Fixing NCLB: How Testing Hurts Disadvantaged Kids
By Renee Moore
Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org.
I’ve been part of a group of determined teachers from around the nation working to engage in direct discussions with the Obama administration about its blueprint for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (known for the past decade as No Child Left Behind). Some of us thought it might be a good time to write about issues related to the Blueprint, and why we think seeking the expertise of successful teachers might help lawmakers develop better policies.
One of the first points identified by teachers as a problem is that the proposed plan continues to place an emphasis on high-stakes accountability through standardized test scores. What's wrong with a big focus on test scores? Don't we need to know how students are performing?
I'm going to revisit a past post from my blog TeachMoore as I begin to answer. Here’s what I wrote:
I recently had opportunity to talk with some parents, including some who were my former students. One of the most profound and disturbing discussions was with a young mother I'll call Debra. Fourteen years ago, Debra had been in my high school English class, and managed to graduate just a few days before her daughter was born. Debra's life, which had never been easy, took a deeply tragic turn five years ago when that child was murdered.
Sitting next to me at the health program, we watched her other child, 9-year-old Donnell, sit passively through what was otherwise a lively group discussion. She shared with me her concerns that he was growing increasingly frustrated with school, and more and more withdrawn. Donnell had serious learning disabilities that affected his language and reading skills. According to Debra, his Individual Education Plan and previous tests indicated that he could handle the equivalent of 1st, maybe 2nd grade work. But the newly enacted changes in special education placement and testing to meet federal Adequate Yearly Progress guidelines required that he be moved to an inclusion setting and tested with the 4th graders. She had tried, unsuccessfully, to talk with the special education staff, even the superintendent, along with some other concerned mothers of special needs children, about giving him a more gradual transition.
"I don't understand," she said nearly in tears, "why they insist on giving him work and a test that they know he's not ready for yet? He thinks he is stupid, and he's ready to give up on school," at 9 years old.
She's been to the school 15 times this year already. His new teacher, with an already overcrowded classroom, is struggling to give Donnell the extra help he needs while not neglecting the others. Both women are frustrated and angry with the system.
Donnell's story has been repeated all over the country with tens of thousands of special-needs students. The focus on test scores and the over-reliance on them to determine student learning has led to this widespread abuse.
Under the current and proposed federal requirements, we have used test scores to justify punishing schools and students who have been chronic underperformers before we took the necessary steps to correct the profoundly unequal learning conditions that have been created within those schools. Case in point: My own children attended the black high school in our town that had no science labs (although we parents are charged an annual lab fee). Their teachers resorted to buying lab kits out of their own pockets with which they could at least demonstrate the principles for the students to watch. Even so, my children had to take the same state biology test as their classmates at the predominantly white high school across town, which had a fully stocked and usable science lab. I'm not talking about the 1950s here; this is 21st-century inequity: one district, same leadership, responsible for providing equal opportunities to all students. Guess which school's students performed better overall on the state test? But which school might be punished for low performance by having its funding cut even more? Which teachers are in danger of losing their jobs?
It's a harsh reality that some students in this country receive a rich, challenging curriculum that allows them to perform consistently well on tests and other evaluations, while other children—particularly the children of the poor—are more often in schools focused on control and remediation. Ironically, many of those who insist on forcing teachers and students to spend inordinate amounts of time drilling basic skills believe they are helping "close the achievement gap." In fact, they may actually be making it wider. Lest we forget, the purpose of all this testing is to determine what students have actually learned. The goal of education is not to produce great test takers, but to prepare tomorrow's citizens.
One of my TLN colleagues, David B. Cohen, who teaches at the upscale Palo Alto High School in northern California, summed it up nicely:
What I wish people would realize is that "good" schools with high test scores don't think of their instruction as some kind of reward for the test scores. They don't focus on basic skills and then suddenly reach a point where they...develop deeper knowledge, enrich learning, engage students' interests, etc. It's not basics and then enrichment. The basics can be addressed more covertly, more authentically, and more effectively, when those skills are developed in a meaningful and motivational context. That type of environment shouldn't be the exception, the unearned privilege of the children of privileged parents, and those lucky enough to attend schools that test well. That type of education is the birthright of every child.
Renee Moore teaches in the rural Mississippi Delta. A former state teacher of the year and Milken Award winner, she serves on the boards of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. She will continue her commentaries about the ESEA Blueprint at her TeachMoore blog.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
Lulac Disgusted at Radio Contest Targeting Immigrants
Probably goes without saying but discrimination against Mexicans and Latinos, generally, has gone wild in the U.S. Latinos are treated as if they do not belong, have not contributed, or have not shed blood for this country.
What a terrible situation for our country's largest, rapidly growing demographic to be suffering. Rather than scapegoating Latinos and Latinas, we should see them as this country's greatest asset. This is a group that generally works hard, values education, has strong family values, fights our wars and this is how they get recompensed.
As a member of LULAC myself, I am glad to see LULAC leading in this way. But more beyond LULAC must be done. All persons of good conscience need to be denouncing prejudice and discriminatory behavior, on the one hand, and explore possibilities through an assets-based perspective, on the other.
-Angela
June 4, 2010
Contact: Lizette Jenness Olmos, (202) 365-4553 mobile
Press Release
Lulac Disgusted at Radio Contest Targeting Immigrants
Radio Station General Manager apologizes for the insensitivity of the promotion
Washington, DC – The League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the country, had called on Ohio radio station WTVN-AM and its parent company Clear Channel Communications to apologize for the distasteful contest held last week urging callers to win a free trip to Arizona and “spend a weekend chasing aliens and spending cash in the desert.” LULAC along with other national organizations will file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
A coalition of Columbus community members including LULAC Ohio joined together in rejecting the insensitive promotion and an advertisement on Clear Channel's WTVN 610 Radio Station depicting Mayor Coleman on a Green Card in a trip giveaway promotion to Phoenix, Arizona last week.
“We stood up to racial profiling and bigoted messaging inferred by WTVN’s promotion,” said LULAC National President Rosa Rosales. “This is clearly the chilling effect of what is happening in Arizona with SB 1070. We believe that our community must respect and protect all people. We will file a complaint with the FCC and ensure that threats made against the community are dealt with urgently.”
“LULAC will work to create a long-term relationship with Clear Channel,” said LULAC Ohio State Director Jason Riveiro. “We have an advisory board with Clear Channel in Cincinnati and we hope to also establish an advisory board in Columbus as well to help ensure that insensitive issues do not occur again.”
LULAC will have a meeting with Brian Dytko, General Manager of the station next week.
Organizations that have come out against this action include: LULAC Ohio, LULAC – Columbus Councils, NCLR, Reform Immigration Reform for America, Empleos y Employment, Ohio Hispanic Coalition, Casa de la Cultura Hispana, Colombianos en Ohio, The Horn of Africa Rescue Committee (SomaliCommunity), Victoria Motors, University Area Enrichment Association, DJVU Latin Fusion, Jewish Family Services of Columbus and Latino LeaderShift Initiative.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest and largest Hispanic membership organization in the country, advances the economic conditions, educational attainment, political influence, health, housing and civil rights of Hispanic Americans through community-based programs operating at more than 700 LULAC councils nationwide.
This email was sent to: valenz@mail.utexas.edu
Click here to unsubscribe from email sent by LULAC.
LULAC National Office, 2000 L Street, NW, Suite 610 Washington DC 20036, (202) 833-6130, (202) 833-6135 FAX
What a terrible situation for our country's largest, rapidly growing demographic to be suffering. Rather than scapegoating Latinos and Latinas, we should see them as this country's greatest asset. This is a group that generally works hard, values education, has strong family values, fights our wars and this is how they get recompensed.
As a member of LULAC myself, I am glad to see LULAC leading in this way. But more beyond LULAC must be done. All persons of good conscience need to be denouncing prejudice and discriminatory behavior, on the one hand, and explore possibilities through an assets-based perspective, on the other.
-Angela
June 4, 2010
Contact: Lizette Jenness Olmos, (202) 365-4553 mobile
Press Release
Lulac Disgusted at Radio Contest Targeting Immigrants
Radio Station General Manager apologizes for the insensitivity of the promotion
Washington, DC – The League of United Latin American Citizens, the largest and oldest Hispanic civil rights organization in the country, had called on Ohio radio station WTVN-AM and its parent company Clear Channel Communications to apologize for the distasteful contest held last week urging callers to win a free trip to Arizona and “spend a weekend chasing aliens and spending cash in the desert.” LULAC along with other national organizations will file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
A coalition of Columbus community members including LULAC Ohio joined together in rejecting the insensitive promotion and an advertisement on Clear Channel's WTVN 610 Radio Station depicting Mayor Coleman on a Green Card in a trip giveaway promotion to Phoenix, Arizona last week.
“We stood up to racial profiling and bigoted messaging inferred by WTVN’s promotion,” said LULAC National President Rosa Rosales. “This is clearly the chilling effect of what is happening in Arizona with SB 1070. We believe that our community must respect and protect all people. We will file a complaint with the FCC and ensure that threats made against the community are dealt with urgently.”
“LULAC will work to create a long-term relationship with Clear Channel,” said LULAC Ohio State Director Jason Riveiro. “We have an advisory board with Clear Channel in Cincinnati and we hope to also establish an advisory board in Columbus as well to help ensure that insensitive issues do not occur again.”
LULAC will have a meeting with Brian Dytko, General Manager of the station next week.
Organizations that have come out against this action include: LULAC Ohio, LULAC – Columbus Councils, NCLR, Reform Immigration Reform for America, Empleos y Employment, Ohio Hispanic Coalition, Casa de la Cultura Hispana, Colombianos en Ohio, The Horn of Africa Rescue Committee (SomaliCommunity), Victoria Motors, University Area Enrichment Association, DJVU Latin Fusion, Jewish Family Services of Columbus and Latino LeaderShift Initiative.
The League of United Latin American Citizens, the oldest and largest Hispanic membership organization in the country, advances the economic conditions, educational attainment, political influence, health, housing and civil rights of Hispanic Americans through community-based programs operating at more than 700 LULAC councils nationwide.
This email was sent to: valenz@mail.utexas.edu
Click here to unsubscribe from email sent by LULAC.
LULAC National Office, 2000 L Street, NW, Suite 610 Washington DC 20036, (202) 833-6130, (202) 833-6135 FAX
Altered mural fuels racial debate in Prescott
Altered mural fuels racial debate in Prescott
by Dennis Wagner - Jun. 4, 2010 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic
A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.
The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the school's principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.
The "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.
R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.
"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."
Wall said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children's faces appear happier and brighter.
"It is being lightened because of the controversy," Wall said, adding that "they want it to look like the children are coming into light."
Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. "We asked them to fix the shading on the children's faces," he said. "We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race."
City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.
In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"
Blair could not be reached for comment Thursday. In audio archives of his radio show, Blair discusses the mural. He insists the controversy isn't about racism but says the mural is intended to create racial controversy where none existed before.
"Personally, I think it's pathetic," he says. "You have changed the ambience of that building to excite some kind of diversity power struggle that doesn't exist in Prescott, Arizona. And I'm ashamed of that."
Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the "Mural Mice."
The public art, funded by a $5,000 state grant through the Prescott Alternative Transportation Center, was selected by school students and faculty.
"The parents and children love it," Lane said.
Thursday, June 03, 2010
The Latino Education Crisis Rescuing the American Dream
Check out the full report.
-Patricia
By: Patricia Gandara
The education achievement gap between Latinos — the nation's largest and fastest growing minority group — and most other students is enormous, and in many cases growing. In fact, Latinos in the United States have made almost no progress in college completion rates during the last three decades, according to Patricia Gándara in a new WestEd Policy Perspectives paper.
In The Latino Education Crisis: Rescuing the American Dream, Gándara, Co-Director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, observes that, in 2008, Latinos were about half as likely as African Americans and a third as likely as Whites to obtain a college degree. Especially in states like California and Texas, where Latinos make up half of the public school students, this means a large segment of the population will be ill-equipped for the education-intensive careers of the 21st century.
Educational attainment is not the only problem these students face. Gándara notes that student achievement is highly correlated to household income and parental academic attainment — two other areas in which Latinos trail other groups.
In this paper, Gándara outlines a program of known policy interventions to help narrow the Latino education gap. The interventions Gándara lays out to address this crisis acknowledge the interconnectedness of homes, schools, and communities.
-Patricia
By: Patricia Gandara
The education achievement gap between Latinos — the nation's largest and fastest growing minority group — and most other students is enormous, and in many cases growing. In fact, Latinos in the United States have made almost no progress in college completion rates during the last three decades, according to Patricia Gándara in a new WestEd Policy Perspectives paper.
In The Latino Education Crisis: Rescuing the American Dream, Gándara, Co-Director of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, observes that, in 2008, Latinos were about half as likely as African Americans and a third as likely as Whites to obtain a college degree. Especially in states like California and Texas, where Latinos make up half of the public school students, this means a large segment of the population will be ill-equipped for the education-intensive careers of the 21st century.
Educational attainment is not the only problem these students face. Gándara notes that student achievement is highly correlated to household income and parental academic attainment — two other areas in which Latinos trail other groups.
In this paper, Gándara outlines a program of known policy interventions to help narrow the Latino education gap. The interventions Gándara lays out to address this crisis acknowledge the interconnectedness of homes, schools, and communities.
High-School Dropout Rate Is Cited as a Key Barrier to Obama's College-Completion Goal
Jennifer Gonzalez | The Chronicle of Higher Education
Washington
May 25, 2010
A senior Education Department official, speaking at a college-readiness forum here on Tuesday, singled out the nation's dropout rate among high-school students as a key obstacle to fulfilling President Obama's goal of putting the United States atop the world by 2020 in the proportion of residents with a college degree.
