-stakes" assessment. And if we could get over our aversion to sampling, even standardized tests could in fact also help us gain understanding of quite complex matters.

One of our readers suggested that David Leonhardt's essay on health care in last weekend's New York Times Magazine was evidence on behalf of measurement. Indeed, what you and I are—I think—arguing against is measuring the wrong things, in the wrong ways, and in the process corrupting the ends we have in mind.

The story of the work of Dr. Brent James, as Leonhardt describes it, is not a refutation, but a support for good assessment. It is a call for assessments that start from the bottom up. And, while the health field has one enormous advantage—little disagreement about what constitutes improved health, except at the two ends of life—it's not easy to gather the right data. With educational assessment, we are stuck with the fact that different "schools of thought" actually exist about means and ends. For example, in my own field and yours, the way we examine the past too often betrays our "deterministic" view of human history. The "causes" of World War I are taught as set knowledge, suggesting that another history couldn't have happened. This mindset undermines democracy and civic participation. Wouldn't it be grand if students were asked "how otherwise" the story of WWI could have played out? And, why not? One of the "habits of mind" that was central to the schools I founded was precisely that: "Supposing that, what if?". But this is a controversial viewpoint—should federal policy settle this difference in outlook?

It takes deep knowledge to struggle through the historical data with such ends in mind, but it is precisely the kind of mindset that history in a democracy needs. Or, so I would argue. It is the mindset that enlivens the debate over the history being written in our own lives. And there is no age too young to start such "imaginary" thinking, based on sound factual knowledge. In fact, playfulness is not just the task of early childhood, but the task of every citizen who cares about the future. Schools rarely do much to keep such "playfulness" alive, but democracy depends upon it.

I've just returned from New Orleans, and a wonderful three days of both celebrating the ideas of Ted Sizer and considering where next to take them. Between sessions I went from my luxury hotel in the French Quarter out to the lower Ninth Ward—that part of New Orleans that still looks like the disaster just happened. We were visiting a school in the Ninth Ward that reopened thanks to the strong will of the principal, her staff, and the school community. But the difficulties in New Orleans made me wonder if anyone is responsible for that old-fashioned idea: the common good.

President Obama's message throughout the campaign was a reiteration of the concept of the "common good," at a time when we were experiencing the impact of a society built around "the more I get, the better." But I agree with you, Diane. What we're hearing now is rather different than what we expected. Neither Education Secretary Arne Duncan's failure in Chicago, nor the mayor's in N.Y.C., nor Michele Rhee's in Washington, D.C., are on the table; it's as though we can sweep that inconvenient evidence under the rug by a constant repetition of good PR.

Producing schools that do right by all children AND by the nation is, in fact, more complex than rocket science. It means, for example, concerning ourselves with the children in that other ward across the levees, not just our own. Democracy works most easily when our personal short-term interests and the interests of the least advantaged match. But democracy can't depend on that.

If Iraq and Afghanistan are about the struggle for democracy, than why can't we see our schools as just as important in this struggle? What we spend in a week or month in Iraq/Afghanistan would allow us to lower class sizes nationwide to match what the most powerful citizens demand for their own children.

So where do we go with this issue, Diane? We need policies that don't make it too easy for the most advantaged to do right for their kids at the expense of those least advantaged. That means, to begin with, defining achievement as something more, not less, ambitious than test scores. The rich can survive that, perhaps, but the nation can't.

Deborah

Obama's Vision for Education

2009-11-09T21:38:21Z

Dear Deborah,

I have been trying to ascertain what President Obama plans to do to reshape the federal role in education, and the outlines of his policy are becoming clear. So far, we have not heard much about what he will do to fix the No Child Left Behind approach, but the signs are not encouraging.

One point is clear: He prefers charter schools to regular public schools. After his election, he first visited a charter school, not a regular public school. The day after the 2009 election, he and Secretary Arne Duncan visited the Wright Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, which caps its class sizes at 20. That is a class size, by the way, that is out of reach in most urban public schools. The president seems eager to turn over as many public schools as possible to private management. I find it laughable that so many of his critics call him a socialist and a man of the left, when in education, he is quite obviously a force for privatization of public education.

The president is a strong supporter of performance pay. In his visit to the charter school in Madison, the president took the opportunity to remind the nation that teachers should be evaluated in relation to their students' test scores. The funny part of this was that he "went off script" to tell everyone that his daughter Malia came home from school with a 73 on a science test. Logic should have compelled the president to demand an immediate investigation of Malia's teacher, who had obviously failed in her responsibility to make Malia an A student. But, no, the president said that Malia, apparently upset by her low grade, had "started wanting it [the higher score] more than us," and on her next science test, she got a 95. The president did not seem to realize that his little family story had undermined his campaign to blame teachers if students did not score well. Malia got a low score initially because she didn't try hard enough, not because her teacher was ineffective.

Too bad that no one in the U.S. Department of Education briefed the president and the secretary on the latest merit pay evaluation. This one, produced by the National Center on Performance Incentives at the request of the Texas Education Agency, reviewed the results of the nation's largest merit pay program (PDF). Called the Governor's Educator Excellence Grant (GEEG) program, it handed out some $300 million over three years to teachers in 99 high-poverty schools. The plan relied on test scores, and the performance of individual teachers.

The good news: The teachers liked the extra pay; they collaborated to get extra pay. Teachers had positive attitudes about the program, whether they got the bonuses or not.

The bad news: The program had an "inconclusive" impact on student achievement, which the evaluation characterizes as "weakly positive, negative or negligible effect" on gains.

So, having seen little return from its sizable investment, Texas plans to expand the program, and of course, President Obama wants every state to pump federal dollars into pay-for-performance, even though we have yet to see any evidence that this is a sensible investment of scarce public funds.

