education

Memo From Austerity Land To Teachers: Caring No Longer Counts

Jeff Bryant — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 22:30:11 -0500

Although it's a bit early to know for sure, let's hope that 2012 is the year that the economic policies known as "austerity" finally crashed and burned. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is certainly ready to bid adieu to austerity, writing in The New York Times this week that deep spending cuts leveled by state and local governments have proven to be "a major drag on the overall economy" and most probably have erected an "unnecessary" detour in "the road to self-sustaining growth."

Nowhere have the ravages of austerity policies been more apparent and more ruinous than in public education, where deep budget cuts to schools have taken spending back to 2008 levels or earlier. What we've witnessed over the past two years is the biggest cut to education since the Great Depression, and it has had catastrophic and long-lasting effects on a generation of kids -- beginning with the very youngest.

Austerity Is Eviscerating Early Childhood Education

A recent article in the Huffington Post recounted that, due to state budget cuts and roll-backs to early childhood programs, "roughly a quarter of the nation's 4-year-olds and more than half of 3-year-olds attend no preschool, either public or private."

Unbelievably, only three states currently offer prekindergarten to all 4-year-olds, even though "kids from low-income families who start kindergarten without first attending a quality education program enter school an estimated 18 months behind their peers. Many never catch up, and research shows they are more likely to need special education services and to drop out."

Simultaneous to this article's warning bell, the medical journal Pediatrics reported the results of a new study showing that "lack of adult support" in a child's early years results in a build up of "toxic stress" that has life-long negative ramifications, including harmful effects to "learning capacities, adaptive behaviors, lifelong physical and mental health, and adult productivity.”

Writing at the Core Knowledge blog, Robert Pondisco commented that "the report should have a profound impact on educators and education policymakers because we now know that interventions in children's lives -- especially those who grow up in the difficult circumstances associated with poverty, homelessness, crime, malnutrition, and abusive households -- "must start from Day One. Not Day One of school, Day One of life. Kindergarten is too late."

The federal government's attempt to alleviate some of the harm being done to the youngest Americans falls way short of what's needed. The Obama administration's recent debut of a $500 million Race to the Top grant competition for early childhood education has been widely dismissed as being "too little, too late" and being too reliant on reviving assessments of four-year-olds that were tried and abandoned by the Bush administration.

So there's little doubt that the dreadful results of economic austerity have been equal to if not worse to education than they've been to the economy. But as the failure of economic austerity becomes a more widespread realization (hopefully) in the media, far less attention is being paid to another form of austerity that is at least as pernicious and potentially far more poisoning.

Austerity of the Soul

This other austerity -- call it "austerity of the soul" -- is most obvious when you look at how the people on the frontlines of public education -- classroom teachers -- are being treated. By now, for instance, anyone who is paying attention has heard about classroom teachers in the Chester-Upland, Pennsylvania school district who agreed to work without pay while their school budgets were being savaged by state officials and their resources and students were bled away to competitive charter schools.

One of the teachers, writing at Valerie Strauss's blog at the Washington Post explains what should trouble everyone who cares about the welfare of children:

My heart bleeds for these kids. Many of these students have seen so much tragedy, loss, and rejection in 16 years than most will see in a lifetime. Now, when faced with the possibility of their schools closing they are hit yet again. In discussions between students regarding the possibility of being sent to other districts, a common response from students is, "They won’t do that; nobody wants us." Heartbreaking.

These teachers refused to abandon the kids because they cared, unlike the hapless Italian cruise ship captain who recently abandoned ship before his passengers had fled to safety. So what do they get in return for their sacrifice?

The governor's office has drafted a legislative proposal that calls for a state takeover of the distressed district. And if this state takeover follows the course of others in Pennsylvania, this will put a "school reform commission-type" oversight board in place which would likely cancel the teachers' contracts and turn all the district's schools into charters.

In other words, these teachers, despite their sacrifice, are more apt to get fired.

It's important, by the way, to remember that the spending cuts that slammed Chester-Upland and other school districts like it were deliberately aimed at those schools. State lawmakers purposefully designed the budget cuts to draw the most money away from the poorest districts. And regardless of the rationale used justify such an act, this has been nothing but a despicable attack on people who are least capable of fighting back.

"People like you destroy morale"

Pennsylvania isn't the only place where teachers are being treated badly. In Dallas, Texas classroom teachers are being forced to work longer days, with no extra pay, simply because local school officials, regardless of any objective evidence, decided that the district wasn't getting its money's worth from teachers.

Texas is, of course, a "right to work" state that prohibits unions from organizing on a mass scale to negotiate fair wages. But when one of the school officials made the comment that he didn't feel the district was getting its "eight hours" worth from teachers, it prompted one teacher to speak out in an email: (emphasis added)

It is sad that individuals like you make this noble profession of teaching America’s future leaders more and more miserable each day. We already give more of our daily selves to the students and community than an average worker, including lawyers. I have been on the same salary step for 4 years, due to the fact that the district shifts it each time I am due for that coveted next step. I have received no substantial raise in 4 years. I am the father of 6 children and am the only income for my family. I am struggling to pay bills and just make it through life. We get dumped on by administration each day, cursed out by students, yelled at by parents, receive very little respect from the community, work long hours, and receive meager pay. But that’s okay. I see, on the other hand, that according to the Dallas CAD you have several nice properties in your name at [address deleted] (value $155,770), [address deleted] (value $187,310), and [address deleted] (value $225,330). I, on the other hand, am struggling to pay bills and just make it through life. I used to think I was doing something good for society. People like you destroy morale, beat us down into the ground, and make us wish we had been greedy enough to go into the business world as yourself.

For speaking his mind, the teacher, Joseph Drake, was summarily placed on leave. And although he has since been reinstated, the message is clear that how teachers feel about the way they're being treated matters little to local politicians.

The Great Big Disconnect

Politicians at all levels love to talk in glittering generalities about how "valuable" good teachers are and how much they "matter." In his recent Sate of the Union address, President Obama, with one of the Chester-Upland teachers sitting practically within arm's length of his wife, called for an end to teacher "bashing" and exhorted them to "teach with creativity and passion" and "stop teaching to the test."

All this sounds well and good -- except it is completely disconnected to what is happening on the ground.

As Diane Ravitch recently wrote in her regular blog at Education Week, the President's policies actually promote "teaching to the test" and do more to advance "teacher bashing" than quell it.

The truth is that if we want teaching with "creativity and passion," we want to reinforce in teachers that act of caring. But teachers everywhere are being told that caring -- whether it's caring about the welfare of students or caring about work conditions -- is no longer something that counts.

This discrepancy of what our political leaders profess and the deliberate actions they take produces an austerity of the soul that is at least as crippling to education as economic austerity has been. The reality is that in addition to closing its pocketbooks, America its hardening its heart to children and the people who care for and educate them.

As a Texas school superintendent, John Kuhn, recently wrote at the site of edu-blogger Anthony Cody,

"Accountability is only for the teachers in our modern republic. There is no visible or sustained pressure to address school funding, no pressure to address the inequity of resources or the unequal opportunity to learn that, while many are content to pretend it doesn't exist, nonetheless devastates kids . . . . We [teachers] are supposed to accept poverty as "part of the deal." There will be no hue and cry in opposition to inequality. And to that I can only say, "Why?"

Why indeed!

As John Dickerson recently observed at Slate.com, we're likely heading into a Presidential election between two candidates -- Barak Obama and Mitt Romney -- who portray all the characteristics of "aloof men trading charges about who is more out of touch." This stands in stark contrast to what's needed for the times.

Writing at, coincidentally, In These Times, Thomas Franks notes that in the destructive wake of economic austerity what's needed is an "idealism in the grand sense" that can rise above "our fallen economic world" and point the way to a better future.

If Obama can heed the times and break through with an idealistic message extolling the value of caring and the need to extinguish our current austerity of the soul, it could make all the difference.

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Romney Peddles Creative Destruction For America's School Children

Jeff Bryant — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:58:27 -0500

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, notorious for his flip-flops on a broad array of issues, seems to maintain this tendency when he's addressing policies governing education and public schools.

But it would be a big mistake to conclude that there is not at the heart of Romney's political views a core philosophy that would be deeply destructive to public education and harmful to the future well-being of the nation's children and youth.