Gregory M. Darnieder, special assistant and senior adviser to Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the secretary's Initiative on College Access, said 30 percent of the nation's high-school students are not graduating. He said the graduation rate in a couple of states is so bad that the high schools there are considered "dropout factories," graduating less than 60 percent of their high-school students.
Four or five other states also have especially poor track records, with between 30 and 40 percent of their high schools graduating less than 60 percent of students, he said.
"This has definitely caught the president's attention," said Mr. Darnieder, who made his remarks during the College and Career Readiness Symposium held by McGraw-Hill Education and the Center for Digital Education. "He has challenged us as a country to get to a 60-percent postsecondary graduation rate by the year 2020."
Mr. Darnieder highlighted the various programs the Education Department is pursuing to strengthen elementary and secondary education and higher education. He also stressed that the department is tired of the blame game between schools and colleges, and even between the different grade levels in elementary and secondary education, over who is responsible for poor student performance.
Rather, he said, the department wants more cooperation between the sectors to plug gaps in the education pipeline. He said too many students graduate from high school and end up taking remedial classes in college. For example, nearly 60 percent of community-college students take at least one remedial course, according to a 2009 report by the Community College Research Center.
Washington
May 25, 2010
A senior Education Department official, speaking at a college-readiness forum here on Tuesday, singled out the nation's dropout rate among high-school students as a key obstacle to fulfilling President Obama's goal of putting the United States atop the world by 2020 in the proportion of residents with a college degree.
Gregory M. Darnieder, special assistant and senior adviser to Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the secretary's Initiative on College Access, said 30 percent of the nation's high-school students are not graduating. He said the graduation rate in a couple of states is so bad that the high schools there are considered "dropout factories," graduating less than 60 percent of their high-school students.
Four or five other states also have especially poor track records, with between 30 and 40 percent of their high schools graduating less than 60 percent of students, he said.
"This has definitely caught the president's attention," said Mr. Darnieder, who made his remarks during the College and Career Readiness Symposium held by McGraw-Hill Education and the Center for Digital Education. "He has challenged us as a country to get to a 60-percent postsecondary graduation rate by the year 2020."
Mr. Darnieder highlighted the various programs the Education Department is pursuing to strengthen elementary and secondary education and higher education. He also stressed that the department is tired of the blame game between schools and colleges, and even between the different grade levels in elementary and secondary education, over who is responsible for poor student performance.
Rather, he said, the department wants more cooperation between the sectors to plug gaps in the education pipeline. He said too many students graduate from high school and end up taking remedial classes in college. For example, nearly 60 percent of community-college students take at least one remedial course, according to a 2009 report by the Community College Research Center.
Advocates Question Whether Administration’s Proposals Will Leave Minority Institutions Behind
More efficient, less bureaucratic government spending is always high on everyone’s list of priorities. But an Obama administration plan to consolidate dozens of education, science and community-development programs of interest to communities of color, including minority-serving institutions, continues to draw concerns from the president’s allies and adversaries alike.
At issue, will consolidation—and increased competition for federal dollars—negate minority participation in such programs or otherwise leave communities, institutions and students of color behind?
“Our children’s future should not depend on whether their state or district receives a competitive grant,” says National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel, referring to Race to the Top, one of several Obama initiatives that use competition to drive reform.
The consolidation/competition proposal that has generated considerable attention is a plan to take separate National Science Foundation programs for historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and fold them into a new, larger program featuring partnerships between MSIs and majority institutions. Hispanic-serving institutions, which had sought their own separate program, also would become part of this mix.
At another agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the administration’s 2011 budget also calls for realignment of MSI programs.
HUD would create a $25 million University Community Fund to replace smaller separate funding streams targeted individually at MSIs. Under the current funding structure, HBCUs receive $9 million, while HSIs and tribal colleges have $6 million and $5 million, respectively.
“Funding would be allocated by competition to universities that show innovative community-development strategies that respond to local needs and build on past experience,” says HUD spokesman Lemar Wooley. “Perhaps the best way to think of the program changes are combining the programs under one name and encouraging partnership.”
As an example, Wooley says, an institution such as Howard University could work with American or Georgetown university on a project to change an area in the District of Columbia.
But MSI leaders have concerns, noting that the realignment would force HBCUs to compete with HSIs and tribal colleges for limited funding—all while trying to attract interest from majority-White institutions for partnerships.
“Fundamentally I think it’s the wrong approach to build capacity at MSIs,” says Dr. Antonio Flores, president of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. He notes there already is competition within the existing programs at NSF and HUD; as a result, not all applicants receive funding.
One concern with the administration’s proposals, says UNCF Government Affairs Director Edith Bartley, is implementation of newly consolidated initiatives—including whether MSIs have broad representation on grant review panels.
Changes to NSF and HUD programs are taking place as the Obama administration is placing an increased emphasis on consolidation and competition within federal education programs.
In its fiscal year 2011 education budget, for example, the administration proposed a consolidation of 38 existing programs into 11 new, streamlined activities—many of them with competitive grants.
“These things just keep cropping up in this budget, page after page after page of consolidations,” said Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., in a recent exchange with Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Cochran said he was particularly concerned that the consolidation plans included termination of Even Start, a federal family literacy program that provides formula funding to all states. In its place would be a $450 million new competitive grant for effective literacy practices, to be awarded by competitive grants. In his state, Cochran said, Mississippi would lose $830,000 previously allotted to Even Start by formula.
“Formula grants provide a reliable stream of funding to states and local districts,” he said.
The new emphasis on competition also is prompting criticism from some Democrats’ staunchest allies. NEA’s Van Roekel took particular aim at Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion competitive grant in the 2009 economic stimulus bill designed to promote K-12 innovation. More than 40 states applied for funding during the first round of competition, but the department says only two applications—from Delaware and Tennessee—qualified for funding right now. The department says it hopes to fund 10 to 15 additional states during the next Race competition.
In the meantime, Van Roekel says, many districts are considering major cuts to teacher slots. “Now is not the time for competition,” he says. “Competition is a luxury our states should have during a budget surplus, not when they are facing record deficits and slashing jobs.”
Instead of more competition, NEA is looking for more formula funding to shore up state and local education budgets, one other element of last year’s stimulus bill. The union is urging Congress to support a $23 billion education jobs bill it says would save 150,000 education jobs.
Duncan has countered that competitive funding is needed to drive reform. “Kids at risk are not well-served by the status quo, which is why we want to continue driving reform with competitive programs,” he said.
Consolidations could support innovation as well as efficiency, he said. “We are trying to do fewer things but do them in a world-class manner.”
At issue, will consolidation—and increased competition for federal dollars—negate minority participation in such programs or otherwise leave communities, institutions and students of color behind?
“Our children’s future should not depend on whether their state or district receives a competitive grant,” says National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel, referring to Race to the Top, one of several Obama initiatives that use competition to drive reform.
The consolidation/competition proposal that has generated considerable attention is a plan to take separate National Science Foundation programs for historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges and fold them into a new, larger program featuring partnerships between MSIs and majority institutions. Hispanic-serving institutions, which had sought their own separate program, also would become part of this mix.
At another agency, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the administration’s 2011 budget also calls for realignment of MSI programs.
HUD would create a $25 million University Community Fund to replace smaller separate funding streams targeted individually at MSIs. Under the current funding structure, HBCUs receive $9 million, while HSIs and tribal colleges have $6 million and $5 million, respectively.
“Funding would be allocated by competition to universities that show innovative community-development strategies that respond to local needs and build on past experience,” says HUD spokesman Lemar Wooley. “Perhaps the best way to think of the program changes are combining the programs under one name and encouraging partnership.”
As an example, Wooley says, an institution such as Howard University could work with American or Georgetown university on a project to change an area in the District of Columbia.
But MSI leaders have concerns, noting that the realignment would force HBCUs to compete with HSIs and tribal colleges for limited funding—all while trying to attract interest from majority-White institutions for partnerships.
“Fundamentally I think it’s the wrong approach to build capacity at MSIs,” says Dr. Antonio Flores, president of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. He notes there already is competition within the existing programs at NSF and HUD; as a result, not all applicants receive funding.
One concern with the administration’s proposals, says UNCF Government Affairs Director Edith Bartley, is implementation of newly consolidated initiatives—including whether MSIs have broad representation on grant review panels.
Changes to NSF and HUD programs are taking place as the Obama administration is placing an increased emphasis on consolidation and competition within federal education programs.
In its fiscal year 2011 education budget, for example, the administration proposed a consolidation of 38 existing programs into 11 new, streamlined activities—many of them with competitive grants.
“These things just keep cropping up in this budget, page after page after page of consolidations,” said Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., in a recent exchange with Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Cochran said he was particularly concerned that the consolidation plans included termination of Even Start, a federal family literacy program that provides formula funding to all states. In its place would be a $450 million new competitive grant for effective literacy practices, to be awarded by competitive grants. In his state, Cochran said, Mississippi would lose $830,000 previously allotted to Even Start by formula.
“Formula grants provide a reliable stream of funding to states and local districts,” he said.
The new emphasis on competition also is prompting criticism from some Democrats’ staunchest allies. NEA’s Van Roekel took particular aim at Race to the Top, a $4.3 billion competitive grant in the 2009 economic stimulus bill designed to promote K-12 innovation. More than 40 states applied for funding during the first round of competition, but the department says only two applications—from Delaware and Tennessee—qualified for funding right now. The department says it hopes to fund 10 to 15 additional states during the next Race competition.
In the meantime, Van Roekel says, many districts are considering major cuts to teacher slots. “Now is not the time for competition,” he says. “Competition is a luxury our states should have during a budget surplus, not when they are facing record deficits and slashing jobs.”
Instead of more competition, NEA is looking for more formula funding to shore up state and local education budgets, one other element of last year’s stimulus bill. The union is urging Congress to support a $23 billion education jobs bill it says would save 150,000 education jobs.
Duncan has countered that competitive funding is needed to drive reform. “Kids at risk are not well-served by the status quo, which is why we want to continue driving reform with competitive programs,” he said.
Consolidations could support innovation as well as efficiency, he said. “We are trying to do fewer things but do them in a world-class manner.”
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Restoring Our Schools
Restoring Our Schools
Linda Darling-Hammond | May 27, 2010
This article is adapted from Linda Darling-Hammond's The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (Teachers College Press).
In 1989 President George H.W. Bush and the nation's governors convened to establish a set of six national education goals to be accomplished by the year 2000. Among these were to ensure that all students enter school healthy and ready to learn, that at least 90 percent of students graduate from high school, that all students are competent in the academic disciplines and that the United States ranks "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement."
In 2010 none of these goals have been accomplished, and we are further away from achieving most of them than we were two decades ago. More children live in poverty and lack healthcare; the high school graduation rate has slipped below 70 percent; the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988; and US performance on international tests has continued to drop.
Far from being first in the world in math and science, the United States ranked thirty-fifth out of the top forty countries in math—right between Azerbaijan and Croatia—when the most recent Programme in International Student Assessment tests were given in 2006. In science, the United States ranked twenty-ninth out of forty, sandwiched between Latvia and Lithuania. These rankings and scores had dropped from 2000, when the No Child Left Behind Act was introduced. While the United States performs closer to international averages in reading, its scores also dropped on the international reading tests during the NCLB era.
Declines on international tests and a flattening of growth on the National Assessment of Educational Progress occurred even as state test scores used for NCLB were driven upward. This is partly because the international assessments demand more advanced analysis than do most US tests. They require students to weigh and balance evidence, apply what they know to new problems and explain and defend their answers. These higher-order skills are emphasized in other nations' curriculums and assessment systems but have been discouraged by the kind of lower-level multiple-choice testing favored by NCLB.
In addition, inequality has an enormous influence on US performance. White and Asian students score just above the average for the European OECD nations in each subject area, but African-American and Hispanic students score so much lower that the national average plummets to the bottom tier. The United States is also among the nations where socioeconomic background most affects student outcomes. This is because of greater income inequality and because the United States spends much more educating affluent children than poor children, with wealthy suburbs often spending twice what central cities do, and three times what poor rural areas can afford.
Both segregation of schools and inequality in funding have increased in many states over the past two decades, leaving a growing share of African-American and Hispanic students in highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities. Thus, the poor US standing is substantially a product of unequal access to the kind of intellectually challenging learning measured on these international assessments.
During his historic campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama described our large race- and class-based achievement gaps as "morally unacceptable and economically untenable." At a time when three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require postsecondary education, our college participation rates have slipped from first in the world to seventeenth. While more than half of young people are becoming college graduates in many European and Asian nations, fewer than 40 percent of American young people—and fewer than 20 percent of African-American and Hispanic youth—receive a college degree.
In minority communities, a greater number join the growing ranks of inmates in what the New York Times recently dubbed our "prison nation," which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. With 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the world's inmates, at a cost of untold human tragedy and more than $50 billion annually to taxpayers. In an economy that requires knowledge and skills for employment and success, most inmates are high school dropouts and functionally illiterate—with literacy skills below those demanded by the labor market. States that would not spend $10,000 a year to ensure adequate education for children of color in under-resourced schools later spend more than $30,000 a year to keep them in jail.
Since the 1980s, national investments have tipped heavily toward incarceration rather than education.
As the number of prisoners has quadrupled since 1980, state budgets for corrections have grown by more than 900 percent, three times faster than funds for education. With prisons and education competing for limited funds, the strong relationship between under-education, unemployment and incarceration creates a vicious cycle. Today, at least five states spend more on corrections than they spend on public colleges and universities, and some, like California, are decreasing slots in their higher education systems, as other nations are aggressively increasing theirs.
