Last week, the National Education Association held its annual convention. Biggest news: they passed a resolution asking Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, to resign. Second biggest news: the NEA’s new president is Lily Eskelsen Garcia — she began as a cafeteria worker and went on to become Utah’s Teacher of the Year — who promises to promote a more assertive, activist agenda than the NEA has employed in the past. It has generally been the smaller teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, that has been the firebrand while the NEA tried to steer a more moderate, middle ground. It’s looking like the NEA wants to get in the fight.
This is the latest skirmish in the growing battles over the best ways to improve our children’s educations. By naming Arne Duncan Secretary of Education, Obama threw in with the more conservative “education reform” wing of the Democratic party, which has formed an uneasy alliance with conservatives and billionaires who spend millions of dollars trashing public schools and pushing a privatization agenda. That means focusing on high stakes testing and charter schools and harping on problems in traditional public schools — painting the schools and the teachers who work in them as failures. The teachers unions, along with many educators and progressives, disagree. For the NEA, which tends to put its money and influence behind Democrats, to officially call for Duncan’s resignation indicates how wide the divide has grown.
The education controversy raging in the country has lots of moving parts. Whole books have been written about the battles and the motivations of the actors in this drama. I want to concentrate on just one aspect of the controversy because it hasn’t gotten as much attention as it deserves: the philosophical divide at the core of the discussion.
On one side, the more conservative education reform/privatization movement maintains that traditional public schools and teachers are to blame for our students’ poor achievement and, by extension, for problems like poverty and income inequality. Fix the schools and our social ills will take care of themselves, they maintain.
The other, more progressive side maintains that poverty, income inequality and lack of social and economic mobility are societal illnesses which are too deep seeded and pervasive to be cured by the schools. By blaming schools for some of our country’s most troublesome structural problems, they say, we’re aggravating and perpetuating a situation we should address head on. We need to couple aggressive measures addressing root causes of poverty with efforts to make our schools more effective, and the two will improve together.
Adopting either of the two narratives takes you in significantly different directions.
If the fault lies with our current public school systems and the teachers who work in them as the reform/privatization crowd asserts, then the solution is, Throw the bums out! We have to tear out the failing school system root and branch. That means creating a whole new type of school, the charter school, which will succeed because it operates outside the current system of failure, and maybe even sending kids to private schools on the public dime. It means closing “failing schools” or firing entire school staffs and starting over. It means coming up with a clear way to measure student success and failure — yearly standardized tests — and using the results to determine which schools and teachers stay, and which schools and teachers go.
And it also follows from this way of thinking that we can spend less on all those social programs that only make things worse by perpetuating a culture of dependency. If we just get kids into great schools with great teachers . . . problem solved.
But if schools aren’t the prime mover in our social ills, which is what the progressive side of the education battle asserts, then a radical reform of our education system won’t have the revolutionary effects the “school reformers” predict. All the shifting and shuffling and privatization will create schools which are marginally better or marginally worse than what we have now, but they won’t have a serious impact on student achievement, poverty, income inequality or social and economic mobility. And the dismantling of our system of public schooling which, for all its flaws, is one of this country’s great accomplishments, could leave us with schools that are even more segregated than they are now, greater educational inequality and a more fragmented society.
And, according to this argument, by misdirecting all our attention toward schools and ignoring the underlying social and economic causes, we’re allowing some of our most serious problems to fester, which will result in losing another generation of children.
Anyone who has read my posts knows I’m on the more progressive side of this argument. A few months ago, I created a map of the letter grades of schools in the greater Tucson and Phoenix areas, and another map with the average income levels of families. The correlation between the A-F grades and income levels is astounding. The “A” schools are mainly in the high income areas, the “B” and “C” schools are in the middle class and transitional areas, and the “D” schools are concentrated in the areas of highest poverty. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone, because no matter where you go in the world, you’ll find a similar correlation between family income and student achievement. As poverty lessens, and with it the stresses and burdens poor children carry with them into school, student achievement increases. High stakes tests haven’t changed that basic fact. Charter schools and private schools have the same mixed record of student achievement as school districts when you compare similar students. No one has discovered a reliable, reproduceable educational fix for the income-related achievement gap.