Romney's Edu-Flip-Flops
First, Romney's edu-flip-flops are indeed numerous. All the way back to his previous run for the Presidency in 2008, Romney's adversaries have spotlighted inconsistencies with his pronouncements about education policy on the trail and his record as Massachusetts Governor.

As revealed this week in a leak to the internet of the opposition research conducted by staffers of his Republican Presidential nominee rival John McCain, Romney has historically had it both ways on education policy issues including school choice, abstinence-only sexual education, English only immersion vs. bilingual ed, and eliminating the Department of Education. (hat-tip: GottaLaff)

According to the McCain campaign document, on the issue of using school vouchers to allow parents to opt-into private schools, for example, Romney came out against school vouchers in 2002 after favoring them in 1994.

Also, Romney maintained support for No Child Left Behind and standardized testing while expressing doubts about NCLB's measurements and exhibiting ignorance about the "vital details" of testing systems.

He said he opposed "abstinence-only" sexual education programs in schools in 2002 then in 2005 tried to steer $740,000 in federal funds to a school program emphasizing abstinence-only.

In 2002, he refused to back a ballot initiative mandating English immersion instead of bilingual education then months later reversed his position and endorsed the ballot initiative.

And as a Senate candidate in 1994, Romney backed eliminating the federal Department of Education but later changed his views to supporting the Department.

In his more recent pronouncements, Romney has shown some confusion in contrasting his own views on education policy with those of President Obama. As noted in the education profession's trade newspaper Education Week, Romney proclaimed his agreement with the President on "school choice" even though Obama moved to scrap the choice program in Washington, DC.

Romney's Heart of Darkness
That said, despite his shiftiness on specific issues related to education, Romney does indeed have a core philosophy on education, which he revealed earlier this week. According to an article in the New York Times Romney has developed a recurrent theme on education in his campaign:

At a town-hall-style meeting in New Hampshire last month, listeners pressed Mitt Romney on the soaring cost of higher education. His solution: students should consider for-profit colleges like the little-known Full Sail University in Florida.
A week later in Iowa, Mr. Romney offered another unsolicited endorsement for “a place in Florida called Full Sail University.” By increasing competition, for-profit institutions like Full Sail, which focuses on the entertainment field, “hold down the cost of education” and help students get jobs without saddling them with excessive debt, he said.

The article, written by Eric Lichtblau, was quick to point out that the cost of tuition at Full Sail can run more than $80,000 for a 21-month program, and that many of the school's programs have a less than sterling graduation rate -- as low as just 14 percent of students graduating on time and only 38 percent at all. Meanwhile, some Full Sail students "carried a median debt load of nearly $59,000 in federal and private loans," way more than the national average of $23,000.

So given Full Sail's high costs and troubling results, why would Romney offer it as an exemplar of good education?

To answer that question, let's deconstruct what the Times article said. First two words -- "for-profit" and "competitive" -- stand out in Romney's adulation of the Full Sail program. And second, there's the fact that the school's "chief executive, Bill Heavener, is a major campaign donor and a co-chairman" of Romney's state fund-raising team in Florida.

These two conditions -- that Full Sail is "good business" and part of his network of rich chums -- reveal that Romney's views on education are primarily driven by crony capitalism that values a particular ideology over the real values of teaching and learning.

Did Romney base his admiration for Full Sail on the institution's curriculum? Did he express admiration for the way the faculty conduct lessons and measure results? Did he talk about the knowledge and values that are instilled in the students once they've completed the programs?

No. What he admires most about Full Sail is the institution's ability to operate like a successful business -- making a profit, being competitive -- and that its leaders are part of his inner circle of like-minded corporatists.

This business-minded perspective -- which is perhaps the chief ideology driving the Romney candidacy altogether -- is how Romney routinely differentiates his qualifications for office from the rest of the presidential field. As if only he has the executive experience -- forged in the marketplace -- that can steer America toward better policy.

But what actually is the real nature of the business hammer Romney uses to address every nail in America? After all, anytime someone says they want to run our public institutions "like a business," what kind of business do they mean? And why "like a business?" Most businesses go out of business. Is that the kind of track record we want for our public institutions to emulate?

Doing School The Bain Way
No doubt, what Romney means when he says "like a business" is to follow the practices of the investment firm Bain Capital where he made so much of his considerable fortune. As an article in the Washington Post this week explained, both the successes and the failures Romney had while at helm of Bain "reveal the candidate’s faith in 'creative destruction,' the notion that the new must relentlessly replace the old so that companies and the economy can become more efficient."

The article contends that doing business the Bain way "meant embracing aspects of capitalism that have unsettled some Americans: laying off workers when necessary, expanding overseas to chase profits and paying top executives significantly more than employees on lower rungs."

Whether you find this to be an acceptable approach to doing business, or not, you have to wonder what would be a "creative destruction" approach to education.

Taking a sympathetic view, this from "Creative Destruction Properly Understood" in The American Spectator, creative destruction presents a "paradox of progress" in which every step forward is accompanied by dead bodies along the way.

Here's a particularly revealing description of this approach to "progress" that the author cites from a couple of bankers:

Herein lies the paradox of progress. A society cannot reap the rewards of creative destruction without accepting that some individuals might be worse off, not just in the short term, but perhaps forever.

Now apply that statement to education and substitute "children" for "individuals" and see how that statement works for you.

Lets' try that analogy again with this statement from our oh-so-wise financiers:

The disruption of lost ~~jobs~~ children and shuttered ~~businesses~~ schools is immediate, while the payoff from creative destruction comes mainly in the long term.

I suppose one can imagine a parent agreeing with this statement -- as long as it's not his or her child who is the one being consigned to history while progress marches bravely on.

If you think this is just an intellectual exercise, then you're not paying attention.

When Creative Destruction Comes to Town
Unfortunately, creative destruction is already being applied to public schools in many places across America. For Exhibit A, cast your eyes on Chester-Upland school district near Philadelphia, PA.

As Pennsylvania-based edu-blogger Tim Slekar recently contented at Huffington Post, when government officials, including current Governor Tom Corbett, developed competitive charter schools operating parallel to traditional public schools in Chester-Upland, it resulted in the deliberate underfunding of traditional public schools and seriously negative consequences to school children.

As National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel recently explained, also in Huffington Post, Chester-Upland is a troubled district serving about 3,650 students, more than 70 percent who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches -- more than double Pennsylvania's average.

To solve the chronic problems of educating underserved, minority children -- certainly a national problem not peculiar to Chester-Upland -- the state took control of the district and subjected it to various management schemes, including contracting management out to a for-profit company, Edison Schools.

In the latest attempt to "turn around" these underserved schools, state officials incentivized private individuals to open charter schools that would "compete" with the traditional public schools in hopes of "catalyzing progress."

As Valerie Strauss explains at her Washington Post blog, "Now about 45 percent of the district’s students go to two public charter schools, and 45 percent of the district’s total operating budget goes to two charter schools to pay to educate those children."

The funding cuts to the traditional public schools in Chester-Upland have resulted in huge losses of personnel including 40 percent of the system’s professional staff, and 50 people of its unionized support staff. Some of the unionized teachers and others, including bus drivers and cafeteria aides, have agreed to work for free. But who knows how long that can last.

So what have the competitive charter schools produced? Well, one of them, the largest charter in the state, is one of 89 schools in Pennsylvania under investigation for irregularities in scores on 2009 state standardized tests.

So what are the children and families of Chester-Upland to do while their schools are on the brink? Even if the competitive charters were "better," and it's highly doubtful that they are, there's not enough room for all the district's students to transfer. And it's not like they can be airlifted to Philadelphia, a district also experiencing serious budget problems.

But I suppose that's just the "paradox of progress."

So let's recap: Sure Romney -- and many other politicians for that matter -- flip-flop on education issues. But at the very core of Romney and those who agree with this "business" perspective to education is a pernicious philosophy that must be rejected outright -- regardless of the source.

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When Lessons From Education 'Reform' Go Unlearned

Jeff Bryant — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:41:15 -0500

One good thing you can say about 2011 is that it is a year in which lots of wrong-headed undertakings finally came to their ignominious conclusions -- including, among others, the Iraq War, the Gadhafi regime, the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, and "The Oprah Winfrey Show".

Also among the train-wrecks is undoubtedly our failed national education policy, No Child Left Behind.