Also unlike high-achieving nations, we have failed to invest in the critical components of a high-quality education system. While we have been busy setting goals and targets for public schools and punishing the schools that fail to meet them, we have not invested in a highly trained, well-supported teaching force for all communities, as other nations have; we have not scaled up successful school designs so that they are sustained and widely available; and we have not pointed our schools at the critical higher-order thinking and performance skills needed in the twenty-first century. Some states are notable exceptions, but we have not, as a nation, undertaken the systemic reforms needed to maintain the standing we held forty years ago as the world's unquestioned educational leader.
A Glimpse of What High-Achieving Nations Are Doing
Other nations have been transforming their school systems to meet the new demands of today's world. They are expanding educational access to more and more of their people, and they are revising curriculums, instruction and assessments to support the more complex knowledge and skills needed in the twenty-first century. Starting in the 1980s, for example, Finland dismantled the rigid tracking system that had allocated differential access to knowledge to its young people and eliminated the state-mandated testing system that was used for this purpose, replacing them with highly trained teachers educated in newly overhauled schools of education, along with curriculums and assessments focused on problem-solving, creativity and independent learning. These changes have propelled achievement to the top of the international rankings and closed what was once a large, intractable achievement gap.
In the space of one generation, South Korea has transformed itself from a nation that educated less than a quarter of its citizens through high school to one that graduates more than 95 percent from high school and ranks third in college-educated adults, with most young people now completing postsecondary education. Egalitarian access to schools and a common curriculum, coupled with investments in well-prepared teachers, have been part of the national strategy there as well.
Similarly, starting in the 1970s, Singapore began to transform itself from a collection of fishing villages into an economic powerhouse by building an education system that would assure every student access to strong teaching, an inquiry curriculum and cutting-edge technology. In 2003, Singapore's fourth and eighth grade students scored first in the world in math and science on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study assessments. When children leave their tiny, spare apartments in high-rises throughout the nation, they arrive at beautiful, airy school buildings where student artwork, papers, projects and awards are displayed throughout; libraries and classrooms are well stocked; instructional technology is plentiful; and teachers are well trained and well supported.
A visit to Nan Chiau Primary School, for example, finds fourth and fifth graders eagerly displaying the science projects they have designed and conducted in an "experience, investigate and create" cycle that is repeated throughout the year. Students are delighted to show visitors their "innovation walk," displaying student-developed projects from many subject areas lining a long corridor. Students study plants, animals and insects in the school's eco-garden; they run their own recycling center; they write and edit scripts for the Internet radio program they produce; and they use handheld computers to play games and create mathematical models that develop their quantitative abilities. Teachers, meanwhile, engage in research sponsored by the government to evaluate and continually improve their teaching.
Certainly there are schools that look like this in the United States. But they are not the norm. What distinguishes systems like Singapore's is that this quality of education—aimed at empowering students to use their knowledge in inventive ways—is replicated throughout the entire nation of 4.8 million, which is about the size of Kentucky, the median US state. Furthermore, Singapore is not alone. The pace at which many nations in Asia and Europe are pouring resources into forward-looking systems that educate all their citizens to much higher levels is astonishing. And the growing gap between the United States and these nations—particularly in our most underfunded schools—is equally dramatic.
Contrast the picture of a typical school in Singapore with the description of a California school, from a lawsuit filed recently on behalf of low-income students of color in schools like it throughout the state, a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education:
At Luther Burbank, students cannot take textbooks home for homework in any core subject because their teachers have enough textbooks for use in class only.... For homework, students must take home photocopied pages, with no accompanying text for guidance or reference, when and if their teachers have enough paper to use to make homework copies.... Luther Burbank is infested with vermin and roaches and students routinely see mice in their classrooms. One dead rodent has remained, decomposing, in a corner in the gymnasium since the beginning of the school year.... The school library is rarely open, has no librarian, and has not recently been updated. The latest version of the encyclopedia in the library was published in approximately 1988.... Luther Burbank classrooms do not have computers. Computer instruction and research skills are not, therefore, part of Luther Burbank students' regular instruction.... The school no longer offers any art classes for budgetary reasons.... Ceiling tiles are missing and cracked in the school gym, and school children are afraid to play...in the gym because they worry that more ceiling tiles will fall on them during their games.... The school has no air conditioning. On hot days classroom temperatures climb into the 90s. The school heating system does not work well. In winter, children often wear coats, hats, and gloves during class to keep warm.... Eleven of the 35 teachers at Luther Burbank have not yet obtained full, non-emergency teaching credentials, and 17 of the 35 teachers only began teaching at Luther Burbank this school year.
Under these kinds of circumstances, when the school lacks the rudiments needed to focus on the quality of learning and teaching or the development of higher-order thinking, it is impossible even to begin to talk about developing the deep knowledge and complex skills required of young people in today's and tomorrow's society.
Learning From the Past
These declines are not inevitable. We have made strong headway on educational achievement in the past and can do so again. It is easy to forget that during the years following Brown v. Board of Education, when desegregation and school finance reform efforts were launched, and when the Great Society's War on Poverty increased investments in poor communities, substantial gains were made in equalizing educational inputs and outcomes. Childhood poverty was reduced to levels almost half of what they are today. Investments were made in desegregation, magnet schools, community schools, pipelines of well-qualified teachers, school funding reforms and higher education assistance.
These investments paid off in measurable ways. For a brief period in the mid-'70s, black and Hispanic students were attending college at rates comparable with whites, the only time this has happened before or since. By the mid-1970s, urban schools were spending as much as suburban schools, and paying their teachers as well; perennial teacher shortages had nearly ended; and gaps in educational attainment had closed substantially. Federally funded curriculum investments transformed teaching in many schools. Innovative schools flourished, especially in the cities. Large gains in black students' performance throughout the 1970s and early '80s cut the literacy achievement gap by nearly half in just fifteen years. Had this rate of progress continued, the achievement gap would have been closed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, that did not occur. While nations that today are high-achieving built on the progressive reforms they launched in the 1970s, the United States backpedaled in the Reagan years, cutting the education budget in half, ending most aid to cities and most supports for teacher recruitment and training while also slashing health and human services budgets and shifting costs to the states. This caused states to reduce equalization aid to schools in order to pick up other social service costs.
Conservatives introduced a new theory of reform focused on outcomes rather than inputs—that is, high-stakes testing without investing—which drove most policy initiatives. The situation in many urban and rural schools deteriorated over the ensuing decades. Drops in real per-pupil expenditures accompanied tax cuts and growing enrollments. Meanwhile, student needs grew with immigration, concentrated poverty and homelessness, and growing numbers of students requiring second-language instruction and special education services. Although some federal support to high-need schools and districts was restored during the 1990s, it was not enough to recoup the earlier losses, and after 2000 inequality increased once again.
What's to Be Done?
Although some of America's schools are among the best in the world, too many have been neglected in the more than twenty years since the clarion call for school reform was sounded in the 1980s. Clearly we need more than a new set of national goals to mobilize a dramatically more successful educational system. We also need more than pilot projects, demonstrations, innovations and other partial solutions. We need to take the education of poor children as seriously as we take the education of the rich, and we need to create systems that routinely guarantee all the elements of educational investment to all children.
What would this require? As in high- and equitably achieving nations, it would require strong investments in children's welfare—adequate healthcare, housing and food security, so that children can come to school each day ready to learn; high-quality preschool to close achievement gaps that already exist when children enter kindergarten; equitably funded schools that provide quality educators and learning materials, which are the central resources for learning; a system that ensures that teachers and leaders in every community are extremely well prepared and are supported to be effective on the job; standards, curriculums and assessments focused on twenty-first-century learning goals; and schools organized for in-depth student and teacher learning and equipped to address children's social needs, as the community schools movement has done [see David L. Kirp, "Cradle to College," page 26].
Thus far, the Obama administration has taken affirmative steps on a portion of this agenda. Healthcare for children has been secured in the healthcare reform bill, and investments in early childhood education have been increased, although thus far with more emphasis on expanding access than investing in high-quality teaching. The president has increased federal funding for college, which had previously dropped to a level that precluded college-going for many qualified young people who couldn't afford it.
The administration's stimulus package, which made $100 billion available for schools, has stanched some of the acute hemorrhaging of resources and staff that would otherwise have occurred last year as a result of the recession. And the president has signaled his interest in more intellectually thoughtful assessments that "don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test but whether they possess twenty-first-century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity." This concern will be pursued through competitive grants to state consortiums that develop new assessments linked to new common core standards of learning in math and English.
The most touted aspects of the Race to the Top initiative, however, focus on peripheral issues rather than investments that have characterized major improvements in education systems at home and abroad. No nation has become high-achieving by sanctioning schools based on test-score targets and closing those that serve the neediest students without providing adequate resources and quality teaching. The implementation of Race to the Top has not required states to equalize funding to underresourced schools or even to maintain their existing commitments to these schools, many of which have had to slash budgets deeply, laying off tens of thousands of teachers, raising class size to more than forty in some cases and cutting successful programs.
In this context, schools serving high-need students are called on to raise achievement or face closure, despite evidence from the Consortium on Chicago School Research that closing more than 100 low-performing schools in that city and replacing them did not result in higher achievement.
Race to the Top requires that states expand charters but fails to assure quality and ensure access, despite evidence from the largest national study to date (conducted at Stanford University's Hoover Institution) that charter schools more frequently underperform than outperform their counterparts serving similar students; evidence from a UCLA study indicating that charters exacerbate segregation; and evidence from many studies that charters serve significantly fewer special education students and English-language learners. Some excellent charters do exist, along with excellent schools run by regular public school districts, but the law does not aim to spread excellence so much as it aims to change governance. Nations that are focused on spreading quality—like Singapore, Finland and Canada, for example—have developed strategies for schools to share successful practices through networks, creating an engine for ongoing improvement for the system as a whole.
Rather than establishing a framework for dramatically improving the knowledge, skills and equitable distribution of teachers, as high-achieving nations have done, Race to the Top encourages states to expand alternative routes to certification and to reduce coursework for prospective teachers, despite findings that hiring teachers from low-coursework alternatives reduces student achievement. Further, Race to the Top largely misses the critical investments needed to prepare and distribute excellent teachers and school leaders. Pay bonuses alone cannot succeed in recruiting and retaining teachers without efforts to create competitive, equitable salaries and working conditions. Removing low-performing teachers cannot improve teaching or student outcomes without strategies to ensure a stable supply of highly effective teachers who stay in their communities.
Teacher evaluation needs to become more rigorous, and rewards for effectiveness should be encouraged, but these strategies can succeed only if they are embedded in a system of universal high-quality preparation, mentoring and support—including adequately resourced and well-designed schools that allow and enable good practice. Rather than short-term incentives and quick fixes, federal policy should focus on building capacity across the entire system.
Achieving these conditions will require as much federal attention to opportunity-to-learn standards as to assessments of academic progress, and greater equalization of federal funding across states. It will require incentives for states to provide comparable funding to students, adjusted for pupil needs and costs of living, as well as incentives and information that can steer spending productively to maximize the likelihood of student success. Finally, an equitable and adequate system will need to address the supply of well-prepared educators—the most fundamental of all resources—by building an infrastructure that ensures high-quality preparation for all educators and ensures that well-trained teachers are available to all students in all communities.
While the administration's blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (whose most recent iteration was No Child Left Behind) carries some hints of such strategies, its framework still envisions competition and sanctions as the primary drivers of reform rather than capacity-building and strategic investments. If this remains the primary frame for federal and state policy, it is unlikely that we will rebuild good schools in every community.
To meet twenty-first-century demands, the United States needs to move beyond a collection of disparate and shifting reform initiatives to a thoughtful, well-organized and well-supported set of policies that will enable young people to thrive in the new world they are entering. We must also finally make good on the American promise to make education available to all on equal terms, so that every member of this society can realize a productive life and contribute to the greater welfare. This is the challenge that Obama pledged to take on, and the one we should hope he will vigorously pursue.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/restoring-our-schools
Linda Darling-Hammond | May 27, 2010
This article is adapted from Linda Darling-Hammond's The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (Teachers College Press).
In 1989 President George H.W. Bush and the nation's governors convened to establish a set of six national education goals to be accomplished by the year 2000. Among these were to ensure that all students enter school healthy and ready to learn, that at least 90 percent of students graduate from high school, that all students are competent in the academic disciplines and that the United States ranks "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement."
In 2010 none of these goals have been accomplished, and we are further away from achieving most of them than we were two decades ago. More children live in poverty and lack healthcare; the high school graduation rate has slipped below 70 percent; the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988; and US performance on international tests has continued to drop.
Far from being first in the world in math and science, the United States ranked thirty-fifth out of the top forty countries in math—right between Azerbaijan and Croatia—when the most recent Programme in International Student Assessment tests were given in 2006. In science, the United States ranked twenty-ninth out of forty, sandwiched between Latvia and Lithuania. These rankings and scores had dropped from 2000, when the No Child Left Behind Act was introduced. While the United States performs closer to international averages in reading, its scores also dropped on the international reading tests during the NCLB era.
Declines on international tests and a flattening of growth on the National Assessment of Educational Progress occurred even as state test scores used for NCLB were driven upward. This is partly because the international assessments demand more advanced analysis than do most US tests. They require students to weigh and balance evidence, apply what they know to new problems and explain and defend their answers. These higher-order skills are emphasized in other nations' curriculums and assessment systems but have been discouraged by the kind of lower-level multiple-choice testing favored by NCLB.
In addition, inequality has an enormous influence on US performance. White and Asian students score just above the average for the European OECD nations in each subject area, but African-American and Hispanic students score so much lower that the national average plummets to the bottom tier. The United States is also among the nations where socioeconomic background most affects student outcomes. This is because of greater income inequality and because the United States spends much more educating affluent children than poor children, with wealthy suburbs often spending twice what central cities do, and three times what poor rural areas can afford.
Both segregation of schools and inequality in funding have increased in many states over the past two decades, leaving a growing share of African-American and Hispanic students in highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities. Thus, the poor US standing is substantially a product of unequal access to the kind of intellectually challenging learning measured on these international assessments.