Two things are becoming clear to me: One, people who have an agenda will pursue that agenda regardless of evidence. They will tell you that conditions weren't exactly right, that the bonus should have been larger, that the program should have been tweaked this way or that way. But the bottom line is that teachers got bonuses, and the impact on student achievement (using those same lousy measures that we complain about) was hard to quantify.

The other is that the Obama administration has an education plan that was written by corporate-style ideologues. They are determined to fasten a business plan on the schools and will not be deterred by arguments or evidence. If incentives and sanctions work in the business world, then by gum, they will work in education. If deregulation is what the corporate sector wants, then why not foist it on the schools as well.

So, the outline of the Obama education vision is emerging. It is a business plan, designed by people who know nothing about schools and care nothing about evidence.

The nation's public schools are in for a rough ride.

Diane

Simplify Everything Else, Not Kids & Subject Matter

2009-11-05T15:51:00Z

Dear Diane,

The absurdities you describe are on the mark and ought to kill the idea of paying teachers based on their students' test scores. But we both know the idea won't die that easily. Even the most renowned of testing experts argue that we're nowhere near being able to produce tests that can do the job of pay-by-score that folks want. I do wonder at times what "they" think they are doing?

The trouble is that when I start down that path I see conspiracies everywhere—for example, that these schemes justify hiring inexperienced and low-paid teachers—who can do scripted test-prep as well as the next guy. It has the handy side effect of destroying solidarity which from a businessman's perspective (perhaps) is a good thing, and keeps teachers away from controversial subjects—and tightly aligned to the stuff being tested. It probably weakens unions. And finally, it paves the way for a marketplace system of schooling instead of a public one (which is then relabeled a bureaucratic monopolistic model). Of course, the latter can be true—and as you know I was an early champion of choice and increased school autonomy for just that reason—within the public sector.

The charter schools have also become I fear another name for vouchers. Operated by private chains with public funding, they offer a kind of distorted marketplace, controlled by test scores standing in for profits. Thus, they kill two birds with one stone: public education and human judgment.

A test of intellectual rigor always in part rests on judgment. Democracy is built on that shaky foundation of trusting our fallible judgments. The central purpose of K-12 schooling in a democracy is thus the training of human judgment. The young can only learn how-to in the company of adults who are doing it. The means and ends are one.

But where you and I may disagree re. the Obama agenda is on the question of nationwide "standards"—e.g. curriculum. I think we are in agreement that NAEP—the only existing national exam—should remain separate and untainted by high stakes. A better labeling/benchmark system—or even doing away with any labels—would be wiser still. We can then focus on in-depth analysis of a wide range of interesting data. Those who want a 50-state common core grade-by-grade curriculum won't be satisfied with sampled NAEP scores because they want to make state-by-state, school-by-school, student-by-student comparisons. They see the competition for test scores as healthy. So, where do you stand?

In that regard, I found the recent Brookings Institution research by Grover Whitehurst et al a helpful warning. He argues that "the creation of common standards will have little impact on our future in a system in which there are also aligned assessments, and aligned curriculum, educators, and accountability for students, and aligned professional development...." And on and on. "Faith," he concludes, is not enough, and a closer look at our most successful "competitors" internationally demonstrates that this is not the path they have taken.

I don't recall the exact data, but someone once noted that teachers make dozens (or hundreds?) of decisions a minute. More than almost any other field (e.g. doctors), partly because they are simultaneously educating 20 to 30 different kids every minute. That's why they need eyes in the back of their heads and a trained instinct about those peculiar silences, mutterings, etc., which only experience teaches us to notice. Kids are complex—and each one is different. The subject matter is hopefully difficult, too. Thus, as Ted Sizer reminded me, be sure and simplify everything else you can, or you'll find yourself simplifying the kids and the subject matter. We've done the opposite under the new "deform" agenda: as school people follow ever more complicated analysis of statistical data! Becoming themselves more like machines. Truly! I sometimes wonder how many hours it would take to accomplish five hours of school time. If we each were teaching one child—home-schooling, in short. Simplifying complex people and information consumes us. It's not all wasted time, but.....

Once in a while, I'd try to make a quick round of my classroom to assess who was catching on to what. The trouble was that I usually got so intrigued by the first child I sat next to that I didn't get to the second. I exaggerate, a little.

Finding the right metaphors and analogies that work for each child is in part an art that takes time to accumulate into wisdom. It takes wariness, too, and sometimes only a good observer can catch our mistakes. It's hard not to hear our own meaning rather than the one the kids are making. Besides, many kids know how to fool us by "looking" smart.

I found this as true in my relationships with adults when I was a principal or head teacher. Because once again we don't all respond to criticism or close questioning the same way and can open up or close down very quickly. Sometimes quite politely.

I wish I could convince the new reformers—those who truly want a better way—that we need to improve and deepen NAEP while school-by-school we develop better tools for assessing that are simultaneously better tools for teaching.

Our final exercises at CPE and Mission Hill and Urban Academy and Beacon and on and on are the culmination of years of teaching/assessing approaches. At culminating years, the staff pull together to show off more formally before real-live audiences, who are assigned the task of "judging." They are, as I say over and over, real "road tests"; what people encounter in the real world of college or the workplace, and they simultaneously respond to the skills and knowledge that we need as citizens who are not easy to fool—at least not often. They serve, in short, democracy first and foremost.

Deb

Should Teacher Evaluation Depend on Student Test Scores?

2009-11-03T13:43:17Z

Dear Deborah,

What a lovely tribute to Ted Sizer! I did not know Ted nearly as well as you did, but I admired him very much. He was very much the gentleman, and truly a gentle man. I had many disagreements with Jerry Bracey over the years; he was not gentle at all. Nonetheless, it is sad that these two men will no longer be among us, as they were both completely independent, a quality that is in short supply these days.