Maybe our country has learned some valuable lessons from the fallout of some of the events of 2011. Perhaps we've learned that ground wars in the Middle East are a dead-end, that people will eventually rebel and overthrow repressive governments, that presidential elections have yet to descend to the levels of reality TV, and that many of our most popular celebrities are long past their shelf life.

So what have we learned from the failure of NCLB?

Yes, NCLB Was a Failure
First, not everyone agrees that NCLB was a failure. Just last week, as reported in the education trade newspaper Education Week, the conservative Fordham Institute issued a study claiming that NCLB should be credited for having boosted math scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress -- especially in the state of Texas, an early adopter of "accountability". The study concludes that the problem with America's public schools is not that NCLB has been a failure, but that it was only good enough to provide a temporary "shock" to our educational system, and another one is sorely needed.

The study's author, Mark Schneider, likens NCLB to the meteor strike that may have wiped out the dinosaurs and cleared the ecosystem for the rise of mammals -- no, I am not making this up -- and contends that the doctrine created a positive new "equilibrium." What's necessary now, he contends, is for "another meteor" to "come crashing into the school ecosystem."

The expected results for this apocalyptic wish? Another "uptick in math scores" -- if we're "lucky." And what if we're not . . . ?

Hyperbole aside (please), this effort to cherry pick data in order to draw a grand conclusion about the state of America's public schools wouldn't be so bad if it didn't overlook an overwhelming context of other information.

NCLB In Context
The "overwhelming context" is that although NCLB may -- or may not have (correlation is not causation) -- helped produce higher scores in math, there's very good reason to conclude that any "uptick" in math scores was likely at the expense of teaching a great many other subjects.

A recent national survey of 1,001 public school teachers found that an overwhelming majority -- two-thirds -- said that study of art, science, and social studies was "getting crowded out of the school day." From an article in Education Week about the survey:

Nearly all of the teachers who see time for English and math pushing other subjects aside say the main reason is state tests. In fact, 60 percent say their school is devoting more time in recent years to test-taking skills. And, the extra time for English and math is not simply for struggling students, but affects all students, conclude 77 percent of respondents.

Furthermore, now that nearly half of the public schools in America have been deemed "failing," according to NCLB standards, even though everyone agrees the standards for failing are "defective," most states are jumping through all kinds of hoops in order to get around what is still the law of the land. What results, of course, is time, energy, and resources going toward anything but the crucial matter at hand: real teaching and learning.

It's The Data, Stupid
The premise of NCLB was that by tracking "the data" produced by standardized tests, we could set our students free of "failed" schools. Instead, it's "the data" that appear to be failing us. In recent days, two articles from major news outlets illustrate the failure all too well.

First, Michael Winerip from The New York Times recounts the "scientific" exactitude of tracking school performance in New York over the past decade. Mocking the "finely calibrated" academic standards used by the state, Winerip traced the bizarre ups and downs of education assessments, in which student scores meander from "dismal" to "record levels," back to "ridiculously inflated," then to "statistically significant declines," without any particular rhyme or reason. And all the while edu-crats and politicians assure the public, over and over, that everything is "going in the right direction."

Then, over at Huffington Post, Joy Resmovits points us to a new study by policy analysts at Mathematica that blasts NCLB's reliance on "raw test data" as being "extremely misleading."

The analysts at Mathematica reasoned that NCLB's reliance on test data made it a flawed policy from the get-go because you can't "compare this year's fifth graders with last year's," and you can't use the results of a test "to measure short-term impacts of policies or schools," because you're measuring different groups of students. So differences in scores between two cohorts -- say, fourth graders one year and fourth graders the next year -- are more indicative of the differences in the students themselves as opposed to the quality of schooling they've experienced. And the results from these year-to-year snapshots that NCLB relied on generally led to "false impressions of growth or loss."

Nevertheless in 2012, the Obama administration's Race to the Top -- a competition that has states vie for federal funds by promising to implement reforms championed by the Education Department -- will, in fact, extend NCLB’s obsession with "year-to-year snapshots." By requiring that teacher evaluation be in part measured by the scores students get on exams, the intent of NCLB remains unwaivering.

The Coming Data-Based "Dropout Crisis"
As long as this illusion of "scientific precision" continues to guide education policy, we’ll keep chasing after these flawed "impressions of growth or loss." In fact, quite likely the first of these data-based chimeras to pop-up on the radar in 2012 will be a new "crisis" over dropout rates. Again, the crisis will be based on "the data," and again, "the data" will be completely misleading.

As US News and World Report revealed last week, "the official national graduation rates will likely dip between 5 percent and 10 percent next year." How do we know this?

Because "new federal rules that mandate states to report [high school] graduation rates uniformly will go into effect for the class of 2012," most states will have to change the way they report graduation rates. For many of these states, it will mean lower graduation totals at the end of each year, even if the same percentage of high schoolers still earn diplomas.

The report explains: "Under current federal laws, states are allowed to lump in students who complete special education programs, night school, the GED, and virtual high school programs along with those who earn a traditional high school diploma." But after removing these students from federal allowances, graduation rates will definitely fall.

"That doesn't mean schools are doing anything differently or are graduating fewer students than in past years," the report observes. But nevertheless, whether you agree with the new federal mandates or not, "the data" will show a "dropout crisis."

Caution Signs In Order
This is not to say that data can't be an important element for guiding public policy. But there are currently too many gung-ho data devotees exhorting us onward when we desperately need some caution signs.

Few, for instance, have considered what it could mean to have these warehouses of our children's academic information potentially in the hands of profiteers. Need a mailing list of "failing students" anyone?

This week, the blog NYC Public School Parents connected the dots among reports from the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to reveal that student data from New York are being outsourced to a corporation run by Bill Gates and operated by a business owned by Rupert Murdoch.

A chilling excerpt from the documents obtained by the blogger makes it all too clear what the commercial intentions are for this project:

In addition to making instructional data more manageable and useful, this open-license technology, provisionally called the Shared Learning Infrastructure (SLI), will also support a large market for vendors of learning materials and application developers.

"In other words, companies will be making more money off student's test scores," the blogger concludes.

Back To School?
Whether you agree or not that the current data obsession guiding education policy is more about making schools better or making money, the lesson from 2011 is that, either way, there are few benefits to our nation's children and youth.

What NCLB represented more than anything was a really bad way of thinking about public policy. Established on the notion that something as complex as a school system, overseeing something as ill-defined as "learning," can be evaluated and governed by specific and isolated "data outputs," NCLB was doomed to failure from the start.

But even as NCLB lays in ruins, there's every indication that lessons have not been learned and we're continuing down the same policy rat hole as before.

Every good teacher knows that one of the most valuable things you can impart to students is the ability to learn from mistakes. If they're right, we have a whole lot of policy leaders who need to go back to school.

What Happens When The Edu-Bubble Bursts?

Jeff Bryant — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:34:30 -0500

Heard the term "edu-bubble" yet? Chances are you will soon.

No doubt you've heard of the "dot-com bubble." And if you're like millions of Americans, you may be currently experiencing the ravages of the "housing bubble." But the edu-bubble?

During the dot-com bubble, from 1990-2000, speculative capital drove up the wildly inflated prospects of internet-based businesses. The speculation was driven to a great extent by venture capitalists and MBA-types who argued persuasively that the amount of "eye-balls" attracted to an internet site could be "flipped" into a revenue stream by "monetizing" the passing fancy of people searching the world wide web for just about everything other than haircuts.

But not every business could make the flip. While gambling and porn did fine, selling real goods like healthcare advice, groceries, and pet supplies didn't always do so well, and the whole market came crashing down, and millions lost their jobs and retirement funds.

Some successful businesses -- Cisco, SAS, Dell -- were "forged in the cauldron of the dot-com market," so to speak. And we all got iPhones. So business leaders and policy makers went blithely on their way to the next capitalist wet dream.

The housing bubble followed much the same trajectory as the dot-com forebearer. To a great extent, the wild speculation on real estate that inflated home prices was driven, again, by nefarious "flippers." First, banks and finance firms figured out that worthless mortgages could be monetized into derivative investments on Wall Street, which drove the market for low down-payments and sub-prime mortgages. Then, unbridled real estate investors of all kinds looked to flip the low-down-payment-subprime-loan properties into quick cash.