During his historic campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama described our large race- and class-based achievement gaps as "morally unacceptable and economically untenable." At a time when three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require postsecondary education, our college participation rates have slipped from first in the world to seventeenth. While more than half of young people are becoming college graduates in many European and Asian nations, fewer than 40 percent of American young people—and fewer than 20 percent of African-American and Hispanic youth—receive a college degree.
In minority communities, a greater number join the growing ranks of inmates in what the New York Times recently dubbed our "prison nation," which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. With 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the world's inmates, at a cost of untold human tragedy and more than $50 billion annually to taxpayers. In an economy that requires knowledge and skills for employment and success, most inmates are high school dropouts and functionally illiterate—with literacy skills below those demanded by the labor market. States that would not spend $10,000 a year to ensure adequate education for children of color in under-resourced schools later spend more than $30,000 a year to keep them in jail.
Since the 1980s, national investments have tipped heavily toward incarceration rather than education.
As the number of prisoners has quadrupled since 1980, state budgets for corrections have grown by more than 900 percent, three times faster than funds for education. With prisons and education competing for limited funds, the strong relationship between under-education, unemployment and incarceration creates a vicious cycle. Today, at least five states spend more on corrections than they spend on public colleges and universities, and some, like California, are decreasing slots in their higher education systems, as other nations are aggressively increasing theirs.
Also unlike high-achieving nations, we have failed to invest in the critical components of a high-quality education system. While we have been busy setting goals and targets for public schools and punishing the schools that fail to meet them, we have not invested in a highly trained, well-supported teaching force for all communities, as other nations have; we have not scaled up successful school designs so that they are sustained and widely available; and we have not pointed our schools at the critical higher-order thinking and performance skills needed in the twenty-first century. Some states are notable exceptions, but we have not, as a nation, undertaken the systemic reforms needed to maintain the standing we held forty years ago as the world's unquestioned educational leader.
A Glimpse of What High-Achieving Nations Are Doing
Other nations have been transforming their school systems to meet the new demands of today's world. They are expanding educational access to more and more of their people, and they are revising curriculums, instruction and assessments to support the more complex knowledge and skills needed in the twenty-first century. Starting in the 1980s, for example, Finland dismantled the rigid tracking system that had allocated differential access to knowledge to its young people and eliminated the state-mandated testing system that was used for this purpose, replacing them with highly trained teachers educated in newly overhauled schools of education, along with curriculums and assessments focused on problem-solving, creativity and independent learning. These changes have propelled achievement to the top of the international rankings and closed what was once a large, intractable achievement gap.
In the space of one generation, South Korea has transformed itself from a nation that educated less than a quarter of its citizens through high school to one that graduates more than 95 percent from high school and ranks third in college-educated adults, with most young people now completing postsecondary education. Egalitarian access to schools and a common curriculum, coupled with investments in well-prepared teachers, have been part of the national strategy there as well.
Similarly, starting in the 1970s, Singapore began to transform itself from a collection of fishing villages into an economic powerhouse by building an education system that would assure every student access to strong teaching, an inquiry curriculum and cutting-edge technology. In 2003, Singapore's fourth and eighth grade students scored first in the world in math and science on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study assessments. When children leave their tiny, spare apartments in high-rises throughout the nation, they arrive at beautiful, airy school buildings where student artwork, papers, projects and awards are displayed throughout; libraries and classrooms are well stocked; instructional technology is plentiful; and teachers are well trained and well supported.
A visit to Nan Chiau Primary School, for example, finds fourth and fifth graders eagerly displaying the science projects they have designed and conducted in an "experience, investigate and create" cycle that is repeated throughout the year. Students are delighted to show visitors their "innovation walk," displaying student-developed projects from many subject areas lining a long corridor. Students study plants, animals and insects in the school's eco-garden; they run their own recycling center; they write and edit scripts for the Internet radio program they produce; and they use handheld computers to play games and create mathematical models that develop their quantitative abilities. Teachers, meanwhile, engage in research sponsored by the government to evaluate and continually improve their teaching.
Certainly there are schools that look like this in the United States. But they are not the norm. What distinguishes systems like Singapore's is that this quality of education—aimed at empowering students to use their knowledge in inventive ways—is replicated throughout the entire nation of 4.8 million, which is about the size of Kentucky, the median US state. Furthermore, Singapore is not alone. The pace at which many nations in Asia and Europe are pouring resources into forward-looking systems that educate all their citizens to much higher levels is astonishing. And the growing gap between the United States and these nations—particularly in our most underfunded schools—is equally dramatic.
Contrast the picture of a typical school in Singapore with the description of a California school, from a lawsuit filed recently on behalf of low-income students of color in schools like it throughout the state, a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education:
At Luther Burbank, students cannot take textbooks home for homework in any core subject because their teachers have enough textbooks for use in class only.... For homework, students must take home photocopied pages, with no accompanying text for guidance or reference, when and if their teachers have enough paper to use to make homework copies.... Luther Burbank is infested with vermin and roaches and students routinely see mice in their classrooms. One dead rodent has remained, decomposing, in a corner in the gymnasium since the beginning of the school year.... The school library is rarely open, has no librarian, and has not recently been updated. The latest version of the encyclopedia in the library was published in approximately 1988.... Luther Burbank classrooms do not have computers. Computer instruction and research skills are not, therefore, part of Luther Burbank students' regular instruction.... The school no longer offers any art classes for budgetary reasons.... Ceiling tiles are missing and cracked in the school gym, and school children are afraid to play...in the gym because they worry that more ceiling tiles will fall on them during their games.... The school has no air conditioning. On hot days classroom temperatures climb into the 90s. The school heating system does not work well. In winter, children often wear coats, hats, and gloves during class to keep warm.... Eleven of the 35 teachers at Luther Burbank have not yet obtained full, non-emergency teaching credentials, and 17 of the 35 teachers only began teaching at Luther Burbank this school year.
Under these kinds of circumstances, when the school lacks the rudiments needed to focus on the quality of learning and teaching or the development of higher-order thinking, it is impossible even to begin to talk about developing the deep knowledge and complex skills required of young people in today's and tomorrow's society.
Learning From the Past
These declines are not inevitable. We have made strong headway on educational achievement in the past and can do so again. It is easy to forget that during the years following Brown v. Board of Education, when desegregation and school finance reform efforts were launched, and when the Great Society's War on Poverty increased investments in poor communities, substantial gains were made in equalizing educational inputs and outcomes. Childhood poverty was reduced to levels almost half of what they are today. Investments were made in desegregation, magnet schools, community schools, pipelines of well-qualified teachers, school funding reforms and higher education assistance.
These investments paid off in measurable ways. For a brief period in the mid-'70s, black and Hispanic students were attending college at rates comparable with whites, the only time this has happened before or since. By the mid-1970s, urban schools were spending as much as suburban schools, and paying their teachers as well; perennial teacher shortages had nearly ended; and gaps in educational attainment had closed substantially. Federally funded curriculum investments transformed teaching in many schools. Innovative schools flourished, especially in the cities. Large gains in black students' performance throughout the 1970s and early '80s cut the literacy achievement gap by nearly half in just fifteen years. Had this rate of progress continued, the achievement gap would have been closed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, that did not occur. While nations that today are high-achieving built on the progressive reforms they launched in the 1970s, the United States backpedaled in the Reagan years, cutting the education budget in half, ending most aid to cities and most supports for teacher recruitment and training while also slashing health and human services budgets and shifting costs to the states. This caused states to reduce equalization aid to schools in order to pick up other social service costs.
Conservatives introduced a new theory of reform focused on outcomes rather than inputs—that is, high-stakes testing without investing—which drove most policy initiatives. The situation in many urban and rural schools deteriorated over the ensuing decades. Drops in real per-pupil expenditures accompanied tax cuts and growing enrollments. Meanwhile, student needs grew with immigration, concentrated poverty and homelessness, and growing numbers of students requiring second-language instruction and special education services. Although some federal support to high-need schools and districts was restored during the 1990s, it was not enough to recoup the earlier losses, and after 2000 inequality increased once again.
What's to Be Done?
Although some of America's schools are among the best in the world, too many have been neglected in the more than twenty years since the clarion call for school reform was sounded in the 1980s. Clearly we need more than a new set of national goals to mobilize a dramatically more successful educational system. We also need more than pilot projects, demonstrations, innovations and other partial solutions. We need to take the education of poor children as seriously as we take the education of the rich, and we need to create systems that routinely guarantee all the elements of educational investment to all children.
What would this require? As in high- and equitably achieving nations, it would require strong investments in children's welfare—adequate healthcare, housing and food security, so that children can come to school each day ready to learn; high-quality preschool to close achievement gaps that already exist when children enter kindergarten; equitably funded schools that provide quality educators and learning materials, which are the central resources for learning; a system that ensures that teachers and leaders in every community are extremely well prepared and are supported to be effective on the job; standards, curriculums and assessments focused on twenty-first-century learning goals; and schools organized for in-depth student and teacher learning and equipped to address children's social needs, as the community schools movement has done [see David L. Kirp, "Cradle to College," page 26].
Thus far, the Obama administration has taken affirmative steps on a portion of this agenda. Healthcare for children has been secured in the healthcare reform bill, and investments in early childhood education have been increased, although thus far with more emphasis on expanding access than investing in high-quality teaching. The president has increased federal funding for college, which had previously dropped to a level that precluded college-going for many qualified young people who couldn't afford it.
The administration's stimulus package, which made $100 billion available for schools, has stanched some of the acute hemorrhaging of resources and staff that would otherwise have occurred last year as a result of the recession. And the president has signaled his interest in more intellectually thoughtful assessments that "don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test but whether they possess twenty-first-century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity." This concern will be pursued through competitive grants to state consortiums that develop new assessments linked to new common core standards of learning in math and English.
The most touted aspects of the Race to the Top initiative, however, focus on peripheral issues rather than investments that have characterized major improvements in education systems at home and abroad. No nation has become high-achieving by sanctioning schools based on test-score targets and closing those that serve the neediest students without providing adequate resources and quality teaching. The implementation of Race to the Top has not required states to equalize funding to underresourced schools or even to maintain their existing commitments to these schools, many of which have had to slash budgets deeply, laying off tens of thousands of teachers, raising class size to more than forty in some cases and cutting successful programs.
In this context, schools serving high-need students are called on to raise achievement or face closure, despite evidence from the Consortium on Chicago School Research that closing more than 100 low-performing schools in that city and replacing them did not result in higher achievement.
Race to the Top requires that states expand charters but fails to assure quality and ensure access, despite evidence from the largest national study to date (conducted at Stanford University's Hoover Institution) that charter schools more frequently underperform than outperform their counterparts serving similar students; evidence from a UCLA study indicating that charters exacerbate segregation; and evidence from many studies that charters serve significantly fewer special education students and English-language learners. Some excellent charters do exist, along with excellent schools run by regular public school districts, but the law does not aim to spread excellence so much as it aims to change governance. Nations that are focused on spreading quality—like Singapore, Finland and Canada, for example—have developed strategies for schools to share successful practices through networks, creating an engine for ongoing improvement for the system as a whole.
Rather than establishing a framework for dramatically improving the knowledge, skills and equitable distribution of teachers, as high-achieving nations have done, Race to the Top encourages states to expand alternative routes to certification and to reduce coursework for prospective teachers, despite findings that hiring teachers from low-coursework alternatives reduces student achievement. Further, Race to the Top largely misses the critical investments needed to prepare and distribute excellent teachers and school leaders. Pay bonuses alone cannot succeed in recruiting and retaining teachers without efforts to create competitive, equitable salaries and working conditions. Removing low-performing teachers cannot improve teaching or student outcomes without strategies to ensure a stable supply of highly effective teachers who stay in their communities.
Teacher evaluation needs to become more rigorous, and rewards for effectiveness should be encouraged, but these strategies can succeed only if they are embedded in a system of universal high-quality preparation, mentoring and support—including adequately resourced and well-designed schools that allow and enable good practice. Rather than short-term incentives and quick fixes, federal policy should focus on building capacity across the entire system.
Achieving these conditions will require as much federal attention to opportunity-to-learn standards as to assessments of academic progress, and greater equalization of federal funding across states. It will require incentives for states to provide comparable funding to students, adjusted for pupil needs and costs of living, as well as incentives and information that can steer spending productively to maximize the likelihood of student success. Finally, an equitable and adequate system will need to address the supply of well-prepared educators—the most fundamental of all resources—by building an infrastructure that ensures high-quality preparation for all educators and ensures that well-trained teachers are available to all students in all communities.
While the administration's blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (whose most recent iteration was No Child Left Behind) carries some hints of such strategies, its framework still envisions competition and sanctions as the primary drivers of reform rather than capacity-building and strategic investments. If this remains the primary frame for federal and state policy, it is unlikely that we will rebuild good schools in every community.
To meet twenty-first-century demands, the United States needs to move beyond a collection of disparate and shifting reform initiatives to a thoughtful, well-organized and well-supported set of policies that will enable young people to thrive in the new world they are entering. We must also finally make good on the American promise to make education available to all on equal terms, so that every member of this society can realize a productive life and contribute to the greater welfare. This is the challenge that Obama pledged to take on, and the one we should hope he will vigorously pursue.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/restoring-our-schools
A New Vision of School Reform
A New Vision of School Reform
Pedro Noguera | May 27, 2010
Pedro Noguera is the guest editor of this week's special issue on education in THE NATION
Before his election President Obama carved out what many regarded as a more progressive and enlightened position on education reform. Recognizing that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had become widely unpopular because of its overemphasis on standardized tests, he declared, "Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test." He pledged to lead the nation in a different direction.