Which brings us back to the Obama agenda for education. Most educators are dubious about this agenda, but unwilling to speak up. The profession encourages timidity, I am sorry to say, because no one is supposed to speak out unless their supervisor approves, and the superintendents these days are looking at that big pile of cash in D.C. and hankering for a piece of it. So no one speaks up.

But that's why we are here, so let's have at it.

As you know, one of the big-ticket items on the Obama agenda is a proposal to evaluate teachers by looking at changes in their students' test scores. As I explain in my forthcoming book, this idea comes out of studies by various economists who say that credentials and experience count for nothing, and that if we value improvements in student performance, we should judge teachers by their students' scores. If the scores go up, the teacher is "effective," and if they don't go up, the teacher is a loser.

This approach has become wildly popular among the chattering classes. They think it is akin to a business that makes a profit (a winner) and one that loses money (a loser). They do not know of the studies by economists demonstrating that this particular measure of effectiveness is highly unstable. A teacher may have a class that gets higher scores one year, but not the next; or lower scores one year, but not the next. And then there is the fundamental problem, as all psychometricians warn us, that tests should be used for the purpose for which they were intended, and not for other purposes. In other words, a test of fifth grade reading tests whether students in the fifth grade are able to read material appropriate for children their age. It cannot then be used to determine whether their teacher was good or bad.

Writers who know nothing about education love the idea, however. For example, The New York Times published an editorial on Oct. 29 about the new teachers' contract in New Haven, Conn., which will allow test scores to count when evaluating teachers. The Times was happy about that, but disappointed that the contract did not spell out a precise formula "in which the student achievement component carries the preponderance of the weight." Instead, the details will be determined, to the Times' chagrin, by a committee that includes teachers and administrators.

By coincidence, the Century Foundation published an issue brief by Gordon MacInnes on the same day titled "Eight Reasons Not to Tie Teacher Pay to Standardized Test Results." Among the reasons are these: "Even reliable standardized tests are valid only when they are used for their intended purposes"; students are not randomly assigned to schools or to classes; state data systems are in their infancy, and it is far too soon to produce reliable and accurate longitudinal data; the assumption behind such plans is that teachers are holding back on their efforts because they are not paid enough (when it is far likelier that teachers, schools, and legislators "simply don't know how to improve educational prospects for poor children"); such an approach will inhibit collaboration among teachers; and most teachers don't teach a subject or grade that is subject to regular testing.

I have been trying to figure out how a school would function if the advocates of tying test scores to teacher evaluation prevail. At least three years of data would be needed, though five years would be better. At the end of the three-to-five years, the teachers who did not get gains would be fired and replaced by teachers who have no track record at all. Every year, a new group of teachers who had not produced gains would be fired, and another untested group of teachers would take their place. Most teachers, as MacInnes points out, would be exempt because they don't teach reading or math. But for the unfortunate minority who do teach the tested subjects, there would be an annual game of musical chairs. There would be constant churn, with untried teachers thrown into the trenches. Some might make it (though it will take three years or more to be sure), but many will be ousted.

Does any other profession work this way?

Correct me if I am wrong, Deborah, but I don't think this describes what any of the high-performing nations in the world do.

Diane

Remembering Ted Sizer

2009-10-29T12:31:00Z

Dear Diane,

I have been feeling sad during the past month. First came awareness that the health of an old colleague of mine has moved into its final stages. When she joined us at CPE 32 years ago, she was the first person my age to be my colleague. It was nice not to be a mother or mentor to someone. I learned so much from her. It's like losing a part of my own history.

Then came word of Gerald Bracey's sudden death. I was startled because his sharp-witted, clever, and yet erudite contribution to our work has been a life-saver to me over the years. Bracey's annual reports and his Phi Delta Kappan columns made me both wince and rub my hands in delight.

Then came news of Ted Sizer's death last week. I was at an AFT/NEA meeting of TURN in Washington, D.C., listening to "Arne" Duncan. (Asking us to call him Arne doesn't ring true to me—why is that?) My cell phone rang—confusion, embarrassment. Then came George Wood's words—"Ted died last night."

A week later, and it's still not believable. Can it be that he is not "there" for us, for his family, and for America's schools? But maybe that's the wrong way of thinking about it. Maybe he is still "there," but in a different way.

Ted was, first of all, a close friend—he and Nancy have been at my side on many a nerve-wracking occasion, and their home has always been open to me, as have their ideas. We met in Paris and introduced our granddaughters to each other at a lovely Paris restaurant. Mine still remembers the occasion. Was Ted a mentor? I think so, in the sense of that word that I like best. Not from the perspective of a "follower," but an aspiring colleague. His words and his actions represented the highest standard for what it was we should aspire.

That's what I mean by having standards. That is not lost.

He also met a high standard for friendship—both of a personal and collegial kind. He regularly showed up when any of us needed him—to speak to yet another chancellor or to another "ornery" school board member. He "used" his status in the most tactful way and that made all of us gain stature from him.

His patience-toleration level was much higher than mine; he would sit at meetings in which I poured forth my passionate opinions and not say a word. His face did not betray (as mine so often does) his opinion. At most, a benign and slightly amused look would on occasion pass over his features. Then, he would enter the conversation for a few minutes of laid-back words that changed the course of the discourse. I will "imagine" him at the next heated gathering I attend—and the words he might have uttered.

Whether it was at meetings or during school visits—he was a learner every second. His ears and eyes were taking in what I too often missed, or rushed by. His equanimity in the face of what would seem to be crisis situations buoyed me up. It did not appear to be the response born of naiveté or foolish optimism. We need to learn to pass this on to our colleagues in the field.