Again, the whole bubble burst, but this time the consequences were far more severe than the dot-com fallout. Compared to the dot-com bubble, millions more not only lost their jobs and retirement funds but are now in danger of being kicked out of their homes, and jobless rates in the US remain stubbornly high.

Much like the aftermath of the dot-com implosion, the few who benefited the most from the housing bubble are left to go merrily on their way while business leaders and policy makers make excuses and blame the masses for being "irresponsible." And in the meantime, the bubble cycle is pumping up all over again.

According to The Wall Street Journal nonfinancial corporations alone are sitting on over $2 trillion in liquid assets. And it's simply got to have some place to go.

Behold the next victim of capitalism's game of Russian roulette: education.

What better target than a $1 trillion market with a 30+ percent growth rate?

Furthermore, with most of the funding of education controlled by state governments that are now predominantly in the hands of Republicans intent on cutting education, there's a lot of excess demand to be had.

If you doubt at all the edu-bubble is something really happening, then you need to read a recent series of articles from the Miami Herald that report on the $400 million a year charter school industry in South Florida. Driven by real estate developers and politicians, the charter school sector has gotten so big that it now operates as a "parallel system" to traditional public schools, only these schools can collect taxpayer dollars while avoiding much of the oversight that typical public school have to operate under. So they get away with things like shackling schools to exorbitant lease payments, charging students fees, withholding supplies like textbooks, or blatantly under-serving students who happen to be black, poor, or disabled.

Or you should read the article in this week's New York Times reporting on the explosive growth of for-profit online schools. The largest of these enterprises, K-12, Inc., has been a hot item on the stock market despite offering a sub-standard education to school kids because, as the article states, "kids mean money."

How did this happen?

Partially at fault are federal government mandates that force school districts into hiring consultants and developing elaborate and expensive data systems. Many school systems that win federal grants from Race to the Top and School Improvement Grant contests end up spending the bulk of those outlays on outside vendors and services.

But there's a much bigger system at work here.

The first essential step to hyping up the edu-bubble was to find something new to monetize -- something that could be flipped from a public value into a private commodity that could be bought and sold. Except for small-time scandals and dishonest public officials, education had been walled-off, mostly, from large profiteers. So speculators had no proven business models for how to ramp up public education into a private money making machine.

For sure, the "value" on education has long been calculated in terms of what it means to a child's earnings as an adult and how this benefits the economy in the future. But speculators needed something that could pay out in the here and now.

Most of the money in education is tied-up in just two areas -- physical plant and personnel. Those two expenditures alone account for well over 80 percent of what a typical school spends. But with no "revenue" to show in the other side of the balance sheet, venture capitalists were at a loss for how to make schools a matter of financial speculation.

Case in point, one notable edu-venture was Edison Schools which lost millions of dollars every year, showing a profit in just one quarter of the 10 years it was publically traded.

Then education reform advocates -- either unwittingly or intentionally (does it matter?) --gave the venture crowd a huge gift by decreeing that student scores on standardized tests would define the learning "output" that schools would be accountable for. And all of a sudden everything monetarily related to schools -- operations budgets, teacher salaries, classroom costs, government funds, grant money -- could be related to a test score output.

This in effect turned student learning -- and by extension, the students themselves -- into a commodity that could be speculated on. Now that edu-venturists had something they could put on the other side of the balance sheet, they could now "flip" student test scores into a speculative market. And all sorts of "reform" schemes and start-ups -- from starting charter schools to lowering teacher salaries to closing schools -- could be rationalized on the basis of test scores.

In a recent op-ed in the education trade publication Education Week, history teacher Jonathan Keiler explained how this works, at least in relationship of linking test scores to teacher salaries. Once teacher evaluations are tied to test scores, Keiler points out, there is a "system that turns student scores into a market and, as such, creates cheating, disreputable practices, and dislocations."

When student scores become like orange juice, pork bellies, or yen, the people with the greatest incentive to cheat are the weakest teachers and administrators. These people might be weak, but that doesn’t mean they are stupid. Weak but clever educators will inevitably find ways to game the system, sometimes by cheating, but more often by coming close, but not stepping over the line: Educators could turn their courses into nothing but test-prep machines; they could refuse to collaborate with colleagues; they could curry favor with students to encourage better results; or take other steps we can’t imagine. Many of these weaker teachers, even short of cheating, might well end up with excellent “value added” scores, while stronger teachers who are honest and don’t play the sharp game end up looking bad.
This is not just a possible bad outcome, it is inevitable. It is inevitable because markets generate such behavior and dislocations, and the more volatile the market, the greater the undesirable behavior and dislocations will be.

Of course, much like the "eyeballs" from the dot-com bubble and the mortgage derivatives of the housing bubble, test scores driving the edu-bubble are of marginal value.

In the book, The Myths of Standardized Tests: Why They Don’t Tell You What You Think They Do,

Phillip Harris, Bruce M. Smith and Joan Harris explain that standardized tests are less objective than many people believe, they don’t adequately measure student achievement, they don't tell you which schools and teachers are more "effective," and they “inadvertently” lead young people to become “superficial thinkers."

It's true that test scores can give individual teachers insights about their students that can then lead to instructional decisions. And using tests in a diagnostic way to draw conclusions from random samples of students can be very helpful. But making systemic decisions based wholesale on mass testing is an idea that's yet to produce much evidence of being beneficial to students.

Nevertheless, standardized test scores are now the "currency" of education that enables all sorts of resource swaps that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, including charter schools for traditional public schools, online learning for race-to-face teaching, and experienced, tenured teachers for Teach for America amateurs.

It must be noted that many of the fascinations of the reformists don't actually yield the same test score results as traditional approaches. But as long as a reformist can point to at least one, he can crow about "knowing what works."

So what's wrong with all this?

To begin with, an edu-bubble driven by test scores is most likely to produce schools that are, back to Keiler, "little more than test-preparation institutes, ignoring subjects and skills that are not assessed, with faculty members who resent and distrust one another."

And whereas the dot-com bubble ruined Silicon Valley, and the housing bubble ruined the American economy, the edu-bubble will destroy our nation's future. Our children's education has such profound consequences on what their adulthood will be like. And when the edu-bubble bursts, as it most certainly will, there's apt to be a whole generation that will have been robbed of its potential well-being. Do you think having iPhones will compensate for that?

On The Question Of Virginity, Or, “Starter? I Can’t Make Her Stop!”

fake consultant — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 02:28:04 -0500

I got a weird little story about my friend Blitz Krieger to bring to you today.

He’s had a crazy car problem, he has, and over the past few months he thought he had found a solution – in fact, he thought he had found the solution of his dreams – but in the end, he’s discovered that the things you dream about often don’t go according to plan.

The way it’s worked out for him so far, it’s been a lot of anticipation followed by a sudden wave of frustration, but I feel like he’s a lot better off having his particular problem with his car…because if he’d had cancer instead, he’d surely be dead by now.

The community is always embarrassed by the drag queens because straight society says, “A faggot always dresses in drag, or he’s effeminate.” But you got to be who you are. Passing for straight is like a light-skinned woman or man passing for white. I refuse to pass. I couldn’t have passed, not in this lifetime.

--Sylvia Rivera, describing the founding of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), quoted in the book “Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America”

So here’s what happened to Blitz: he waited forever to buy his first car because he wanted, more than anything else in life, to drive his “perfect” car: a 1982 American Motors Eagle SX/4.

It’s a wild car: it was designed as a small hatchback…with a V-8 engine…and “switchable” 4WD…which allowed it to travel easily in snow in a way that virtually no other passenger car at the time could manage.

So he waited all this time, and two years ago, in California, he literally found a little old lady from Pasadena who sold him his “Dream Car”, which, ironically, was the same brown color as Al Bundy’s Dodge.

It drove great for about six months, but it’s been suffering from a strange malady that presents as a horrible grinding noise when he tries to start the car. He has no idea what to do – and standing in the way of a solution is an obsession that I find a bit strange:

He is absolutely determined that he is not going to go to just any mechanic.

Instead, Blitz told me that since it’s the first time the Dream Car needs to be repaired, he intends to go to a mechanic who has never worked on any car before his – and he says he wants to do this because he feels the experience of having the work done this way will make it more “special” for the both of them.

It took him almost a year to find someone, but when he did, it was truly perfect: he met a woman named Jenna Talia who wanted more than anything to be a mechanic.