We are still waiting for a change of course. Since the election, the president and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have adopted policies that, to the chagrin of many of their supporters, have had far more in common with the previous administration than expected. Market-based reforms like performance pay for teachers, the excessive emphasis on charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools and the distribution of federal funds—once treated as entitlements to compensate for poverty—through competitive grants all represent a disturbing continuity with the policies of the past. The Obama administration gets some credit for not ignoring education despite being preoccupied with several formidable challenges. But the new initiatives do not reflect the change many hoped Obama would deliver.
For those who worked hard to help Barack Obama win the election, this is a sad and difficult realization, but there is still time to change the focus and direction of the administration's education policies. Decisive measures and bold reforms are needed to address the many serious challenges confronting the nation's schools and to recover from eight years of misguided policies. As state governments enact severe cuts to education budgets and lay off teachers on a scale not seen in more than thirty years, it will be equally important for the federal government to restore our commitment to public education. It must find ways to target support to schools in impoverished communities and, where possible, to use federal funds to compensate for the loss of state and local money.
However, change in education cannot be implemented on a piecemeal basis. The administration needs a new vision, one rooted in the recognition that schools must provide equal opportunity for all children to learn if the schools are to fulfill their vital role as the cornerstone of our democracy. For this to happen, the administration must understand what was wrong with NCLB and the policies pursued by the Bush administration, and it must direct funds where change and innovation are most needed.
To begin with, Obama and Duncan would do well to exercise better judgment in the language they choose and the approach they take in addressing the politics of education. Duncan's assertion that Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans" because it gave the city a chance to rebuild and improve its failing public schools was particularly callous and misguided, given that the educational needs of many children in that devastated city still have not been addressed. It also wasn't wise for Duncan to describe the mass firing of teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island, as "courageous," especially given that there is no reserve supply of highly qualified teachers waiting for their chance to replace those who have been dismissed. Furthermore, Obama and Duncan's emphasis on narrowly framed pay-for-performance schemes that punish and reward teachers is insensitive to the needs of schools plagued by high failure rates. Educators were an important part of
Obama's base in the 2008 election; although this does not mean the administration should avoid shaking things up or refrain from adopting reforms that may anger some union locals, it makes no sense to inflame them with careless and accusatory rhetoric.
Second, while there is ample evidence that major changes and a new direction are needed, this will require more than a rebranding of No Child Left Behind. Rather than launch another set of Bush-type reforms (e.g., academic standards for preschools) or distributing funds through a competitive process that leaves out most states at a time when funding is scarce (e.g., Race to the Top), the administration must comprehend why the policies of the Bush years did not produce greater success. From the exceedingly high dropout rates in many urban school districts (more than 50 percent in cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis) to the hundreds of chronically underperforming schools that Duncan claims need to be shut down, signs of failure abound. Figuring out why NCLB failed to do more to improve schools in high-poverty communities requires rejecting simplistic approaches like those being taken by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, who have shut down ninety-one failing schools in the past eight years. It is important to note that these schools failed on Bloomberg and Klein's watch and did not respond to their reforms. Closing troubled schools may sound like decisive action, but it does not amount to a reform strategy. When policy-makers are unclear about why their policies do not result in improvement, and are even less clear about what must be done differently to prevent failure in the future, closing schools is little more than a punitive shell game.
Third, the need for change is clear, but history has shown that change in public education does not come easily or quickly. The Obama administration deserves credit for its willingness to provide funds to promote reform, but it is far too impressed with quick fixes like mayoral control of urban districts and charter schools. Over the past forty years studies have shown that education policy must be devised in concert with health reform, poverty alleviation initiatives and economic development in order to address the roots of failure in the most depressed areas. From crime and unemployment to teen pregnancy and even racism, education—or the lack thereof—is implicated in many of our nation's social and economic problems. Education can be part of the solution to these and many other problems if reforms are designed and implemented in concert with key constituents—parents, teachers, local leaders and students—and with an understanding of how they must be coordinated with other aspects of social policy.
The government can play an important role in prodding the nation's schools to improve. It can use federal dollars to provide financial incentives for teachers with a track record of effectiveness to work in disadvantaged schools and communities. It can enforce civil rights laws and challenge school districts that have become resegregated thanks to policies that track students based on dubious measures of ability or that use special education, dead-end programs for English-language learners and punitive discipline practices to limit the access of minority students to academic opportunities. And the government can designate the best schools—charters and traditional public schools—as professional development training laboratories where educators from less successful schools can observe and learn about "best practices" in teaching and educational intervention.
Even without the support of the federal government there have been a number of reforms implemented at the local level that show considerable promise. For example, in Birmingham, Alabama, the courts have required schools to address the underlying causes of discipline problems and mandated that they stop arresting students for minor behavior infractions. This has resulted in a remarkable reduction in juvenile incarceration rates in the past two years. As David L. Kirp describes in this issue, there are a growing number of schools in cities like Portland, Chicago and New York that function as community service centers and are providing children with nourishing meals, after-school enrichment programs and regular exercise. Such schools are also producing significant increases in academic achievement and improved health for the children they serve. Innovative partnerships between schools, universities and biotech industries in the San Francisco Bay Area have created pathways to well-paid jobs in a sector of the economy that had formerly been inaccessible to urban youth. And school/university partnerships in Chicago, Philadelphia and Worcester, Massachusetts, have created exemplary schools where gaps in achievement associated with students' race and class have begun to disappear.
Were the administration to embrace a broader and bolder vision of reform and devise policies to back it up, the government could establish promising programs like these in the communities that need them most. If the administration is serious about pursuing such a vision, it would work with unions to develop a reform agenda that improves conditions for teaching and learning in troubled schools and makes it easier to remove ineffective teachers from classrooms. It would encourage students and teachers to utilize their talent, creativity and imagination rather than allowing the school curriculum to be reduced to preparing students to perform on standardized tests. And it would recognize that schools have an essential role to play in renewing and invigorating American democracy by encouraging critical thinking and civic engagement. The administration must not be afraid to remind the public that this is, in fact, the historic purpose for which public schools were created.
Education is an invaluable national resource, one that must be supported and protected even as it is also pushed to change. Two years ago, several of the authors of the articles in this special issue of The Nation called upon policy-makers to adopt a comprehensive approach to education reform (see boldapproach.org

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/new-vision-school-reform
Pedro Noguera | May 27, 2010
Pedro Noguera is the guest editor of this week's special issue on education in THE NATION
Before his election President Obama carved out what many regarded as a more progressive and enlightened position on education reform. Recognizing that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had become widely unpopular because of its overemphasis on standardized tests, he declared, "Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles in a standardized test." He pledged to lead the nation in a different direction.
We are still waiting for a change of course. Since the election, the president and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have adopted policies that, to the chagrin of many of their supporters, have had far more in common with the previous administration than expected. Market-based reforms like performance pay for teachers, the excessive emphasis on charter schools as alternatives to traditional public schools and the distribution of federal funds—once treated as entitlements to compensate for poverty—through competitive grants all represent a disturbing continuity with the policies of the past. The Obama administration gets some credit for not ignoring education despite being preoccupied with several formidable challenges. But the new initiatives do not reflect the change many hoped Obama would deliver.
For those who worked hard to help Barack Obama win the election, this is a sad and difficult realization, but there is still time to change the focus and direction of the administration's education policies. Decisive measures and bold reforms are needed to address the many serious challenges confronting the nation's schools and to recover from eight years of misguided policies. As state governments enact severe cuts to education budgets and lay off teachers on a scale not seen in more than thirty years, it will be equally important for the federal government to restore our commitment to public education. It must find ways to target support to schools in impoverished communities and, where possible, to use federal funds to compensate for the loss of state and local money.
However, change in education cannot be implemented on a piecemeal basis. The administration needs a new vision, one rooted in the recognition that schools must provide equal opportunity for all children to learn if the schools are to fulfill their vital role as the cornerstone of our democracy. For this to happen, the administration must understand what was wrong with NCLB and the policies pursued by the Bush administration, and it must direct funds where change and innovation are most needed.
To begin with, Obama and Duncan would do well to exercise better judgment in the language they choose and the approach they take in addressing the politics of education. Duncan's assertion that Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans" because it gave the city a chance to rebuild and improve its failing public schools was particularly callous and misguided, given that the educational needs of many children in that devastated city still have not been addressed. It also wasn't wise for Duncan to describe the mass firing of teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island, as "courageous," especially given that there is no reserve supply of highly qualified teachers waiting for their chance to replace those who have been dismissed. Furthermore, Obama and Duncan's emphasis on narrowly framed pay-for-performance schemes that punish and reward teachers is insensitive to the needs of schools plagued by high failure rates. Educators were an important part of
Obama's base in the 2008 election; although this does not mean the administration should avoid shaking things up or refrain from adopting reforms that may anger some union locals, it makes no sense to inflame them with careless and accusatory rhetoric.
Second, while there is ample evidence that major changes and a new direction are needed, this will require more than a rebranding of No Child Left Behind. Rather than launch another set of Bush-type reforms (e.g., academic standards for preschools) or distributing funds through a competitive process that leaves out most states at a time when funding is scarce (e.g., Race to the Top), the administration must comprehend why the policies of the Bush years did not produce greater success. From the exceedingly high dropout rates in many urban school districts (more than 50 percent in cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland and St. Louis) to the hundreds of chronically underperforming schools that Duncan claims need to be shut down, signs of failure abound. Figuring out why NCLB failed to do more to improve schools in high-poverty communities requires rejecting simplistic approaches like those being taken by New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, who have shut down ninety-one failing schools in the past eight years. It is important to note that these schools failed on Bloomberg and Klein's watch and did not respond to their reforms. Closing troubled schools may sound like decisive action, but it does not amount to a reform strategy. When policy-makers are unclear about why their policies do not result in improvement, and are even less clear about what must be done differently to prevent failure in the future, closing schools is little more than a punitive shell game.
Third, the need for change is clear, but history has shown that change in public education does not come easily or quickly. The Obama administration deserves credit for its willingness to provide funds to promote reform, but it is far too impressed with quick fixes like mayoral control of urban districts and charter schools. Over the past forty years studies have shown that education policy must be devised in concert with health reform, poverty alleviation initiatives and economic development in order to address the roots of failure in the most depressed areas. From crime and unemployment to teen pregnancy and even racism, education—or the lack thereof—is implicated in many of our nation's social and economic problems. Education can be part of the solution to these and many other problems if reforms are designed and implemented in concert with key constituents—parents, teachers, local leaders and students—and with an understanding of how they must be coordinated with other aspects of social policy.
The government can play an important role in prodding the nation's schools to improve. It can use federal dollars to provide financial incentives for teachers with a track record of effectiveness to work in disadvantaged schools and communities. It can enforce civil rights laws and challenge school districts that have become resegregated thanks to policies that track students based on dubious measures of ability or that use special education, dead-end programs for English-language learners and punitive discipline practices to limit the access of minority students to academic opportunities. And the government can designate the best schools—charters and traditional public schools—as professional development training laboratories where educators from less successful schools can observe and learn about "best practices" in teaching and educational intervention.
Even without the support of the federal government there have been a number of reforms implemented at the local level that show considerable promise. For example, in Birmingham, Alabama, the courts have required schools to address the underlying causes of discipline problems and mandated that they stop arresting students for minor behavior infractions. This has resulted in a remarkable reduction in juvenile incarceration rates in the past two years. As David L. Kirp describes in this issue, there are a growing number of schools in cities like Portland, Chicago and New York that function as community service centers and are providing children with nourishing meals, after-school enrichment programs and regular exercise. Such schools are also producing significant increases in academic achievement and improved health for the children they serve. Innovative partnerships between schools, universities and biotech industries in the San Francisco Bay Area have created pathways to well-paid jobs in a sector of the economy that had formerly been inaccessible to urban youth. And school/university partnerships in Chicago, Philadelphia and Worcester, Massachusetts, have created exemplary schools where gaps in achievement associated with students' race and class have begun to disappear.
Were the administration to embrace a broader and bolder vision of reform and devise policies to back it up, the government could establish promising programs like these in the communities that need them most. If the administration is serious about pursuing such a vision, it would work with unions to develop a reform agenda that improves conditions for teaching and learning in troubled schools and makes it easier to remove ineffective teachers from classrooms. It would encourage students and teachers to utilize their talent, creativity and imagination rather than allowing the school curriculum to be reduced to preparing students to perform on standardized tests. And it would recognize that schools have an essential role to play in renewing and invigorating American democracy by encouraging critical thinking and civic engagement. The administration must not be afraid to remind the public that this is, in fact, the historic purpose for which public schools were created.
Education is an invaluable national resource, one that must be supported and protected even as it is also pushed to change. Two years ago, several of the authors of the articles in this special issue of The Nation called upon policy-makers to adopt a comprehensive approach to education reform (see boldapproach.org

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/new-vision-school-reform
Banking Giant Offers Financing for Charter Schools
In light of this morning's earlier post, this news story on financing charter schools is a real juxtaposition. Check out, btw, Diane Ravitch's new, best-selling book, Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York: Basic Books, 2010).
-Angela
Banking Giant Offers Financing for Charter Schools http://e-news.edweek.org/ct/7789645:9366034429:m:1:219528889:0D1D281818F61D628E873498116348FA
JPMorgan Chase & Co. pledges $325 million so that charter schools can finance expansions and renovations in a tight credit market. Inside School Research Blog: Charter Schools Still Get Fewer Public Dollars http://e-news.edweek.org/ct/7789646:9366034429:m:1:219528889:0D1D281818F61D628E873498116348FA
-Angela
Banking Giant Offers Financing for Charter Schools http://e-news.edweek.org/ct/7789645:9366034429:m:1:219528889:0D1D281818F61D628E873498116348FA
JPMorgan Chase & Co. pledges $325 million so that charter schools can finance expansions and renovations in a tight credit market. Inside School Research Blog: Charter Schools Still Get Fewer Public Dollars http://e-news.edweek.org/ct/7789646:9366034429:m:1:219528889:0D1D281818F61D628E873498116348FA
Just Say No to the Race to the Top (by Diane Ravitch)
May 25, 2010
Just Say No to the Race to the Top
Dear Deborah,
As I have traveled the country, from Boston to Los Angeles and points in between, I have met thousands of teachers who work in our nation's public schools. The overwhelming mood is one of demoralization, and, in some cases, despair. They thought that President Obama would break free from the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind, and now they realize that he plans to apply even tougher penalties based on test scores. Many of them know how phony the tests are—even Secretary Arne Duncan has said that the current generation of state tests are bad—yet the fate of teachers will now rest on these same inadequate tests.