I met Ted 27 years ago. His background made me suspicious—Harvard, Andover, New England WASPS (white Anglo Saxon Protestantism). He was indeed all of these. But he took from each institution and culture what even I had to admire about them—and left the rest behind.

Ted, we shall overcome in time the obstacles facing us, and we will use the wisdom of your character and your ideas to do so. These ideas, propositions, and principles may not flourish tomorrow or even in my lifetime, as they didn't in your lifetime. But you made a huge difference in the lives of hundreds and thousands and more of us—those you taught formally and informally about how schools could be. The impact you have had can never be taken away from us. It has already changed the shape of so many schools and school people (including parents and kids). What lies at the heart of your mind and heart will persist, and persist, and never die.

Deborah

P.S.: It's interesting how different Ted Sizer and Gerald Bracey were. The gentle giant and the sharp-minded grouch. It would be a poorer world if we didn't have some of both!

P.S. 2: To add to Diane's Tuesday blog re. what the rich want for their children:
Michael Bloomberg: Spence (average class size: 16-18);
Joel Klein: Miss Porter's (average class size: 11);
Photo Anagnostopoulos (COO of NYC Education Department): Dalton (average class size: 15)
President Obama: Sidwell Friends (average class size: 15).

What Does the Best and Wisest Parent Want?

2009-10-27T12:39:00Z

Dear Deborah,

Well, I certainly agree with you that all kids should have the quality of education now available only for students in the best schools. Given how much our nation spends on education, this should not be a pipe dream, but we know that it is not happening and has not happened in the past.

We both recall that John Dewey wrote that what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child is what the community should want for all its children. That's a good starting point. What does the best and wisest parent want for his or her own child?

Certainly, that parent would want a school with small classes, which guarantees that her child would get personal attention. Class size is a pretty good indicator of what most people mean by quality. If you visit the most elite private schools, you can bet that they don't have 32 students in a class. On the Web sites of such schools, one learns that classes are typically 12 to 15 students to a teacher. Such luxury is unheard of in most public schools, with the possible exception of schools in tony suburbs. Many of those who pronounce that class size doesn't matter send their own children to schools with small classes.

Another indicator of quality is the presence of the arts. The best and wisest parent would not want his child to go to a school with no teachers of music, art, dance, or other arts. Yet we know that in most of our public schools today, the arts have been sacrificed to make more time for test-prepping.

One more point: That wise parent would demand schools that were physically attractive and well-maintained. He or she would not tolerate the neglect, deterioration, and obsolescence that we see so often in our schools. There are lots of other things that our mythical best-and-wisest parent would insist upon, but these three points, I think, are indisputable, and a good starting point.

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

Let's get back to the new federal education agenda. Seeing how little has changed from Bush to Obama in education policy, I want my share of that $5 billion back. (That may become my weekly mantra!).

Diane

What Works for Rich Kids Works for All Kids

2009-10-22T13:09:00Z

Dear Diane,

We've got to stop agreeing so much! I can't wait to read your new book so I can go into "attack mode" again. I always wonder, however, whether our disagreements are "fundamental" or based on our very different entries into the world of schooling. I think it's a bit of both. Your view that progressive education ideas became dominant at any time defied what I witnessed in schools I subbed in, sent my kids to, etc. (Even as it may well have swept the elite schools of education.) Your belief that there can be a curriculum that all could follow seems puzzling to me given what I also know about the kind of teachers and teaching you sought for your own kids, and even your reaction to CPESS. I just don't believe that if you were a classroom teacher you'd agree to follow someone's curriculum if you didn't agree with it. I'd rather impose a pedagogy than a curriculum, and you the other way around. But I suspect we both have in our head versions of each other's ideas that are not quite what the other means. We'll see.

I wonder at times what it's like to grow up in a society in which there are people whose bonuses are in the millions—many, many millions. Or annual salaries that are beyond most of our imagination in those big numbers we don't quite fathom. Surely, they can't "spend" it? But it represents the power to buy and sell ideas, information, political offices, and on and on. It unbalances the playing field beyond my wildest nightmares. And to get those bonuses when you failed—with built-in contracts that provide enormous pensions and severance pay—regardless of performance! And this from a business world that proclaims, if teachers get a few-thousand-dollar bonuses, they'd better work harder or smarter? Yes, I suppose I'd be less insulted if they offered a million to the top 10 teachers—based on anything they liked! It would be less demeaning.

If I had wanted to make a lot of money, would I have chosen to be a teacher? And to remain for 40-plus years inside the classroom and schoolhouse? I recall that when I got the MacArthur, reporters asked me whether I would now leave and do something more important. I used the money instead to support a teacher-led reform organization in NYC. (I also took my family on a vacation.) But the award was mostly important because it gained me respect—suddenly I was an "expert." Earlier, I had been invited to panels as the "voice" from the classroom, and folks from the university and the business world were there as the experts.

I was, as reader Erin notes, not looking for ways to "tweak" the system or get a few points more on test scores (which were the rage when I began teaching, too); I wanted to figure out (for myself, I suppose) what it would take to create a different life trajectory for ordinary kids. I happened to live in communities where the schools mostly served children of color, so that's where I worked, too. But the issue is broader—because the vast majority of our citizens are—I believe—poorly educated given the responsibility they possess for writing our future destiny.

I discovered, lo and behold, that what worked for the mostly rich kids who attended the independent progressive school I had gone to worked for all kids—with tweaks. If Obama, Duncan, Klein et al would send their kids to schools with small class sizes, then so should other families do the same. If their teachers had a variety of professional perks, so should ours. If their teachers had the freedom to explore new topics, to create environments that responded to children's interests and the world around them—so should it be for others.