She’d been studying through one of those “learn at home” programs, and, amazingly, she had an attitude similar to my friend Blitz’s: she knew about how to fix a car from what she’d read in a book, but she refused to actually repair one until she got the chance to work on her Dream Car – and even more amazingly, her Dream Car…was a 1982 American Motors Eagle SX/4.

They actually met on the bus (Blitz, naturally, refused to drive any other car except the Dream Car), and after a few months of knowing each other, Blitz proposed that Jenna might work on his car in his garage, and she agreed.

Fun Fact I Just Made Up: In a recent poll, 32% of voters thought the Iowa Caucuses were a country located near the former Soviet Georgia.

So we’re going out last Saturday night, and I get a call from Blitz asking if I could come by and pick ‘em both up there at his house, and I’m OK with that, because with two drinks in a night being a big evening for me I’m more or less a permanent designated driver.

I was wondering how it was going with the car, and what I saw was stunning: the upper half of the engine was sitting in the living room, entirely disassembled. There were rockers and rods and all kinds of stuff there, neatly arranged for easy reassembly, and it looked like they had really put a lot of effort into the thing, but it was clear that they just couldn’t get it quite figured out…which isn’t surprising, considering it was the first time for both of them.

And you could see, in just that first second, that the two of them were some kind of frustrated. But it gets worse: Blitz told me that this was her third “diagnosis”, and that, now that she was actually face-to-face with a real car, she seemed to be entirely confused about exactly what to do.

Apparently things had gone so bad that Jenna wouldn’t even leave his house at night to go home until she could get things figured out…and, from what he’s telling me, he’s ready to throw her out, buy a different car, and get that car fixed by a mechanic who’s been there and done that – a lot.

To put it another way, he’s ready to dump his virgin mechanic…for a slut.

Now here’s the really crazy part of the story: I’ve had a bit of experience with cars breaking down over time, and I knew what was wrong from the beginning, as many of you probably did, too: the starter was bad – and that’s located on the very bottom of the engine, not the top, which means everything they’d been doing was pretty much pointless.

But I couldn’t tell them that in the beginning…because, again, it would’ve just spoiled the experience…and I sure wasn’t gonna say “I told you so” now…so even though I could have offered them both useful advice about how ignorance ain’t bliss, they surely didn’t want to hear it.

So look, folks, we could have a lot more fun following out this comic premise, but there’s a bigger point: I don’t want a virgin mechanic, and surely not a virgin doctor – and they don’t even allow virgin pilots to carry passengers.

What is it about sex (and politics, for that matter) that makes people think they’ll be able to simply “get it” with no experience at all? What is it that makes them think that celebrating their own ignorance is the best way to show they’re ready to take on something that, frankly, requires a bit of trial…and error…before you really get it right?

I don’t know the answer, but the next time someone tells you how their ignorance makes them a lot smarter about something, do me a favor and think about Blitz and Jenna and the Dream Car – and the living room full of engine parts – and if that person’s running for office, run the other way. Quickly.

I’d appreciate it; so will you – and if I know Blitz, he will, too.

No Country For Young Children

Jeff Bryant — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:58:50 -0500

When you call yourself a "historian," you create the implication that you can speak authoritatively about, well, history. But last Friday, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich defied that common sense.

Speaking at one of America's top institutions of learning, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Gingrich, who had earlier in the week bragged about being paid millions to be a "historian" for mortgage behemoth Freddie Mac, boldly declared that laws preventing child labor are "truly stupid."

In outlining a plan to fire janitorial staffs in public schools across the county and then hire poor children to clean the schools, Gingrich claimed that laws preventing poor kids from going to work "before you're 14, 16" are actually obstacles standing in the way of rescuing children who are "in a school that's failing with a teacher that's failing."

What "professor" Gingrich has overlooked is that there are historical reasons why America has child labor laws.

Most civilized countries have enacted child labor laws because history has proven that putting children into work situations at a very early age tends to exploit them, subject them to abuse, and endanger their education, rather than enhance it.

But you don't even need to delve deeply into a history lesson to find examples of how subjecting children to spending long hours of manual labor might not be the best way to improve their academic attainment. All you have to do is look at government policies that currently allow businesses to exploit child labor.

Child Labor Laws Need Strengthening

In America today, hundreds of thousands of children work in the agricultural industry due to a loophole that does not hold corporate agribusiness to restrictions on age and hour requirements that apply to all other enterprises.

According to a report from Human Rights Watch, child farmworkers as young as 12 years old often work 10 or more hours a day, five to seven days a week. Some start working part-time at age 6 or 7.
These children work under blazing sun or through intense rain, in close proximity to sharp blades and dangerous equipment, and with repeated exposure to harmful pesticides.

For far less pay than minimum wage, many of these children are made to work with inadequate food and water, without basic protective clothing like shoes and gloves, and little or no access to medical care or even toilets. Sometimes they're mistreated or beaten by an overseer if they don't maintain their "productivity."

Let's be clear that we're not talking about children working weekends on the family farm here to earn money for the prom. What we're talking about is a cost-effective cog in the big agriculture machine that provides fruits and vegetables to your grocery store.

And the consequences to these children are not good: Children who do agricultural work suffer fatalities at more than four times the rate of children working in other jobs. They also drop out of school at four times the national rate.

The Conservatives' War on Children

So obviously the only thing "truly stupid" about Gingrich's comment about child labor laws is the comment itself. And if we need to make any changes to child labor laws, it should be to toughen them -- especially as they apply to the agricultural industry -- not weaken them.

Gingrich has a reputation for making these sorts of outlandish statements, believing that it makes him appear "unconventional." "You're going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals," he warns us.

But you'd be mistaken to dismiss his attitude as a "maverick" statement made by an "outsider." Notice for instance that although Gingrich is, according to most recent polls, the current frontrunner in the field of candidates vying for the Republican party's nomination not a single one of his opponents, as of this writing, has denounced his position on child labor laws. So one can assume a Republican unified front on this issue?

In fact, the conservative push to eliminate protections for children is not limited to the presidential circuit. Witness another cruel stupidity -- this coming from Congress.

Pizza Is a Vegetable

At a time when child obesity has reached epidemic levels in America, our nation's lawmakers just passed legislation to exempt public school districts from limitations on how many starchy foods they are allowed to include in cafeteria meals, which are a mainstay, especially, in the diets of poor kids. One key to maximizing the starch quotient was to maintain the standard that classifies a slice of cheese pizza as a vegetable.

Politicians of all stripes were insisting the measure go through because current restrictions "cost too much." But there's a reason why leading food industry lobbyist for the likes of ConAgra Foods Inc. and Schwan Food Co. called this "an important victory." And it's got nothing to do with concerns for children.

In fact, at the same time lawmakers were doing the bidding of their corporate funders, a new study conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that children between 12 and 19 years old performed poorly overall on a set of criteria for ideal cardiovascular health. "Diet in particular was a problem."

It's Not Just Conservatives

However, it's too easy to blame conservatives alone for the increasingly callous treatment of children in US policy making. Because American society as a whole is increasingly abusive to the youngest in our society on a systemic level.

From the outset, young children in the US are handicapped by a system that neglects their most basic needs. Nearly five years ago, before the onset of our current recession, UNICEF the U.S. ranks 20th out of 21 industrialized countries in child well-being. One doesn't have to imagine how much worse the condition of children has gotten.

More recently, a new analysis of data from Gallup found that one in four California families can't afford food for their kids.

As New York Times columnist Charles Blow recently lamented, we have done a "poor job" of taking care of our children. As evidence he points to America's near-bottom ranking on a "Social Justice” scale that analyzes metrics of basic fairness and equality among Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. Two metrics that are especially striking are the US's low ranking for child poverty rate (bottom five) and expenditure on pre-primary education (bottom ten).

End Early Childhood Education?

Our nation's neglect of early childhood education is especially critical in light of the effects that schooling in the early years have on long-term success in adulthood. Another recent analysis, this one from the Pew Economic Mobility Project, notes that a study from France found that increasing the number of years of early childhood education from two to three increased monthly income of those individuals later in adulthood by almost 13 percent.

Yet funding for early childhood education in the US has been spiraling downward for years. In 2009-10, states spent $30 million less than in the previous year, giving $700 less per child than what was spent in 2001-2002 and enrolling only 26 percent of 4-year-olds nation wide.