I join the NEA and a large part of the progressive community in wanting to see Arne Duncan go and a more progressively minded educator take his place. Obama should replace Duncan with someone more like Linda Darling Hammond, his education adviser during his 2008 presidential campaign. She, or someone like her, would create a better balance between the need to improve the lives of children outside of school as well as inside.
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2014.
“I join the NEA and a large part of the progressive community in wanting to see Arne Duncan go and a more progressively minded educator take his place. Obama should replace Duncan with…Linda Darling Hammond…. She…would create a better balance between the need to improve the lives of children outside of school as well as inside.”
I agree with every word of this concluding paragraph.
When looking at the letter grades of the schools in Tucson, one could also assume the opposite result. The worse schools create a cycle of failure in lower income areas because they are not graduating high numbers of kids, they stay in the area working low wage jobs, keeping the income level low.
The biggest problem with our school system these days is that the “inmates run the prison.” Our teachers are now afraid of our students and have zero leverage over them because teachers are no longer allowed to hold students accountable for their actions.
Many charter schools in low income areas are allowed to teach accountability and discipline to students who have never met their dad and never see their mom because they work two jobs. They need structure and our public schools are no longer allowed to do that for only God knows why…
Arne Duncan should be retired post haste and be replaced with someone who understands schooling, respects teachers, and has spent a significant portion of his career in a classroom. Larry Cuban would be my choice. Hopefully, Obama will listen to a huge and reliable (and taken for granted) constituent group and act accordingly.
Duncan and other education industrialist technocrats are fixed on a path that will, predictably, self destruct for exactly for the same reasons that No Child Left Behind is now universally regarded as an expensive federal mandate and abject and foreseeable failure. Standardized testing is an adjunct, secondary to teaching. It is meant to assess and compare student learning outcomes, not as a means to identify and remove teachers alleged to be incompetent or close the schools they work in. Safier is absolutely correct, the correlation of low test scores to socio-economic status and poverty is consistent and has been since we began measuring the relationship in the sixties.
If standardized testing is allowed to dominate teaching, and learning is reduced to a health care issue, (with teachers trained to perform as professional diagnosticians armed with established and reliable interventions) the die is cast. If health care is the appropriate intervention model and physician training the path to emulate (Common Core State Standards), then teachers should be recruited from among the best and brightest, asked to select from among well established specializations, serve internships and residencies and be paid accordingly upon entering the workforce as certified and licensed professionals. Easily said.
We are talking about an expensive and radical shift in teacher preparation and ultimately professional compensation few districts would be able to offer. Certainly not the ones struggling now. We’are talking about a challenge on a par with Kennedy’s to NASA, land men on the moon and return them safely – and do it in a decade – starting now. This is where the medical intervention model should have been discarded as unrealistic, even delusional. But this is the model in play today.
The measure/quantify/act gurus have failed repeatedly over the past fifty years from the Whiz Kid McNamara to the recently deposed head of the VA. Numbers can be fudged, misinterpreted or used to justify decisions made in a vacuum. Naysayers can be threatened and punished. and fingers pointed when the whole enterprise implodes.
Teachers need support and encouragement – and protection from the seers sitting in caves interpreting shadows on the wall. They will not get it from privateers equipped with golden parachutes spinning through the revolving doors of government and special interests.
Right. Because the solution is to treat our children more like inmates.
Or perhaps we can consider the reality, demonstrated by a century of educational research, that learning is a complex contextual and relational process that can’t be reduced to these brute methods. I cringe a little bit when I hear people treat this regressive back-to-basics educational approach as if it had equal merit with methods that actually consider the research on how kids learn. It seems rather similar to giving a platform to climate change deniers.
Kudos to to the NEA for calling for Duncan’s resignation. It’s about time we have someone in that office who knows something about children, for a change.