Of course, there are more traditional elite schools—but they, too, tend to be smaller schools with smaller class sizes and they teach a full range of human endeavor—the arts, music, sports, etc. Oh, how I envied that, given my inability to give my students both the "basics" and the "extras." I made compromises that seemed immoral to me—but choices I felt we had to accept given time, budgets, and mandates.

I spent last Saturday evening with students and families who came to CPE in 1974 and many years thereafter—we now educate at CPE the children of our children—and hope to be around for their children, too. The power of their ideas—not mine or our teachers alone—was what drove the school. And it helped make it a place that adults enjoyed and were inspired by—constantly in a state of "relearning."

It could be. And, alas, the charters are in many ways less free than we were within "the system"—and most don't use what freedom they possess to be labs for the rest of us. But two quite remarkable superintendents—Anthony Alvarado and Steve Phillips—between them created a K-12 "district" larger than most cities in which school people redesigned what "regular" schooling could be. CPE was "merely" one of many—and many survive, hanging on by a thread, but determined to persist in going against the grain.

Deborah

P.S. Did I tell you about a marvelous book by Garrett Delavan, The Teacher's Attention (Temple University)? Delevan makes the case for smaller schools and smaller classes, or as he calls it "relationship load reduction." Delavan is a high school teacher in Salt Lake City.

Does Merit Pay Make Sense?

2009-10-20T13:24:00Z

Dear Deborah,

It is a good idea to explore the separate elements of the federal education agenda, one by one. Merit pay, the first issue you raise, now stands high among the priorities of the Obama administration as it did for the Bush administration and as it has for the Republican Party and business leaders for many years.

The idea that teachers should be evaluated in large part by the test scores of their students has achieved a remarkable currency in the past year, because President Obama and Secretary Arne Duncan have championed it. You worry that merit pay might be unfairly applied and that it would disrupt the collegial nature of schoolwork. You also worry that if teachers get a bonus when scores go up, students will see that their teachers are motivated by money, not the intrinsic satisfaction associated with professional success. And, as you point out, there is precious little evidence (you say NO evidence) that merit pay leads to better schools.

As most now define it, merit pay rewards teachers whose students get higher scores on state tests. Such teachers are likely to require their students to practice for days, weeks, even months for the all-important state tests. Such activities are likely to be repetitive, uncreative, and uninspiring. As Daniel Koretz wrote in his recent book, Measuring Up, this intensive test prep regime may produce higher scores by teaching students the format of the state test, even teaching them very similar questions; however, the students may be unable to perform as well on a different test of the same subject. Such activities, Koretz says, tend to corrupt the measure and reduce its validity.

When I was researching merit pay, I discovered that David K. Cohen and Richard J. Murnane wrote an article in The Public Interest in 1985 called "The Merits of Merit Pay." They pointed out that many urban districts adopted some sort of merit pay in the 1920s and again in the 1950s, times of Republican ascendancy in Washington when educators were trying to adapt business methods to the work of the schools. The idea tended to wane because "schools found it difficult to devise defensible criteria of meritorious teaching." Since consensus was lacking on what constituted good teaching and how to measure it, there was no agreement on how to create a sustainable program.

Back in those olden times, schools lacked the computerized data banks that now make it possible to link the test scores of individual students to their teachers. So our technology has reduced "good teaching" to test score gains.

If our sole concern is to see higher scores, then we might be able to induce teachers to produce them if the rewards are big enough. But will our schools be better? Will our students be better prepared as citizens? Will they have greater interest in science and the arts? Will they have the motivation to learn and explore and create without the whip of a test over their heads? Will they be educated to think for themselves or to produce programmed responses?

My guess is that we will see quite a lot of experimentation with compensation plans. The most successful are likely to pay teachers more for doing more—running after-school programs, mentoring young teachers, performing valuable services in the school—not just for getting higher scores. Some test-score information is bound to be part of the equation; but (in my view) it should not be the dominant part.

I do not see merit pay as a cure-all or even as a significant reform. It may be a distraction from the serious issues that confront our students and our schools. Like you, I, too, am fearful of the heavy-handed application of technology and accountability. I, too, worry that the new technocrats will squeeze the life out of teaching and learning. If this is what our nation is buying for nearly $5 billion in stimulus funding, I want my money back.

Diane

Is What's Good for CEOs Good for Teachers?

2009-10-15T13:23:00Z

Dear Diane,

Let's explore, one by one, the separate elements of the federal education agenda, Diane. Are they based on reason and evidence or ignorance and irrationality? (I could have asked myself the same thing about our differences regarding the trade-offs and risks involved in a national curriculum.)

Merit pay is high on the list of the new business-oriented reformers and naturally difficult for unions to swallow. For unions, the big issues are above all aimed at providing employees with a fair system that won't place them at the mercy of their bosses when it comes to the basics of the job. It's obviously of less concern to people entering the field for a short period. (Ditto for retirement, seniority, maternity leave, etc.—all of which are safeguards of concern, mostly, for those in for a lifetime career.)

Merit pay involves a set of related issues of concern to me. I speak to this as a former teacher, trade unionist, parent activist, and principal. On most of these we agree, Diane, even though they have never been directly connected, as they have for me, to "self-interest."

In each of these roles, I was glad that teachers' pay benefits and seniority rights were not at stake in the disagreements we might have. I could always see how dangerous it might be if powerful parents, principals, community members, or union "bosses" were in a position to annually decide how much my own child's teacher was worth paying. Oddly enough—am I right, Diane?—most of the reforms being threatened preceded unionization of schools and exist in states in which there are no labor-management contracts. They came into existence to protect teachers from the political pressures that affected their jobs and their profession. They mirror the protections of most public employment. Union power helped to make these safeguards and benefits more secure, but their history—as you have documented, Diane—has other roots.