As I listened to teachers and principals, I concluded that states and districts should not participate in the Race to the Top . It might better be called the Race to Nowhere, or as some have dubbed it, the Race to the Trough or the Dash to the Cash.
Here are my top 10 reasons for saying no:
The money that states win cannot plug budget gaps, but must be applied to meeting the requirements of the Race.
The Race demands that states evaluate teachers by their students' test scores. Some states are legislating that 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation be based on student scores. There is no basis in research or science for 50 percent or 20 percent or any other number. Of course, supervisors should take test scores into account when evaluating teachers, but they should not be required to use a fixed percentage, determined arbitrarily by legislators.
The issue of how to evaluate teachers should be resolved by professional associations, working in concert, such as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and other professional groups. The state legislatures do not determine how other professionals should be evaluated; they don't know. Nor do they know how teachers should be evaluated. Why doesn't the U.S. Department of Education convene the leading professional organizations and give them a grant to design the ideal method of evaluating teacher performance? Why should such an important issue be determined by political negotiation rather than by professional standards?
The NCLB-induced obsession with testing and test-prep activities will intensify under Race to the Top because teachers will know that their future, their reputation, and their livelihood depend on getting the scores higher, by any means necessary.
By raising the stakes for tests even higher, Race to the Top will predictably produce more teaching to bad tests, more narrowing of the curriculum, more cheating, and more gaming the system. If scores rise, it will be the illusion of progress, rather than better education. By ratcheting up the consequences of test scores, education will be corrupted and cheapened. There will be even less time for history, geography, civics, foreign languages, literature, and other important subjects.
The Race requires states to increase the number of privately managed schools. There is no basis in research for this requirement. Privately managed schools have been compared with regular public schools on the National Assessment of Educational Progress since 2003, and they have never outperformed them. The Stanford CREDO study http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/National_Release.pdf found that 17 percent of charter schools were better than matched traditional public schools, 46 percent performed about the same, and 37 percent were worse than traditional public schools. Not an impressive showing.
The Race promotes the de-professionalization of education by encouraging alternate paths into teaching and leadership. No other nation has built a successful public school system by increasing the number of non-professionals in the classroom or in the job of principal or superintendent. We need better-educated, better-prepared teachers; we need principals who are master teachers; we need superintendents who are knowledgeable educators.
Many public schools will be closed down to comply with the demands of Race to the Top. These schools will be heavily concentrated in poor and minority communities, robbing them of their social capital. This will destabilize communities without any assurance that better schools will be created. Schools that enroll large numbers of low-performing students will be heedlessly closed, even if their staff is doing a good job in the face of difficult challenges.
Race to the Top erodes state control of public education, a basic principle of our federal system of government throughout our history. Now, states will dance to whatever tune the U.S. Department of Education feels like playing. Will a different administration demand school prayer and vouchers in exchange for billions?
Race to the Top erodes local control of education by prompting legislatures to supersede local school boards on any issues selected by federal bureaucrats.
I hope I am wrong, but I believe that 10 years from now, we will look back with regret and even shame on this misuse of federal power. Books will be written analyzing where these ideas came from and why they were foisted on the nation's public schools at a time of fiscal distress. And we will be left to wonder why so much money and energy was spent promoting so many dubious ideas.
Diane
Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:56 AM | Permalink http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2010/05/just_say_no_to_the_race_to_the.html | 19 Comments http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2010/05/just_say_no_to_the_race_to_the.html#comments|
Just Say No to the Race to the Top
Dear Deborah,
As I have traveled the country, from Boston to Los Angeles and points in between, I have met thousands of teachers who work in our nation's public schools. The overwhelming mood is one of demoralization, and, in some cases, despair. They thought that President Obama would break free from the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind, and now they realize that he plans to apply even tougher penalties based on test scores. Many of them know how phony the tests are—even Secretary Arne Duncan has said that the current generation of state tests are bad—yet the fate of teachers will now rest on these same inadequate tests.
As I listened to teachers and principals, I concluded that states and districts should not participate in the Race to the Top
Here are my top 10 reasons for saying no:
The money that states win cannot plug budget gaps, but must be applied to meeting the requirements of the Race.
The Race demands that states evaluate teachers by their students' test scores. Some states are legislating that 50 percent of a teacher's evaluation be based on student scores. There is no basis in research or science for 50 percent or 20 percent or any other number. Of course, supervisors should take test scores into account when evaluating teachers, but they should not be required to use a fixed percentage, determined arbitrarily by legislators.
The issue of how to evaluate teachers should be resolved by professional associations, working in concert, such as the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and other professional groups. The state legislatures do not determine how other professionals should be evaluated; they don't know. Nor do they know how teachers should be evaluated. Why doesn't the U.S. Department of Education convene the leading professional organizations and give them a grant to design the ideal method of evaluating teacher performance? Why should such an important issue be determined by political negotiation rather than by professional standards?
The NCLB-induced obsession with testing and test-prep activities will intensify under Race to the Top because teachers will know that their future, their reputation, and their livelihood depend on getting the scores higher, by any means necessary.
By raising the stakes for tests even higher, Race to the Top will predictably produce more teaching to bad tests, more narrowing of the curriculum, more cheating, and more gaming the system. If scores rise, it will be the illusion of progress, rather than better education. By ratcheting up the consequences of test scores, education will be corrupted and cheapened. There will be even less time for history, geography, civics, foreign languages, literature, and other important subjects.
The Race requires states to increase the number of privately managed schools. There is no basis in research for this requirement. Privately managed schools have been compared with regular public schools on the National Assessment of Educational Progress since 2003, and they have never outperformed them. The Stanford CREDO study http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/National_Release.pdf found that 17 percent of charter schools were better than matched traditional public schools, 46 percent performed about the same, and 37 percent were worse than traditional public schools. Not an impressive showing.
The Race promotes the de-professionalization of education by encouraging alternate paths into teaching and leadership. No other nation has built a successful public school system by increasing the number of non-professionals in the classroom or in the job of principal or superintendent. We need better-educated, better-prepared teachers; we need principals who are master teachers; we need superintendents who are knowledgeable educators.
Many public schools will be closed down to comply with the demands of Race to the Top. These schools will be heavily concentrated in poor and minority communities, robbing them of their social capital. This will destabilize communities without any assurance that better schools will be created. Schools that enroll large numbers of low-performing students will be heedlessly closed, even if their staff is doing a good job in the face of difficult challenges.
Race to the Top erodes state control of public education, a basic principle of our federal system of government throughout our history. Now, states will dance to whatever tune the U.S. Department of Education feels like playing. Will a different administration demand school prayer and vouchers in exchange for billions?
Race to the Top erodes local control of education by prompting legislatures to supersede local school boards on any issues selected by federal bureaucrats.
I hope I am wrong, but I believe that 10 years from now, we will look back with regret and even shame on this misuse of federal power. Books will be written analyzing where these ideas came from and why they were foisted on the nation's public schools at a time of fiscal distress. And we will be left to wonder why so much money and energy was spent promoting so many dubious ideas.
Diane
Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:56 AM | Permalink http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2010/05/just_say_no_to_the_race_to_the.html | 19 Comments http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2010/05/just_say_no_to_the_race_to_the.html#comments|
Those Awful Texas Social Studies Standards: And What About Yours?
Those Awful Texas Social Studies Standards • And What About Yours?
By Bill Bigelow
You’ve probably read the horror stories coming out of Texas about their social studies standards. In March, the Texas board of education gave preliminary approval to new standards that, according to the New York Times, “will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government, and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.” The Texas board of education has rehabilitated Sen. Joe McCarthy, erased mention of the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights declaration, and required that the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis be taught alongside Lincoln’s inaugural. And that’s just a taste of more than 100 amendments that Republicans have made to the 120-page social studies curriculum standards.
No doubt, the victory of conservative ideologues on the Texas board of education is troubling and worth the attention it’s getting. With 4.7 million students, the Texas market is huge and exerts a powerful influence on the whole textbook industry. As Fritz Fischer, chair of the National Council for History Education, told the Washington Post, “The books that are altered to fit the standards become the bestselling books, and therefore within the next two years they’ll end up in other classrooms.”
But all this Texas bashing implies that standards everywhere else are good and fair and true. In fact, other states’ social studies standards have their own conservative biases (and occasional silliness) and deserve the same critical scrutiny that Texas’ new standards are receiving. Other states may not celebrate Jefferson Davis, but neither do they encourage teachers to equip students with the historical background and analytical tools that they’ll need to understand and address today’s social and environmental crises.
Take my own blue state of Oregon. This is no bastion of conservatism. We have a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature; both U.S. senators are Democrats, as are four of our five U.S. representatives. But our social studies standards are profoundly conservative—in big and little ways. There is no recognition of the social emergency that we confront: a deeply unequal and unsustainable world, hurtling toward an ecological crisis without parallel in human history. The standards portray U.S. society as fundamentally harmonious, with laws designed to promote fairness and progress. Today’s wars don’t exist. Nor does hunger or poverty.
Political Bias
The first social studies benchmark in Oregon’s standards requires that 3rd graders begin a nationalistic curricular journey as they learn to “identify essential ideas and values expressed in national symbols, heroes, and patriotic songs of the United States.” By the time these 3rd graders reach high school they’ll “understand how laws are developed and applied to provide order, set limits, protect basic rights, and promote the common good.”
To Read the Rest of This Article:
All Subscribers have Full Access to All Archives - Click Here to Login
By Bill Bigelow
You’ve probably read the horror stories coming out of Texas about their social studies standards. In March, the Texas board of education gave preliminary approval to new standards that, according to the New York Times, “will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government, and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.” The Texas board of education has rehabilitated Sen. Joe McCarthy, erased mention of the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights declaration, and required that the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis be taught alongside Lincoln’s inaugural. And that’s just a taste of more than 100 amendments that Republicans have made to the 120-page social studies curriculum standards.
No doubt, the victory of conservative ideologues on the Texas board of education is troubling and worth the attention it’s getting. With 4.7 million students, the Texas market is huge and exerts a powerful influence on the whole textbook industry. As Fritz Fischer, chair of the National Council for History Education, told the Washington Post, “The books that are altered to fit the standards become the bestselling books, and therefore within the next two years they’ll end up in other classrooms.”
But all this Texas bashing implies that standards everywhere else are good and fair and true. In fact, other states’ social studies standards have their own conservative biases (and occasional silliness) and deserve the same critical scrutiny that Texas’ new standards are receiving. Other states may not celebrate Jefferson Davis, but neither do they encourage teachers to equip students with the historical background and analytical tools that they’ll need to understand and address today’s social and environmental crises.
Take my own blue state of Oregon. This is no bastion of conservatism. We have a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature; both U.S. senators are Democrats, as are four of our five U.S. representatives. But our social studies standards are profoundly conservative—in big and little ways. There is no recognition of the social emergency that we confront: a deeply unequal and unsustainable world, hurtling toward an ecological crisis without parallel in human history. The standards portray U.S. society as fundamentally harmonious, with laws designed to promote fairness and progress. Today’s wars don’t exist. Nor does hunger or poverty.
Political Bias
The first social studies benchmark in Oregon’s standards requires that 3rd graders begin a nationalistic curricular journey as they learn to “identify essential ideas and values expressed in national symbols, heroes, and patriotic songs of the United States.” By the time these 3rd graders reach high school they’ll “understand how laws are developed and applied to provide order, set limits, protect basic rights, and promote the common good.”
To Read the Rest of This Article:
All Subscribers have Full Access to All Archives - Click Here to Login
12th Annual International Latino Book Awards Winners Announced
This is exciting to see all these books become winners in what was surely stiff competition given all the competitors.
-Angela
12th Annual International Latino Book Awards Winners Announced
In recognition of the many positive contributions being made to Latino literature by publishers and writers worldwide, Latino Literacy Now, a non-profit organization that supports and promotes literacy and literary excellence within the Latino community, created the Latino Book Awards in 1999. The awards were presented during Book Expo America on May 25, 2010, at the Javits Center. This year we are introducing a new designation for those entries that swept the judges 1st place ballots: Triple Crown Award Winners.
-Angela
12th Annual International Latino Book Awards Winners Announced
In recognition of the many positive contributions being made to Latino literature by publishers and writers worldwide, Latino Literacy Now, a non-profit organization that supports and promotes literacy and literary excellence within the Latino community, created the Latino Book Awards in 1999. The awards were presented during Book Expo America on May 25, 2010, at the Javits Center. This year we are introducing a new designation for those entries that swept the judges 1st place ballots: Triple Crown Award Winners.
Gov. Perry: Texas is a National Leader in College- and Career- Readiness; Will Not Apply for Second Round of Federal Race to the Top Funding
PRESS RELEASE
Gov. Perry: Texas is a National Leader in College- and Career- Readiness; Will Not Apply for Second Round of Federal Race to the Top Funding
June 01, 2010
AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today announced that Texas will not apply for the second round of federal Race to the Top (RTTT) education funds. Despite making tremendous education progress, Texas’ application would be penalized by the U.S. Department of Education for refusing to commit to adopting national curriculum standards and tests or incurring related ongoing costs.