From 2010-11, ten states eliminated all early childhood programs. And for 2011-12, Texas, Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, North Carolina, Florida, Colorado, Michigan, Georgia, and Illinois are all making significant cuts to early childhood programs or eliminating them altogether.

Schools Favor Testing Over Teaching

Things don't necessarily get much better for children once they get into kindergarten and elementary school. If they are fortunate enough not to attend a school that isn't in a "shameful" state of disrepair, or attend classes that arepacked with over 40 or 50 students per teacher, then they are still increasingly apt to encounter an approach to education that is deeply hostile to their creativity, their motivation to learn, and their need for broad and diverse learning opportunities.

Due to the deeply entrenched and strictly enforced standards and accountability movement -- a darling among many of both Republican and Democratic political persuasions -- schools are increasingly restricting children's learning opportunities.

Because this approach to education places so much emphasis on how kids score on standardized tests of math and English language arts, many schools -- particularly in Florida -- that once may have offered a school band, a drama program, a school newspaper, or a television station, now frequently cut those programs to increase the focus on testing.

Just this week, there was yet another example of an elementary school, this one in Dallas, withholding opportunities for kids to learn science and social studies in order to focus exclusively on math and reading scores that would earn the school an "exemplary" rating.

Unbeknownst to parents, "the students learned only math and reading for most of the school year, while teachers were pressured to fabricate grades for science, social studies and enrichment courses like music. Some of the grades were given by teachers who had never taught the subjects."

These are not isolated incidents. In states as large as California, significant percentages of elementary teachers report that "they spend no more than one hour on science instruction per week," and "districts report that they have no staff members dedicated to elementary science."

'Extreme' Is Now Mainstream

Of course, many who are pushing policies that are harmful to children claim to be actually acting in children's interests. Many who want to cut government regulations protecting children and cut funding children's education say they are doing it so that future generations aren't saddled with massive government deficits. And those who press a "reform" agenda in education focused on "accountability" for math and reading test scores insist that it's all in the interest of making sure children achieve "measured progress."

These are nonsense arguments. What is hurtful to children today is even worse for their future, because the abuses harm their development and hence their capacities to take on whatever challenges the future may bring -- balanced budget or no.

So say what you will about "crazy Newt." But keep in mind that the extreme positions he and his fellow Republicans hold on the treatment of children are in fact becoming more mainstream all the time. If you doubt this at all, ask young people themselves.

Now that the generation that grew up with these increasingly punitive policies toward children is old enough to speak out with force, is it any wonder that you see many of them at the frontlines of expanding street protests in the Occupy Wall Street movement?

But then, you see how we're dealing with that . . .

[AUTHOR DISCLOSURE: Human Rights Watch is a client of mine.]
Follow me on Twitter: @jeffbcdm

NCLB Dies, Zombie Education Reforms Live On

Jeff Bryant — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 14:43:31 -0500

With the collapse of the No Child Left Behind policy that has driven American education policy for at least the past decade, one would think that our nation's leaders would pause to consider the faulty thinking that brought this erroneous policy to life to begin with.

And don't doubt for a minute that NCLB is indeed a failed policy.

As edublogger Anthony Cody writes, "In spite of a decade of No Child Left Behind, growth in student achievement remains essentially flat."

Quoting Lisa Guisbond of FairTest, Cody notes that academic growth, as measured by this month's release of the Main National Assessment of Education Progress, often used as a yardstick by government officials and policy wonks, "was more rapid before and flattened after NCLB took effect." And "black-white achievement gaps remain large, at 25 points, and have not budged, despite the hope that NCLB's bright light would expose these gaps and motivate targeted, successful responses to close them."

Another NAEP yardstick -- the longer term assessment of students age 9, 13, and 17, going back 40 years -- shows that the greatest narrowing of the achievement gap occurred in the 1970s and 80s, long before any "reform" movement preceding NCLB started dominating education policy.

So Cody correctly concludes, "NCLB, perhaps the least popular law ever to blight our schools, has been a dramatic failure by its own chosen indicators."

But never quick to reflect on failure, our political leaders in Washington, DC are responding like all the king's men after Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall.

Instead of starting over with fresh thinking and taking a consensus view -- through perhaps something like an Education Summit that includes educators, parents and students -- Education Secretary Arne Duncan is busy jury-rigging a system for waiving the restrictions that NCLB imposed while at the same time pushing for NCLB-inspired "reform" measures featured in Race to the Top and other policies.

In fact, the ruined remains of NCLB -- RTTT, School Improvement Grants, Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) grants -- have become the de facto policy guiding American public education, and they perpetuate failed notions of education "reform" which, like zombies refusing to die, continue to menace our schools and our children.

Chief among the education reform undead is the pernicious notion of basing teacher evaluations on student scores on standardized tests.

Writing this week in The New York Times reporter Michael Winerip brings us up close and personal to just such a new teacher evaluation system in Tennessee. See if this makes sense to you:

The new rules, enacted at the start of the school year, require Mr. Shelton [the school principal] to do as many observations for his strongest teachers -- four a year --- as for his weakest. “It’s an insult to my best teachers,” he said, “but it’s also a terrible waste of time.”
Because there are no student test scores with which to evaluate over half of Tennessee’s teachers -- kindergarten to third-grade teachers; art, music and vocational teachers -- the state has created a bewildering set of assessment rules. Math specialists can be evaluated by their school’s English scores, music teachers by the school’s writing scores.

This evaluation system is the brainchild of reform policies pushed onto states by the RTTT grant competition.

Tennessee, along with eight other states and the District of Columbia, were awarded billions in federal funds on the basis, partially, of agreeing to implement new systems that tie teacher evaluations in a significant way to student scores on standardized tests. Because Tennessee was among just two states (the other being Delaware) to win the first round of RTTT grant awards, the state is being viewed by many as a model for other states to follow.

In fact, Florida is in the process of rolling out a system similar to Tennessee's with the same absurd consequences to teachers. Again, the evaluation is based on a formula that tries to determine a teacher's effect on a student's standardized test performance, and again "thousands" of teachers who don't teach a subject assessed by the Florida state exam will get a "score" that has nothing to do with the subject or the students they happen to teach.

North Carolina and New York, also RTTT winners, are gearing up to implement similar evaluation systems. And even states that are not RTTT winners, such as Wisconsin, have jumped on the bandwagon to use evaluation systems that are designed, not to see how students are actually doing on acquiring subject area content, but to see if teachers and principals are able to raise test scores.

As one of the quotes from the Winerip article points out, the immediate consequences of these new evaluation policies "put everyone under stress, are divisive, and suck the joy out of schools." But the impacts go way beyond that. In a powerfully written document that also came out this week, principals from schools in Long Island, New York enumerate to their state legislators the multiple problems with this approach to education reform.

It's bad enough that these new evaluation models do not produce reliable measurements -- like "using a meter stick to weigh a person," the principals explain -- but far more important are the damages that these new evaluations will likely have to children.

When "test scores take front and center," the principals state, the curriculum will narrow to "test preparation and skill and drill teaching, and "enrichment activities in the arts, music, civics and other non-tested areas will diminish." More struggling students will likely get placed in lower-level classes without standardized assessments. Schools will likely become "more reluctant to challenge students upward" for fear that it will push test scores lower. Teachers will more likely try to "avoid students with health issues, students with disabilities, English Language Learners, or students suffering from emotional issues." And teachers will become less collaborative as they focus more only how well their students are doing on tests rather than on how well the entire school meets the needs of all its students.

Furthermore, from a financial standpoint, creating and implementing these new evaluation systems is taking huge sums of money away from direct services to students at a time when school budgets are being slashed to the bone in just about every state.

In New York, at the same time when state legislators passed $1.3 billion in education cuts, the state's new teacher evaluation system is redirecting more tax dollars from schools to, in the words of the Long Island principals, "testing companies, trainers, and outside vendors."

While it's true that some states have gotten federal money -- through RTTT and other grants -- to help offset the costs of implementing these evaluation systems, the long term costs go way beyond the amount of the federal funds. Florida, for instance, got $700 million in its RTTT award but will spend more than $1 billion, over the next two years alone, to develop and implement the testing and evaluation apparatus.