I'm reinforced in my attachment to these by my own personal experience and that of two of my teaching offspring! Two out of two have at some point in their teaching lives been fired, and one was blackballed. And, in both cases it was related to out-of-class behaviors: remarks made at public meetings and union activity.

But my critique of merit pay rests also on other prejudices of mine. First of all, I think schools need to be highly collegial settings and any system of financial (or other) rewards creates a setting that makes this harder, not easier to achieve. And, believe me, it's hard enough as it is. That's one reason that in NYC, the United Federation of Teachers agreed to an experiment only if the staff had the right to decide on how to spread the resulting bonus money.

Secondly, I believe that schools work best when we can help young people see that the highest goal of learning is not some external reward, but the enormous satisfaction of learning, the "power of their ideas" (the title of my first book), backed by knowledge. They come to us largely untainted by a system of rewards for the most complex learning they will encounter—the knowledge and reasoning that leads them to language competence, an enormous vocabulary even under the worst of circumstances, the names and faces of thousands of objects and people, the "rules" of the game for any number of ordinary situations. They can "read" people's moods and make sensible predictions based on their theories, as they can with hundreds upon hundreds of other theories that apply to their daily lives. Learning is unstoppable—the trick is how to turn it to some "subject matter" that they don't encounter naturally, or which they don't uncover in its fuller complexity naturally. The aims of school—whatever they may be—depend on our keeping that drive alive, nourishing it, and deliberately doing as little as possible to undermine it. Ditto for teaching.

Thirdly, there is simply NO evidence on its behalf in public or private employment, and most previous attempts at this have been abandoned for that reason. The "evidence" falls on the other side. In fact, there is evidence of a lot of danger. It corrupts. Whatever is used to decide who "merits more" will—as most high-stakes indicators do—undermine the indicator(s) chosen: Campbell's law.

No better example of this has hit the headlines lately than what is known as the "C.E.O. compensation" problem. David Owen has written a startling and chock-full-of-lessons essay in the Oct. 12 New Yorker, "The Pay Problem." I'll be quoting from it in future weeks, so I hope our blogees get a copy of it. Have you read it, Diane?

To those reading us, I hope you will help me think about which of the above arguments are best or worst, and why you disagree—if you do.

Thanks,
Deborah

P.S. Beware old-timers. I've just realized that the term "performance" assessment now refers to the paper-and-pencil test. As in a driver's test—who would imagine calling the paper-and-pencil test a performance test??? We're back to Alice in Wonderland where words can mean whatever we choose.

We Are Lying to Our Children

2009-10-13T12:15:00Z

Dear Deborah,

The elephant in the room is No Child Left Behind. This, as you know, is the latest manifestation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which was passed specifically to help educate disadvantaged children. NCLB was passed by Congress in the fall of 2001 and signed into law in January 2002. At the time, it had the overwhelming support of both parties.

Since the law was implemented, beginning (I would assume) in the fall of 2002 or the fall of 2003, it has been the subject of much debate. President George W. Bush claimed it as his proudest legacy, and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings defended it fiercely.

Four months ago, I wrote an article in Education Week saying that it was time to kill NCLB and to write a different, better law. I argued that the law had failed: "It is dumbing down our children by focusing solely on reading and mathematics. By ignoring everything but basic skills, it is not preparing students to compete with their peers in the high-performing nations of Asia and Europe, nor is it preparing them for citizenship in our complex society. It has usurped state and local control of education. Washington has neither the knowledge nor the capacity to micromanage the nation's schools."

I added, for good measure: "No amount of tinkering can repair this poorly designed law. The time has come for fresh thinking about the best way for Washington to help improve the nation's schools."

President Obama promised during his campaign to bring "change" to the nation's direction and policies. Secretary Arne Duncan has acknowledged in his speeches that NCLB is "toxic" (at least to parents), that teachers complain bitterly about its emphasis on testing, and that "few subjects divide educators so intensely."

Yet in his recent speech about reauthorization of NCLB, he praised the law for "exposing achievement gaps" (as though no one was aware of those gaps before 2002!) and encouraging us to "improve education by looking at outcomes, rather than inputs" (an idea whose provenance dates to the Coleman Report in 1966!). He also credits NCLB with expanding the standards and accountability movement (forgive me while I gag).

To add to his embarrassment, he has been traveling the nation on a listening tour accompanied by former GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich (not known for his interest in education reform) and the Reverend Al Sharpton (ditto).

Memo to Secretary Duncan: NCLB is the quintessence of the test-based accountability movement. It has nothing to do with standards. It contains no standards whatsoever. It encourages states to lower their standards by mandating that all children must be "proficient" by 2014, a goal that is beyond the reach of every district and every state unless they dumb down their standards.

Many states have indeed lowered their standards. New York started testing grades 3-8 in 2006, and in every subsequent year it has lowered the bar to reach proficiency in almost every grade. Illinois also lowered the bar for the same reason.

For Secretary Duncan to associate NCLB with higher standards—or any standards at all—is a cruel joke. As he has often said (one of his favorite phrases), we have been "lying to our children" and their parents when we tell them they are proficient, but they are not.

Now Secretary Duncan wants to get moving to reauthorize NCLB. Presumably, since the brand is toxic, he will want a new name. But the nation needs something very different from NCLB and renaming it will not cure its defects.

As I wrote last June, we are dumbing down our children and calling it reform. We are indeed lying to our children.

Diane

Standards and Passing On the Idea of Democracy

2009-10-08T12:40:00Z

Dear Diane,

On standardized standards: I'm a fan of disagreements and messiness—and maybe that's beyond the call of Reason. But here's a try.