“This administration’s attempt to bait states into adopting national standards is an effort to undermine states’ authority to determine how their students are educated, and is clearly aimed at circumventing laws prohibiting national standards,” Gov. Perry said. “Abandoning state standards and adopting new nationalized standards would cost Texas taxpayers $3 billion, and would likely weaken the rigorous college- and career-ready standards and assessments already in place in our state.”
Since Texas became one of the first states to forgo participating in the first round of RTTT, other states, teachers and education groups nationwide have questioned the U.S. Department of Education’s motives and goals. For example, Virginia, originally enthusiastic about the program, recently announced it would not seek RTTT funding because its curriculum standards are far superior to the proposed national standards.
“It would not only cost Texas a great deal of money to abandon our state standards, which are the product of years of hard work by Texas educators and stakeholders, it would be bad policy,” Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott said.
Texas’ curriculum standards, which determine what students are taught in Texas classrooms, are authorized by elected state legislators and set by the elected State Board of Education (SBOE). The SBOE recently adopted one of the nation’s first college- and career-ready curriculum standards in core subjects after receiving widespread input from Texas education and business leaders.
As was the case with the first round of RTTT funding, the U.S. Department of Education is again trying to coerce states like Texas to abandon their own locally established curriculum standards in favor of adopting national standards spearheaded by organizations in Washington, D.C. While Texas could be eligible for up to $700 million in this round of RTTT funding, it would cost Texas taxpayers upwards of $3 billion to realign our education system to conform to the U.S. Department of Education’s uniform vision for public education.
Developing Texas’ workforce is imperative to maintaining our position as a national leader in job creation and our future prosperity. Texas was recently praised in Education Week magazine for its adoption of college- and career-ready standards, and for holding schools accountable for ensuring students are college-ready. Additionally, the governor recently announced a $160 million initiative to expand the number and scope of Texas Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (T-STEM) academies, an initiative he established in 2005, as well as fund STEM scholarships. Building on successful initiatives like T-STEM academies helps ensure future generations of Texans have the educational foundation necessary to compete and excel in the increasingly competitive global economy.
What Others Are Saying About Round Two Funding…
“Though additional funds for Texas schools would be welcome, the funds available are not worth the policy changes, including more emphasis on high-stakes testing, that a competitive application would require.”
-Jeri Stone, Executive Director and General Counsel, Texas Classroom Teachers Association
“Nothing has really changed from Round One to Round Two of Race to the Top. The reporting requirements are still onerous and would dramatically increase the time a teacher spends reporting rather than teaching. Texas children and teachers do not need the increased federal control and the high-stakes national test that will follow Race to the Top. We continue to support Governor Perry in his refusal to sell our schools to Washington bureaucrats for a few one-time dollars.”
-Gayle Fallon, President, Houston Federation of Teachers
“Texas has set the standard for the rest of the nation when it comes to education reform. We have spent years developing our own curriculum standards- standards developed by Texans, for Texans. Why would we change our education laws for $75 per student? Why do bureaucrats in Washington think that they know better than we do on the best way to educate our children? Not applying for Race to the Top was a smart decision in January, and it remains a smart decision today.”
-Rob Eissler, Chairman – Committee on Public Education, Texas House of Representatives
“We support Governor Perry’s decision to keep Texas out of the federal Race to the Top program. Texas has been a national leader on curriculum standards and educational reform. Decisions about Texas schools should be made by Texans, not by bureaucrats in Washington. We look forward to continuing to work with Governor Perry to develop innovative educational strategies that will ensure Texas’ future is bright.”
-Bill Hammond, President and CEO, Texas Association of Business
“The governor is right to refuse to participate in the federal government’s current push to take over our schools. While some states are chasing federal funds at any cost, Texans are realizing that a federal takeover of education would mean weaker standards; decreased student performance; and higher taxes.”
-Michael Quinn Sullivan, President, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility
“As a former White House liaison for the U.S. Department of Education, I have seen firsthand how out-of-touch federal bureaucrats are with our schools. We at Americans for Prosperity support the decision for Texas to reject federal Race to the Top dollars. Texans should not be subject to national education standards or a national curriculum. Furthermore, tax dollars should not be used to bribe states to adopt federal mandates.”
-Peggy Venable, Director, Americans for Prosperity-Texas
“Education is an issue that has been traditionally left to states and localities, and is best handled on that level. Race to the Top is just one example how Washington politicians and bureaucrats are taking over too many of the decisions that affect the most important aspects of people’s lives. Centralized power in the federal government, especially in education, means less accountability, less innovation and most importantly, less individual liberty.”
-Brooke Terry, Senior Education Policy Analyst, Texas Public Policy Foundation
Gov. Perry: Texas is a National Leader in College- and Career- Readiness; Will Not Apply for Second Round of Federal Race to the Top Funding
June 01, 2010
AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry today announced that Texas will not apply for the second round of federal Race to the Top (RTTT) education funds. Despite making tremendous education progress, Texas’ application would be penalized by the U.S. Department of Education for refusing to commit to adopting national curriculum standards and tests or incurring related ongoing costs.
“This administration’s attempt to bait states into adopting national standards is an effort to undermine states’ authority to determine how their students are educated, and is clearly aimed at circumventing laws prohibiting national standards,” Gov. Perry said. “Abandoning state standards and adopting new nationalized standards would cost Texas taxpayers $3 billion, and would likely weaken the rigorous college- and career-ready standards and assessments already in place in our state.”
Since Texas became one of the first states to forgo participating in the first round of RTTT, other states, teachers and education groups nationwide have questioned the U.S. Department of Education’s motives and goals. For example, Virginia, originally enthusiastic about the program, recently announced it would not seek RTTT funding because its curriculum standards are far superior to the proposed national standards.
“It would not only cost Texas a great deal of money to abandon our state standards, which are the product of years of hard work by Texas educators and stakeholders, it would be bad policy,” Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott said.
Texas’ curriculum standards, which determine what students are taught in Texas classrooms, are authorized by elected state legislators and set by the elected State Board of Education (SBOE). The SBOE recently adopted one of the nation’s first college- and career-ready curriculum standards in core subjects after receiving widespread input from Texas education and business leaders.
As was the case with the first round of RTTT funding, the U.S. Department of Education is again trying to coerce states like Texas to abandon their own locally established curriculum standards in favor of adopting national standards spearheaded by organizations in Washington, D.C. While Texas could be eligible for up to $700 million in this round of RTTT funding, it would cost Texas taxpayers upwards of $3 billion to realign our education system to conform to the U.S. Department of Education’s uniform vision for public education.
Developing Texas’ workforce is imperative to maintaining our position as a national leader in job creation and our future prosperity. Texas was recently praised in Education Week magazine for its adoption of college- and career-ready standards, and for holding schools accountable for ensuring students are college-ready. Additionally, the governor recently announced a $160 million initiative to expand the number and scope of Texas Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (T-STEM) academies, an initiative he established in 2005, as well as fund STEM scholarships. Building on successful initiatives like T-STEM academies helps ensure future generations of Texans have the educational foundation necessary to compete and excel in the increasingly competitive global economy.
What Others Are Saying About Round Two Funding…
“Though additional funds for Texas schools would be welcome, the funds available are not worth the policy changes, including more emphasis on high-stakes testing, that a competitive application would require.”
-Jeri Stone, Executive Director and General Counsel, Texas Classroom Teachers Association
“Nothing has really changed from Round One to Round Two of Race to the Top. The reporting requirements are still onerous and would dramatically increase the time a teacher spends reporting rather than teaching. Texas children and teachers do not need the increased federal control and the high-stakes national test that will follow Race to the Top. We continue to support Governor Perry in his refusal to sell our schools to Washington bureaucrats for a few one-time dollars.”
-Gayle Fallon, President, Houston Federation of Teachers
“Texas has set the standard for the rest of the nation when it comes to education reform. We have spent years developing our own curriculum standards- standards developed by Texans, for Texans. Why would we change our education laws for $75 per student? Why do bureaucrats in Washington think that they know better than we do on the best way to educate our children? Not applying for Race to the Top was a smart decision in January, and it remains a smart decision today.”
-Rob Eissler, Chairman – Committee on Public Education, Texas House of Representatives
“We support Governor Perry’s decision to keep Texas out of the federal Race to the Top program. Texas has been a national leader on curriculum standards and educational reform. Decisions about Texas schools should be made by Texans, not by bureaucrats in Washington. We look forward to continuing to work with Governor Perry to develop innovative educational strategies that will ensure Texas’ future is bright.”
-Bill Hammond, President and CEO, Texas Association of Business
“The governor is right to refuse to participate in the federal government’s current push to take over our schools. While some states are chasing federal funds at any cost, Texans are realizing that a federal takeover of education would mean weaker standards; decreased student performance; and higher taxes.”
-Michael Quinn Sullivan, President, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility
“As a former White House liaison for the U.S. Department of Education, I have seen firsthand how out-of-touch federal bureaucrats are with our schools. We at Americans for Prosperity support the decision for Texas to reject federal Race to the Top dollars. Texans should not be subject to national education standards or a national curriculum. Furthermore, tax dollars should not be used to bribe states to adopt federal mandates.”
-Peggy Venable, Director, Americans for Prosperity-Texas
“Education is an issue that has been traditionally left to states and localities, and is best handled on that level. Race to the Top is just one example how Washington politicians and bureaucrats are taking over too many of the decisions that affect the most important aspects of people’s lives. Centralized power in the federal government, especially in education, means less accountability, less innovation and most importantly, less individual liberty.”
-Brooke Terry, Senior Education Policy Analyst, Texas Public Policy Foundation
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
President of Kaplan College Campus Is Fired Over 'English Only' Dispute
May 31, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education
President of Kaplan College Campus Is Fired Over 'English Only' Dispute
By Katherine Mangan
The president of Kaplan College's campus in Chula Vista, Calif., was fired this month over his handling of an incident in which students were told they could face academic sanctions if they spoke Spanish in class, according to sources involved with the case.
Dennis Manzo had been president since the campus, located just seven miles from the Mexican border, opened in December.
All calls to the campus were referred to Ron Iori, spokesman for the college's for-profit corporate parent, Kaplan Higher Education, in Chicago. He would not confirm that the president had been fired, or provide information on how to reach him, but he said Mr. Manzo is no longer working for Kaplan. "We all agreed that it was best if we parted ways," he said.
Angel Roman, now president of Kaplan's Beaumont, Tex., campus, will take over as president of the Chula Vista campus this week.
Read on here.
President of Kaplan College Campus Is Fired Over 'English Only' Dispute
By Katherine Mangan
The president of Kaplan College's campus in Chula Vista, Calif., was fired this month over his handling of an incident in which students were told they could face academic sanctions if they spoke Spanish in class, according to sources involved with the case.
Dennis Manzo had been president since the campus, located just seven miles from the Mexican border, opened in December.
All calls to the campus were referred to Ron Iori, spokesman for the college's for-profit corporate parent, Kaplan Higher Education, in Chicago. He would not confirm that the president had been fired, or provide information on how to reach him, but he said Mr. Manzo is no longer working for Kaplan. "We all agreed that it was best if we parted ways," he said.
Angel Roman, now president of Kaplan's Beaumont, Tex., campus, will take over as president of the Chula Vista campus this week.
Read on here.
Restoring Our Schools
Linda Darling-Hammond |
May 27, 2010
This article is adapted from Linda Darling-Hammond's The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (Teachers College Press).
In 1989 President George H.W. Bush and the nation's governors convened to establish a set of six national education goals to be accomplished by the year 2000. Among these were to ensure that all students enter school healthy and ready to learn, that at least 90 percent of students graduate from high school, that all students are competent in the academic disciplines and that the United States ranks "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement."
In 2010 none of these goals have been accomplished, and we are further away from achieving most of them than we were two decades ago. More children live in poverty and lack healthcare; the high school graduation rate has slipped below 70 percent; the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988; and US performance on international tests has continued to drop.
Far from being first in the world in math and science, the United States ranked thirty-fifth out of the top forty countries in math—right between Azerbaijan and Croatia—when the most recent Programme in International Student Assessment tests were given in 2006. In science, the United States ranked twenty-ninth out of forty, sandwiched between Latvia and Lithuania. These rankings and scores had dropped from 2000, when the No Child Left Behind Act was introduced. While the United States performs closer to international averages in reading, its scores also dropped on the international reading tests during the NCLB era.
Declines on international tests and a flattening of growth on the National Assessment of Educational Progress occurred even as state test scores used for NCLB were driven upward. This is partly because the international assessments demand more advanced analysis than do most US tests. They require students to weigh and balance evidence, apply what they know to new problems and explain and defend their answers. These higher-order skills are emphasized in other nations' curriculums and assessment systems but have been discouraged by the kind of lower-level multiple-choice testing favored by NCLB.
In addition, inequality has an enormous influence on US performance. White and Asian students score just above the average for the European OECD nations in each subject area, but African-American and Hispanic students score so much lower that the national average plummets to the bottom tier. The United States is also among the nations where socioeconomic background most affects student outcomes. This is because of greater income inequality and because the United States spends much more educating affluent children than poor children, with wealthy suburbs often spending twice what central cities do, and three times what poor rural areas can afford.
Both segregation of schools and inequality in funding have increased in many states over the past two decades, leaving a growing share of African-American and Hispanic students in highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities. Thus, the poor US standing is substantially a product of unequal access to the kind of intellectually challenging learning measured on these international assessments.
During his historic campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama described our large race- and class-based achievement gaps as "morally unacceptable and economically untenable." At a time when three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require postsecondary education, our college participation rates have slipped from first in the world to seventeenth. While more than half of young people are becoming college graduates in many European and Asian nations, fewer than 40 percent of American young people—and fewer than 20 percent of African-American and Hispanic youth—receive a college degree.