Arne Duncan is the perfect example of a non-educator running education into the ground because he does not understand education. So, too, the state bureaucrats who have given us Common Core. As one of the few who has actually read the CC “standards” (in English), I know that (1) they are not “standards,” only vague performance-base descriptions or prescriptions–can do this or do that–without regard to whether students learn it in school or come to school already knowing it (advantage to the “haves,” disadvantage to the “have-nots”); and (2) they do not constitute a “curriculum,” only a grab-all of this or that item that someone brought up in a committee meeting (reflexive pronouns in 2nd grade; intensive pronouns in 6th grade–huh?). Literature is any grab-bag at all, with 17th-century American literature (our founding Puritan and colonial literature) not mentioned. Plainly, American education is adrift, with society unable to decide what it values and wants to transmit to the next generation. So what school under what auspices is nothing more than the building in which administrators, teachers, and students congregate; it hardly matters. No one has a clue what education is or is for, expect learning whatever it takes to pass tests. Do we hate our children that much?
The major problem in education these days is the teachers unions themselves. When it takes years to fire a lousy teacher, something very basic is wrong with the system.
Maybe the kids and their parents and their goals and values have somethingtto do with it? Look to the ethnic groups who value an education. Nah.that would be too easy.
President Obama is the one who has failed to lead on education, not the person he appointed as Secretary of Education. He made his choice as to the path he wanted to follow when he appointed Duncan in 2009. Darling-Hammond was the other contender at that time and Obama passed her over.
Democrats such as Kerry, Kennedy and Lieberman made similar poor choices when they joined with GW Bush to pass No Child Left Behind. We often forget that this horrendous legislation had significant bi-partisan support. Obama has done little to push for the massive revisions the law requires so that its punitive approach to judging schools is reversed.
Standardized tests were originally designed for diagnostic purposes. They are not intended to be used to grade schools or judge the people who work in them, but the denizens of the so-called “accountability movement” in both parties have embraced this illogical and mean-spirited approach. The schools that are continually slammed are the ones who have large numbers of students who live in poverty, significant percentages of English language learners and special education students and high mobility rates. Now that test scores are part of administrator and teacher evaluations in Arizona (per state law), there is a disincentive to choose to work in schools that need dedicated, hardworking educators the most. Arizona state law also denies students who fail to pass standardized tests the right to graduate from high school, even if they have earned all their required credits.
Arne Duncan is a convenient scapegoat for the NEA and others, but our entire political system bears the burden for taking on all the challenges that bedevil our public schools. Unless we decide to renew our commitment to the war on poverty and stop the war on public schools and the people who work in them, nothing will change. Educators bear a lot of responsibility, too. We need to commit to ongoing professional growth, evaluation systems that include peer review, individualized approaches to meet the needs of all learners and support for financial and other incentives for those who choose to work in high-poverty, high-need schools, even if that means they make more money than the rest of us.
It’s a very good article, frankly I’m surprised that Obama has apparently antagonized his democratic base, which includes the teachers and their union, by supporting Arne Duncan. Then again, it may remnants of Obama’s attempt to “triangulate” to the political center and not assume the position of the more liberal democrats and unions on every occasion.
I’m not so sure that high stakes testing and “blaming schools” is not the generic liberal position. Generally, liberals like to use the power of government to address various issues affecting the common good, such as protecting people from air pollution. I’m all for the EPA cracking down on polluting companies, but if I was a teacher, I’d probably want “big government” out of my classroom.
There’s social, biological, and other factors for why some students succeed. For example, if both your parents are mathematicians, you might well have a genetic advantage when it comes to mathematical ability, studies have shown that math skill are to a degree heritable. Of course there are environmental factors as well, and the child of recently arrived immigrants who work menial jobs could well become the next Einstein, their genetic background might well be favorable to achieving high success in mathematics, but their family might never had such opportunities.
In certain neighborhoods in Tucson, you’ve got a lot of high achieving folks, lawyers, and other professionals, who earn more, but the reasons why are many, and I don’t think it makes sense to charge such neighborhoods with “violating the laws of mediocrity”, and then asking schools to make sure everyone is homogenized when it comes to test results, or suggesting that the schools are somehow the cause.
Probably the best thing for all students is to make sure that everybody has opportunities for extracurriculars and a safe learning environment free from hostility and gangs and such. I don’t think it makes sense to attack teachers.
Here we go again, Fraser. You are showing your ignorance again. And on something you more than likely know nothing about. Are you a teacher? Or an anti ethnic? What is your culture exactly? And if being ethically white means you have all the answers, then why do you sound so stupid?