If we all agreed on everything, or even came close, democracy would be an inefficient and cumbersome business and a luxury we could ill afford in tough times. Yet getting agreement is no easy matter. Democracy was "invented" to do that—when needed.

My default position: leave it to those most affected to settle it. Of course, that doesn't work a lot of times. Sometimes what one individual or group wants requires collaboration, or interferes with what others want, or is unfair to a minority, e.g. unconstitutional! Then we have to go up a notch. And up. In today's complex, interdependent world, all three reasons often come into play. Furthermore, to remain a self-governing people one needs to ensure that self-governance itself is protected, e.g. severely unbalanced power undermines its foundations.

Passing the idea of democracy on to the next generation is also no easy matter. It's not intuitive, we're not born democrats. Children need to see, feel, hear, and touch what "society" itself means; best of all in a setting in which there are diverse subcultures, viewpoints, and, thus, disagreements to be contended with.

I quote John Merrow: "In an era when many of us are embracing Twitter, Facebook, and other 'virtual communities,' we may think that walls are breaking down everywhere...but a new report by the Knight Foundation tells us that real (geographic) communities matter more than virtual ones." 'Learning' democracy can't rest only on 'virtual' realities.

In small schools or communities, decision-making is often bitter and nasty—but there's a better chance of being heard, of coming together on how to proceed. Under the best of circumstances well-intended and sane disagreements can produce heat. But also enlightenment.

In a political group I once belonged to, whose ideas placed them far from the center of power, we had fierce arguments and votes on who was "right" about all manner of big and small questions—carried out with all the trickery displayed on the U.S. Senate floor. I was the member of a faction that tried to remind us that we only needed to vote about how to spend our very limited shared resources. Meanwhile, the various ideas espoused were too important to be settled by a vote. I was unpersuasive.

I may be equally unpersuasive on whether we should vote or delegate to one national body of experts the designing of the 'one right curriculum' from K-12. It's too important. At most, I'd like us to agree that, at least by 18, all our children should be strong and knowledgeable citizens.

I don't even want us to demand we teach children that democracy is best. I'm prepared to put up with some students who defend dictatorship. Many highly educated adults, after all, agree. But I want young people to have a deep and engaged experience with the dilemmas underlying the democratic idea, its history, and its practice. I'd even like us to become experts on parliamentary rules—especially rules about attacking someone personally (ad homonym)—versus attacking their ideas.

I want them to reach adulthood as experts on democracy.

But even if we could all agree on that purpose, the way to go about it is a different matter. What form of curriculum this implies is a discussion that I'd like every school, school board, and community to discuss. I think, in addition, we should teach the old-fashioned 3Rs—ideally in a thoughtful manner. And then let many flowers bloom: provide choices between advanced math vs. advanced art, music, drama; between 19th vs. 20th Century literature; studying ancient Asian or ancient Mediterranean civilizations; woodwork or cooking. For their own sake. When kids get close to graduating, school and family can help young people explore all their future options (audit colleges classes, take apprenticeships, study the job market, job shadow), as well as demonstrate that they can seriously defend their work and their ideas—with evidence and reason.

Somewhere along the way kids and the rest of us should take a break—to work at long-term and worthy projects, put on theater productions, sing in choruses, make our own meals—in short, a solid "non-academic" communal experience. I'd pick age 13. (For reasons which may be obvious.)

Then comes assessing our work. Linda Nathan's marvelous and highly readable new book, The Hardest Questions Aren't on the Test: Lessons from an Innovative Urban School is a must-read. She explains how she abandoned the "Habits of Mind" she had created at her former school (Fenway H.S.) when she started the Boston Arts Academy—because that particular faculty and board didn't find the fit persuasive enough and designed their own. One size doesn't... (Although a no-stakes, more traditional test, plus a sophisticated sampled test—NAEP plus—might be an okay add-on.)

The building of a curriculum is part of what makes being a teacher such a pleasure, and challenge. The school becomes a center of learning for everyone. I remember with a thrill how deeply the kids and I got involved in understanding the Supreme Court during the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas hearings. (And, what a shame it was that CPESS wasn't studying the U.S.S.R. at the time of its collapse.)

A good subject to study has legs—in the present, the past, and the future.

Deb

P.S. I am also less sanguine than you, Diane, about who will be making these decisions, not to mention the compromises that leave us teaching too much.

Why 'Washington-Driven Standardization' Is NOT Best

2009-10-06T14:51:00Z

Dear Deborah,

I am somewhat crazed and stressed-out today because my book is due to the publisher, with no more edits allowed. So, needless to say, I am focused on meeting that deadline. But since the book deals with the same issues that we discuss every week, it is not as if I have to turn my attention to a totally different subject. Readers of this blog know that I have often tried out ideas here and benefited by hearing their reactions.

One issue that we have discussed and should discuss more is the regulations embedded in the Race to the Top fund, that sum of $4.3 billion that the U.S. Department of Education is using to stimulate innovation and reform. It may be daring to say this, but I am weary of reform. I think that our schools have been overrun by too many reforms, to the point where it becomes difficult to say what effect any of them has had. Some of our schools are like archeological sites, with layer after layer of reform, one on top of the other. A teacher once said to me that she had "reform fatigue." I wonder if any other nation so regularly reorganizes, reshapes, and reforms its schools.

A few days ago, I came across a stunningly articulate response to the Race to the Top Fund, written by California Attorney General Jerry Brown. Jerry Brown is an interesting public official who has been governor of California and mayor of Oakland, among many other things.

I will quote a few lines, as I think Brown's letter is brilliant. He wrote, "The basic assumption of your draft regulations appears to be that top down, Washington driven standardization is best. This is a 'one size fits all' approach that ignores the vast diversity of our federal system and the creativity inherent in local communities. What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score...In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power social science [sic]."