California recently calculated that it would cost the state $3.5 billion to implement teacher evaluations and other RTTT-inspired requirements for obtaining a waiver to No Child Left Behind mandates still in force.

California wisely turned Secretary Duncan's waiver offer down, but 42 other states have applied for the waivers.

Certainly, there's got to be an alternative to this madness. But efforts to reauthorize federal legislation governing education have generally stalled and most who are currently involved in the negotiation do little more than trade talking points about "accountability" and "achievement," but until these terms become disassociated with "test scores" the conversation will not change.

There have been many voices from outside DC offering useful and constructive advice to lawmakers, but these inputs are being quickly dismissed.

In the meantime, there's wide agreement among the Serious People that NCLB has become untenable. So now, after the consequences of NCLB waivers roll out across the country, get ready for the next Very Serious Discussion on education policy: What to do about the untenable waivers.

'Nation's Report Card' Distracts From Real Concerns For Public Schools

Jeff Bryant — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 16:08:55 -0400

Imagine you’re a parent of a seven-year-old who has just come home from school with her end-of-year report card. And the report card provides marks for only two subjects, and for children who are in grade-levels different from hers. Furthermore, there's nothing on the report card to indicate how well these children have been progressing throughout the year. There are no teacher comments, like "great participation in class" or "needs to turn in homework on time." And to top it off, the report gives a far harsher assessment of academic performance than reports you've gotten from other sources.

That's just the sort of "report card" that was handed to America yesterday in the form of the National Assessment of Education Progress. And while the NAEP is all well and good for what it is -- a biennial norm-referenced, diagnostic assessment of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading -- the results of the NAEP invariably get distorted into all kinds of completely unfounded "conclusions" about the state of America's public education system.

'Nation's Report Card" Is Not A Report Card

First off, let's be clear on what the NAEP results that we got yesterday actually entail. As Diane Ravitch explains, there are two different versions of NAEP: 1) the Main NAEP, which we got yesterday, given every other year in grades 4 and 8 to measure national and state achievement in reading and math based on guidelines that change from time to time; and 2) the Long-Term Trend NAEP given less frequently at ages 9, 13, and 17 to test reading and math on guidelines that have been tested since the early 1970s. (There are also occasional NAEPs given in other subjects.) So in other words, be very wary of anyone claiming to identify "long term trends" based on the Main NAEP. This week's release was not the "long term" assessment.

Second, let's keep in mind the NAEP's limits in measuring "achievement." NAEP reports results in terms of the percent of students attaining Advanced, Proficient, Basic, and Below Basic levels. What's usually reported out by the media is the "proficient and above" figure. After all, don't we want all children to be "proficient?" But what does that really mean? Proficiency as defined by NAEP is actually quite high, in fact, much higher than what most states require and higher than what other nations such as Sweden and Singapore follow.

Third, despite its namesake, NAEP doesn't really show "progress." Because NAEP is a norm-referenced test, its purpose is for comparison -- to see how many children fall above or below a "cut score." Repeated applications of NAEP provide periodic points of comparison of the percentages of students falling above and below the cut score, but does tracking that variance really show "progress?" Statisticians and researchers worth their salt would say no.

Finally, let's remember that NAEP proficiency levels have defined the targets that all states are to aim for according toto the No Child Left Behind legislation. This policy that has now been mostly scrapped, or at least significantly changed, due to the proficiency goals that have been called "unrealistic."

Does this mean that NAEP is useless. Of course not. As a diagnostic tool it certainly has its place. But as the National Center on Fair and Open Testing (FairTest) has concluded, "NAEP is better than many state tests but is still far from the 'gold standard' its proponents claim for it."

NAEP Results: "As Modest As It Gets"

So what to make of this year's results? Not much, according to most reports, which tend to echo Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's statement that "modest increases in NAEP scores are reason for concern as much as optimism." Or then, maybe neither?

Writing at the blog for the Albert Shanker Institute, Matt Di Carlo sums up yesterday's NAEP results so:

NAEP results indicated a “significant increase” in fourth and eighth grade math and eighth grade reading, but in all three cases, the increase was as modest as it gets – just one scale score point, roughly a month of “learning.” Certainly, this change warrants attention, but it may not square with most people’s definition of “significant” (and it may also reflect differences in the students taking the test).

So there you have it.

Nevertheless, the modest results yielded by NAEP don't stop Beltway-based journalists and edu-pundits from projecting their favorite policy idea onto the high-profile Rorschach test that NAEP has become.

As Di Carlo predicted in a different post, "People on all 'sides' will interpret the results favorably no matter how they turn out."

Sure enough, as soon as NAEP results were made public, the Washington Post's Valerie Strauss -- no fan of the education "reform" movement -- declared on her blog that the modest showing was yet more proof that test-based reforms were having no effect on improving schools. She writes, "Someone should be printing up a T-shirt about now that says: 'My nation spent billions on testing and all I got was a 1-point gain.'"

Conversely, school reform enthusiasts at the Education Trust used NAEP's modest showing as a pretense for declaring that school reforms are "not moving fast enough."

Meanwhile, In The Real World

All this back and forth about "what NAEP results really mean" would be just as entertaining as your favorite daytime soap opera if it weren't for the fact that there weren't significantly more consequential problems crashing down on the nation's schools.

While edu-pudits get a sugar high from statistical tables and charts, Americans on a strictly meat and potatoes diet are getting a very different view of the world. While Beltway policy wonks argue over miniscule data points, families are coping with the immediate reality of school cuts that are robbing their children of real learning opportunities.

During the run-up to the NAEP carnival, parents and teachers in Cleveland had far more important concerns about budget cuts denying their students opportunities to ride the bus, play sports, participate in school plays, and go to summer school. Parents in Pasco County, Florida wondered about the consequences to their kids now that art instruction has become rare and PE classes have been cut to once a week. Elsewhere in Florida, thousands of middle and high school students fail to grasp the importance of NAEP as they walk hazardous routes to school because there's not enough money to pay for bus services.

One wonders how all those who fancy themselves to be such clear-minded analysts of "real data" from NAEP feel about a new report from California indicating that "only about one in 10" elementary school students in the state get adequate instruction in science.

This kind of information from the reality community is often dismissed as being "anecdotal." But it's not "anecdotal" when it's your kid. Furthermore, when anecdotes become this frequent, it's called a trend.

Another popular notion among the political class is to parry concerns about student's every day lives in school with arguments about the need to change the focus on "inputs" -- what kids actually do during the school day -- to "outputs" such as test scores. But we know that the inputs of a well-rounded curriculum that includes art, music, PE, and science undoubtedly have real consequences in our children's lives. So why do we we confine our attention to outputs, such as NAEP, that completely ignore that?

What all the fetishization of NAEP results amounts to is so much scrutiny of the dipstick while the wheels are falling off the car. Can you say, "Out of touch?"

Don't Just Get Rid Of NCLB, Get Rid Of The Thinking That Created It

Jeff Bryant — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:09:45 -0400

Now that the mandate to run our nation's schools according to No Child Left Behind has utterly collapsed, and many of the best minds are suggesting that we move on, there is still a prevailing contingency seeking to not just prop up but expand many of the tenants of the failed policy.

Our political leadership in Washington DC continues to be obsessed with the intricacies of the accountability measures imposed by NCLB. Rich people continue to exhort educators to adopt business practices which are in great part what helped bring about NCLB. And state after state across the country continues to divert precious dollars from early childhood education, art and music teachers, and foreign language and advanced placement programs to teacher incentive and evaluation systems mandated by NCLB.

In just the latest absurdity of how lawmakers continue to use NCLB-inspired thinking to "leverage the system" by exerting more pressures on teachers, the state of Idaho has decided to tie teachers' pay to how often parents show up for student conferences and school events. Like teachers really have some control over this?

So despite the clear failure of NCLB as effective public policy, why does the philosophy behind that policy still have such a strong grip at our leadership levels? To answer that question, it's useful to explore the thinking of a certain breed of economists who inspired NCLB to begin with.

These economists are particularly fond of retelling the story

that they believe to be proof positive of how the world should work:

A Tale Of Convicts And Ships

Back in the 1700s, the British government was grappling with a booming crime rate brought on by an economic collapse and a dearth of employment opportunities. So to stem the mounting number of convicted criminals, the ruling classes determined to start sending them to Australia, a recently acquired colony that had relatively large tracts of unoccupied land -- particularly after the native populations had been mostly exterminated -- and a growing need for cheap labor to build a new infrastructure.