He goes on to write, "You assume we know how to 'turn around all the struggling low performing schools,' when the real answer may lie outside of school. As Oakland mayor, I directly confronted conditions that hindered education, and that were deeply rooted in the social and economic conditions of the community or were embedded in the particular attitudes and situations of the parents. There is insufficient recognition in the draft regulations that inside and outside of school strategies must be interactive and merged."

There is growing evidence that Arne Duncan's "turnaround" strategies have not worked in Chicago. In fact, there is a paucity of evidence that anyone knows how to turn around a school without throwing out low-performing students and replacing them with better-performing students.

Brown is thinking about running for governor, a post that he held in the 1970s and 1980s. If I lived in California, I would sign up to work for him. We need his well-informed voice in the national debate about education.

Diane

The Habits of Using Evidence & Reason Can't Wait

2009-10-01T14:57:00Z

Dear Diane,

"To the extent that we can teach students to seek evidence and rational explanations, we will reduce magical thinking and encourage the application of reason and intelligence." —Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences, Sept. 29

We agree! That's my "core."

We also agree that Arne Duncan's agenda lacks evidence or rational explanations. Why? Partially because he ignores his own privileged schooling as irrelevant for all of those millions of "others." He's creating a system, a big business. He forgets that business data doesn't always speak for itself. Witness our current crisis.

Well-educated or not, all of us fall back on "common sense" and "street smarts." It's not a bad idea. But our street smarts differ (and which ones are relevant is tricky). Evidence that seems out of synch with our own experiences should make us pause. We need open minds, but not naïve or vacuous ones. The idea of a good education for democracy requires the recognition that one may be wrong. But one can also be right. Such an education requires respect for the evidence of our daily experience, too. Thus, self-interest, our individual slant on life, plays a role under the best of circumstances.

Personal experience: as a teacher, I have not found a student's past test performance on commercial standardized tests to be useful evidence. Unless. Unless I'm able to go over them, item by item, with the students at my side explaining their own reasoning. Yes, tests always tell us something, but what they tell us is a very different question. It's hard to "reason" me out of this conviction, but I do learn from my colleagues. (For public information about the state of education we can do better with low-stakes sampling.)

What I'm most interested in is the highlighted sentence above: how my students tackle knowledge claims. How they wrestle with their own, their neighbors', and society's dilemmas—how they make judgments on matters central to their and our future—including where to get advice.

My point about Dante, Shakespeare, et al was based on someone else's list of what every educated person should have read (or be able to pretend to have read). There are many such lists floating around. My school had its abbreviated list, too. For kids who've been exposed in the normal course of life to virtually nothing on those lists, the assumption that they can all be "covered" and memorized without damage to our core agreement above is the crux of the dilemma. Doing them together is time-consuming! Since the habits of using evidence and reason can't wait until we pour all the facts into children's heads, a good education must engage in both together. "Even" 5-year-olds learn by reasoning about the world while trying it on for size.

Even great teachers of important subjects are not The Answer. I took an amazing physics course with David Hawkins in Colorado one summer. I drove away with a seemingly deep understanding of one or two basic principles...or so I thought. On the drive east, they slipped away after about 650 miles. But what didn't slip away was my fascination with physics. I actually think I had good science teachers in both high school and college. But they couldn't get through to a roomful of teenagers as "out of it" as most of us were—particularly when it came to modern "counter-intuitive" science.

I liked my high school history teachers, but most of my smart friends found them "bor-ring." And mathematics? I didn't come near to learning what I wish I had, either about its beauty or its practical value. Why, if beauty matters, do we teach five times as much math as all the arts put together—without catching its beauty or its usefulness?

Yes, we are amusing ourselves to death, but in part because we are not "amusing" ourselves in our classrooms. My dictionary suggests that amusement includes pleasure. There's no reason tough stuff can't be a pleasure to take apart. Poor science education, as you say, that tries to fill the bucket (brain) makes us more, not less, susceptible to magical thinking. Because in the hurry to "cover" a lot, we teach scientific laws as though they are merely the word of authority. I always kept the textbook at my side when looking in the microscope in bio labs to be sure I was seeing the "right thing." I threw out all the potted plants that my kindergarteners had dutifully planted the week before—in a controlled experiment—when I discovered Monday morning that the ones in the closet were doing fine and the ones on the window sill had all died! My favorite college physics teacher did the same with an experiment with marbles rolling down a ramp. At just the critical moment when the teaching of science should have come into play, we both were too afraid the "kids" would learn the wrong thing.

In the effort to cover it all, even the best-educated are often cheated. Especially when it comes to judgments about what's in the best interest of all of us. (Fortunately, they may be somewhat better off regarding their own self-interest.) To better level the playing field we cannot cover everything in ways consistent with your highlighted motto. That's one dilemma. Nor do I expect that the "experts" who are in a position politically to write such standards (the details) are likely to be the best of their kind. (And, god help us, surely not the testing companies that turn them into test items with one right answer! Which, for teachers, is the real curriculum.) That's a dilemma, too.

Meanwhile, we need every potential juror and voter alike to know how to reason well, to deal with uncertainty et al. We need 100 percent of them to have had a shot at using their minds well, day after day after day for 12 years; at working through ideas, arguments; and, piqued by unexpected phenomenon or claims. They all deserve wise expert guidance that can catch them when they slip, shift the subject when needed, ask uncomfortable questions and more. For that we need a very different kind of schooling—for all. It won't happen overnight, but it's worth moving toward. Back to "Alice in Wonderland." If we don't care where we're going—and the only measure is a standardized test score—the more difficult reforms won't be tried, until we fail once again with the latest fads. The vocabulary section generally tells the meat of the story. It's a measure not of the test-taker's intelligence, but the language of his community and peers.

Deb