A significant problem the government encountered, however, was that huge percentages of the convicts -- as much as a third -- died while being transported on the ships due to starvation, disease, and little to no medical care. What to do?

Well, according to the hindsight of these modern-day economists, the "solution" was a problem of getting the "metrics" right -- the metric, in this case, being the number of prisoners -- the body count, if you will -- that needed to be tracked during the journey. The problem wasn't the number of bodies that got on the ships -- the "input -- it was the number of bodies that got off -- the "output." And when the government simply shifted from paying the ship captains for the number of bodies stacked into their vessels -- the "input" -- to paying the ship captains for the "output" of live human beings when the boats docked in Australia, then voila, the problem was solved.

In other words, to these economists, all matters humanity are simply resolved by tracking the given metrics in the system and determining the best place to "incentivize" the people involved in the given system. And their base conclusion is that only by appealing to people's self interest -- in this case the ship captain's paycheck -- could you get the desired output from the system -- never mind whether the system you're dealing with is a moral abomination.

One has to assume that, given the improved body count achieved in the transport of convicts, that these economists would be fine if this "solution" had gone on in perpetuity. Of course it didn't, and an "economic model" had nothing to do with its end. Instead, two things ended this moral repugnance: 1) anger from the growing number of free settlers in Australia at seeing their wages being kept artificially low due to a veritable slave trade, and 2) the outrage of citizens in England who insisted that criminal sentencing be governed by "a just measure in pain" for the crimes people commit.

When An Economic Problem Is Really A Moral One

What do English convicts and ship captains from over 200 years ago have to do with education policy today? Just as those 18th century English government officials believed that the main imperative in the business of deporting convicts was reducing the gap between the number of bodies boarding the ships and the number offloaded alive at journey's end, the most well-meaning officials behind NCLB backed the policy as a means to close the gap between the education attainment of underserved children and their better-off peers. And just as those English lawmakers of years ago chose to focus on a metric that would perpetuate rather than end the unfairness and injustice of the system, American policy makers have chosen an equally inadequate metric -- test scores -- to gauge "success."

Despite the demise of NCLB, scores on standardized tests continue to be the be-all and end-all of education policy despite the great harm this is doing to school children and classroom teachers.

Because testing is mandatory at the federal level in just two subjects -- math and English language arts -- school children are being harmed by a narrowing of the curriculum to these subjects only. Our policy leaders respond to this problem by proclaiming that the best solution is to just have "more tests" in "more subjects." In the meantime, more and more subjects, such as science, fall off the curriculum, and the original problem -- the disparity and inequality of learning opportunities available to all school children -- actually gets worse.

So much belief is being invested into the power of test scores to improve education that most classroom teachers now face a new "landscape" in which their pay level and indeed the very existence of their job will depend on how well school children perform on standardized tests, even though advocates for these systems admit that they are less than "perfect." "Some people are concerned that not every 'i' is dotted," a proponent for test-based teacher evaluation recently observed, dismissing any notion that evaluations that could end up in terminating a good teacher's job would need to be "fine tuned." This prompted at least one classroom teacher to wonder, "So what if we fire Mr. Chips and Mr. Holland but keep Cameron Diaz? Their lives are just an 'i' to be dotted, right?"

Even as a practical matter, the belief system that spawned NCLB and the similar enterprises -- such as Race to the Top -- that have followed it, have little to show in terms of real progress. As the veteran educator Deborah Meier recently observed:

But after more than two decades of these New Reforms—more and more testing, higher stakes, charters, and mayoral control—we do know some things for sure:
(a) Test scores have not risen, and the test-score gap hasn't narrowed.
(b) We have moved further away from building a profession that retains and uses its experienced teachers well.
(c) We are witnessing unimaginable hours spent on test-prepping and a narrowing of the rest of the curriculum while cheating is being ignored and teachers are being demoralized. Hardly trivial side effects.
And we know that our immediate bleak economic future will exacerbate all these trends.

But of course this isn't just a "practical matter." Those 18th century English officials overseeing the convict ships sailing to Australia failed at ending the exploitation of incarcerated citizens not because they had the metrics wrong but because they had their values wrong. They could "incent" all they wanted to different ways to improve the body count, but that did nothing to end the overall inhumanity. Only when people asserted the values of fairness and justice did the madness end.

Today, similar ways of thinking in our education policies -- evident in NCLB and other proposals -- have done virtually nothing to advance fairness for our school children and have ratcheted up, in fact, an unjust way of treating teachers. Time to declare, "Enough!"

Starving The Schools Of The 99%

Jeff Bryant — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 14:22:44 -0400

Last week's release of the report Starving America's Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation's Students set the stage for this week's chorus line calling for the U.S. Senate to pass a bill to fund teachers' jobs across the country.

We know school districts are laying off teachers by the thousands, and we know firing teachers reinforces all the things that are bad for the future of our children and our country: cutting early childhood education, increasing class sizes, narrowing curriculum, and shutting down programs and services that individualize the school experience to different student interests and abilities.

This week, Media Matters reminded us that the Senate is about to vote on the President's plan to "prevent teacher layoffs and get more teachers back in our schools -- 400,000 jobs." Right on cue, Think Progress pointed out that the choice our senators face is to decide whether they are for "hundreds of thousands of American jobs or are they for letting millionaire and billionaires get away without paying their fair share."

Senators must pass the bill. But while our political leaders decide between voting for the best interests of their constituents or their big-money donors, an arguably more important drama is playing out in the streets throughout America. As the Occupy Wall Street movement grows in force, the interests of public school teachers are being pushed to the head of the protests.

"It isn't necessary to overthink the relationship between the Occupy Wall Street movement and education," edu-blogger Tom Hoffman explains. Billionaires have a disproportionate influence on the future of our public schools.

Most of the elites who are determined to use "market forces" to cut public education and drive students and parents into privately operated charters went to private schools themselves and express little interest in providing the types of school experiences they benefited from to the general population. It's not their private school backgrounds that make them hypocrites. What's hypocritical is to seek out educational opportunities for yourself and your children, and then turn around and work systematically to deny those very same opportunities to others.

As Stan Karp of Rethinking Schools explains: "The same corporate elites and politicians who accept no accountability for having created the most unequal distribution of wealth in the history of the planet -- and an economy that threatens the health and well-being of hundreds of millions -- want to hold teachers accountable for their students’ test scores. They even want to use similar instruments to do it."

There's no doubt that turning public education into a test-driven enterprise is enriching the coffers of huge corporations, and that these companies then, in turn, use their wealth to have undue influence on policy makers.

To public school teachers, Wall Street's ravaging of our economy mirrors all to well the attack on, in Karp's words, "the universal public and democratic character of public schools" And the political will of our leadership to starve our schools is connected to the "corporate greed and inequality" that is ruining our economy.

The message that public school teachers bring to OWS is by no means lost on the young people who make up the majority of the demonstrators. Not only do they experience firsthand the loss of learning opportunities, but they are increasingly apt to, literally, get stuck with the bill. As education professor Willie Hiatt explains in an op-ed that appeared in Lexington, Kentucky media:

Our students are graduating into debt peonage (the average debt is $22,900, according to the Wall Street Journal) and joblessness as far as the eye can see. The next bubble to burst could be the nearly $1 trillion in student loans. Forgive protesters for connecting the dots: Wall Street crashed the economy, which wrecked state budgets, which meant higher tuition and fewer grants and scholarships, which led to more private loans. The home-equity decline means fewer families can pay for a liberal-arts education on second mortgages alone.

This is not the future that we promised to our children. Writing as a guest at Amanda Ripley's blog, Marie Lawrence puts forth the idea that OWS is mostly about education:

We know that the Occupy Wall Street protest is partly a response to corporate greed, but I suspect it also reflects the disconnect between our aspirations and our reality. It feels like the engines of social mobility (namely education) are failing us.

(hat tip: Alex Russo)

The reality that we are starving our children's means of getting an education and then saddling them with the costs, while at the same time making it harder and harder for them to get a job, is in stark contrast to what we've always been told the American Dream is all about. Teachers know this because they see it first hand. Students know it because the consequences come crashing down on them the hardest. It's time for everyone else to get this.