In minority communities, a greater number join the growing ranks of inmates in what the New York Times recently dubbed our "prison nation," which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. With 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the world's inmates, at a cost of untold human tragedy and more than $50 billion annually to taxpayers. In an economy that requires knowledge and skills for employment and success, most inmates are high school dropouts and functionally illiterate—with literacy skills below those demanded by the labor market. States that would not spend $10,000 a year to ensure adequate education for children of color in under-resourced schools later spend more than $30,000 a year to keep them in jail.
Since the 1980s, national investments have tipped heavily toward incarceration rather than education.
As the number of prisoners has quadrupled since 1980, state budgets for corrections have grown by more than 900 percent, three times faster than funds for education. With prisons and education competing for limited funds, the strong relationship between under-education, unemployment and incarceration creates a vicious cycle. Today, at least five states spend more on corrections than they spend on public colleges and universities, and some, like California, are decreasing slots in their higher education systems, as other nations are aggressively increasing theirs.
Also unlike high-achieving nations, we have failed to invest in the critical components of a high-quality education system. While we have been busy setting goals and targets for public schools and punishing the schools that fail to meet them, we have not invested in a highly trained, well-supported teaching force for all communities, as other nations have; we have not scaled up successful school designs so that they are sustained and widely available; and we have not pointed our schools at the critical higher-order thinking and performance skills needed in the twenty-first century. Some states are notable exceptions, but we have not, as a nation, undertaken the systemic reforms needed to maintain the standing we held forty years ago as the world's unquestioned educational leader.
A Glimpse of What High-Achieving Nations Are Doing
Other nations have been transforming their school systems to meet the new demands of today's world. They are expanding educational access to more and more of their people, and they are revising curriculums, instruction and assessments to support the more complex knowledge and skills needed in the twenty-first century. Starting in the 1980s, for example, Finland dismantled the rigid tracking system that had allocated differential access to knowledge to its young people and eliminated the state-mandated testing system that was used for this purpose, replacing them with highly trained teachers educated in newly overhauled schools of education, along with curriculums and assessments focused on problem-solving, creativity and independent learning. These changes have propelled achievement to the top of the international rankings and closed what was once a large, intractable achievement gap.
In the space of one generation, South Korea has transformed itself from a nation that educated less than a quarter of its citizens through high school to one that graduates more than 95 percent from high school and ranks third in college-educated adults, with most young people now completing postsecondary education. Egalitarian access to schools and a common curriculum, coupled with investments in well-prepared teachers, have been part of the national strategy there as well.
Similarly, starting in the 1970s, Singapore began to transform itself from a collection of fishing villages into an economic powerhouse by building an education system that would assure every student access to strong teaching, an inquiry curriculum and cutting-edge technology. In 2003, Singapore's fourth and eighth grade students scored first in the world in math and science on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study assessments. When children leave their tiny, spare apartments in high-rises throughout the nation, they arrive at beautiful, airy school buildings where student artwork, papers, projects and awards are displayed throughout; libraries and classrooms are well stocked; instructional technology is plentiful; and teachers are well trained and well supported.
A visit to Nan Chiau Primary School, for example, finds fourth and fifth graders eagerly displaying the science projects they have designed and conducted in an "experience, investigate and create" cycle that is repeated throughout the year. Students are delighted to show visitors their "innovation walk," displaying student-developed projects from many subject areas lining a long corridor. Students study plants, animals and insects in the school's eco-garden; they run their own recycling center; they write and edit scripts for the Internet radio program they produce; and they use handheld computers to play games and create mathematical models that develop their quantitative abilities. Teachers, meanwhile, engage in research sponsored by the government to evaluate and continually improve their teaching.
Certainly there are schools that look like this in the United States. But they are not the norm. What distinguishes systems like Singapore's is that this quality of education—aimed at empowering students to use their knowledge in inventive ways—is replicated throughout the entire nation of 4.8 million, which is about the size of Kentucky, the median US state. Furthermore, Singapore is not alone. The pace at which many nations in Asia and Europe are pouring resources into forward-looking systems that educate all their citizens to much higher levels is astonishing. And the growing gap between the United States and these nations—particularly in our most underfunded schools—is equally dramatic.
Contrast the picture of a typical school in Singapore with the description of a California school, from a lawsuit filed recently on behalf of low-income students of color in schools like it throughout the state, a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education:
At Luther Burbank, students cannot take textbooks home for homework in any core subject because their teachers have enough textbooks for use in class only.... For homework, students must take home photocopied pages, with no accompanying text for guidance or reference, when and if their teachers have enough paper to use to make homework copies.... Luther Burbank is infested with vermin and roaches and students routinely see mice in their classrooms. One dead rodent has remained, decomposing, in a corner in the gymnasium since the beginning of the school year.... The school library is rarely open, has no librarian, and has not recently been updated. The latest version of the encyclopedia in the library was published in approximately 1988.... Luther Burbank classrooms do not have computers. Computer instruction and research skills are not, therefore, part of Luther Burbank students' regular instruction.... The school no longer offers any art classes for budgetary reasons.... Ceiling tiles are missing and cracked in the school gym, and school children are afraid to play...in the gym because they worry that more ceiling tiles will fall on them during their games.... The school has no air conditioning. On hot days classroom temperatures climb into the 90s. The school heating system does not work well. In winter, children often wear coats, hats, and gloves during class to keep warm.... Eleven of the 35 teachers at Luther Burbank have not yet obtained full, non-emergency teaching credentials, and 17 of the 35 teachers only began teaching at Luther Burbank this school year.
Under these kinds of circumstances, when the school lacks the rudiments needed to focus on the quality of learning and teaching or the development of higher-order thinking, it is impossible even to begin to talk about developing the deep knowledge and complex skills required of young people in today's and tomorrow's society.
Learning From the Past
These declines are not inevitable. We have made strong headway on educational achievement in the past and can do so again. It is easy to forget that during the years following Brown v. Board of Education, when desegregation and school finance reform efforts were launched, and when the Great Society's War on Poverty increased investments in poor communities, substantial gains were made in equalizing educational inputs and outcomes. Childhood poverty was reduced to levels almost half of what they are today. Investments were made in desegregation, magnet schools, community schools, pipelines of well-qualified teachers, school funding reforms and higher education assistance.
These investments paid off in measurable ways. For a brief period in the mid-'70s, black and Hispanic students were attending college at rates comparable with whites, the only time this has happened before or since. By the mid-1970s, urban schools were spending as much as suburban schools, and paying their teachers as well; perennial teacher shortages had nearly ended; and gaps in educational attainment had closed substantially. Federally funded curriculum investments transformed teaching in many schools. Innovative schools flourished, especially in the cities. Large gains in black students' performance throughout the 1970s and early '80s cut the literacy achievement gap by nearly half in just fifteen years. Had this rate of progress continued, the achievement gap would have been closed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, that did not occur. While nations that today are high-achieving built on the progressive reforms they launched in the 1970s, the United States backpedaled in the Reagan years, cutting the education budget in half, ending most aid to cities and most supports for teacher recruitment and training while also slashing health and human services budgets and shifting costs to the states. This caused states to reduce equalization aid to schools in order to pick up other social service costs.
Conservatives introduced a new theory of reform focused on outcomes rather than inputs—that is, high-stakes testing without investing—which drove most policy initiatives. The situation in many urban and rural schools deteriorated over the ensuing decades. Drops in real per-pupil expenditures accompanied tax cuts and growing enrollments. Meanwhile, student needs grew with immigration, concentrated poverty and homelessness, and growing numbers of students requiring second-language instruction and special education services. Although some federal support to high-need schools and districts was restored during the 1990s, it was not enough to recoup the earlier losses, and after 2000 inequality increased once again.
What's to Be Done?
Although some of America's schools are among the best in the world, too many have been neglected in the more than twenty years since the clarion call for school reform was sounded in the 1980s. Clearly we need more than a new set of national goals to mobilize a dramatically more successful educational system. We also need more than pilot projects, demonstrations, innovations and other partial solutions. We need to take the education of poor children as seriously as we take the education of the rich, and we need to create systems that routinely guarantee all the elements of educational investment to all children.
What would this require? As in high- and equitably achieving nations, it would require strong investments in children's welfare—adequate healthcare, housing and food security, so that children can come to school each day ready to learn; high-quality preschool to close achievement gaps that already exist when children enter kindergarten; equitably funded schools that provide quality educators and learning materials, which are the central resources for learning; a system that ensures that teachers and leaders in every community are extremely well prepared and are supported to be effective on the job; standards, curriculums and assessments focused on twenty-first-century learning goals; and schools organized for in-depth student and teacher learning and equipped to address children's social needs, as the community schools movement has done [see David L. Kirp, "Cradle to College," page 26].
Thus far, the Obama administration has taken affirmative steps on a portion of this agenda. Healthcare for children has been secured in the healthcare reform bill, and investments in early childhood education have been increased, although thus far with more emphasis on expanding access than investing in high-quality teaching. The president has increased federal funding for college, which had previously dropped to a level that precluded college-going for many qualified young people who couldn't afford it.
The administration's stimulus package, which made $100 billion available for schools, has stanched some of the acute hemorrhaging of resources and staff that would otherwise have occurred last year as a result of the recession. And the president has signaled his interest in more intellectually thoughtful assessments that "don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test but whether they possess twenty-first-century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity." This concern will be pursued through competitive grants to state consortiums that develop new assessments linked to new common core standards of learning in math and English.
The most touted aspects of the Race to the Top initiative, however, focus on peripheral issues rather than investments that have characterized major improvements in education systems at home and abroad. No nation has become high-achieving by sanctioning schools based on test-score targets and closing those that serve the neediest students without providing adequate resources and quality teaching. The implementation of Race to the Top has not required states to equalize funding to underresourced schools or even to maintain their existing commitments to these schools, many of which have had to slash budgets deeply, laying off tens of thousands of teachers, raising class size to more than forty in some cases and cutting successful programs.
In this context, schools serving high-need students are called on to raise achievement or face closure, despite evidence from the Consortium on Chicago School Research that closing more than 100 low-performing schools in that city and replacing them did not result in higher achievement.
Race to the Top requires that states expand charters but fails to assure quality and ensure access, despite evidence from the largest national study to date (conducted at Stanford University's Hoover Institution) that charter schools more frequently underperform than outperform their counterparts serving similar students; evidence from a UCLA study indicating that charters exacerbate segregation; and evidence from many studies that charters serve significantly fewer special education students and English-language learners. Some excellent charters do exist, along with excellent schools run by regular public school districts, but the law does not aim to spread excellence so much as it aims to change governance. Nations that are focused on spreading quality—like Singapore, Finland and Canada, for example—have developed strategies for schools to share successful practices through networks, creating an engine for ongoing improvement for the system as a whole.
Rather than establishing a framework for dramatically improving the knowledge, skills and equitable distribution of teachers, as high-achieving nations have done, Race to the Top encourages states to expand alternative routes to certification and to reduce coursework for prospective teachers, despite findings that hiring teachers from low-coursework alternatives reduces student achievement. Further, Race to the Top largely misses the critical investments needed to prepare and distribute excellent teachers and school leaders. Pay bonuses alone cannot succeed in recruiting and retaining teachers without efforts to create competitive, equitable salaries and working conditions. Removing low-performing teachers cannot improve teaching or student outcomes without strategies to ensure a stable supply of highly effective teachers who stay in their communities.
Teacher evaluation needs to become more rigorous, and rewards for effectiveness should be encouraged, but these strategies can succeed only if they are embedded in a system of universal high-quality preparation, mentoring and support—including adequately resourced and well-designed schools that allow and enable good practice. Rather than short-term incentives and quick fixes, federal policy should focus on building capacity across the entire system.
Achieving these conditions will require as much federal attention to opportunity-to-learn standards as to assessments of academic progress, and greater equalization of federal funding across states. It will require incentives for states to provide comparable funding to students, adjusted for pupil needs and costs of living, as well as incentives and information that can steer spending productively to maximize the likelihood of student success. Finally, an equitable and adequate system will need to address the supply of well-prepared educators—the most fundamental of all resources—by building an infrastructure that ensures high-quality preparation for all educators and ensures that well-trained teachers are available to all students in all communities.
While the administration's blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (whose most recent iteration was No Child Left Behind) carries some hints of such strategies, its framework still envisions competition and sanctions as the primary drivers of reform rather than capacity-building and strategic investments. If this remains the primary frame for federal and state policy, it is unlikely that we will rebuild good schools in every community.
To meet twenty-first-century demands, the United States needs to move beyond a collection of disparate and shifting reform initiatives to a thoughtful, well-organized and well-supported set of policies that will enable young people to thrive in the new world they are entering. We must also finally make good on the American promise to make education available to all on equal terms, so that every member of this society can realize a productive life and contribute to the greater welfare. This is the challenge that Obama pledged to take on, and the one we should hope he will vigorously pursue.
May 27, 2010
This article is adapted from Linda Darling-Hammond's The Flat World and Education: How America's Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (Teachers College Press).
In 1989 President George H.W. Bush and the nation's governors convened to establish a set of six national education goals to be accomplished by the year 2000. Among these were to ensure that all students enter school healthy and ready to learn, that at least 90 percent of students graduate from high school, that all students are competent in the academic disciplines and that the United States ranks "first in the world in mathematics and science achievement."
In 2010 none of these goals have been accomplished, and we are further away from achieving most of them than we were two decades ago. More children live in poverty and lack healthcare; the high school graduation rate has slipped below 70 percent; the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988; and US performance on international tests has continued to drop.
Far from being first in the world in math and science, the United States ranked thirty-fifth out of the top forty countries in math—right between Azerbaijan and Croatia—when the most recent Programme in International Student Assessment tests were given in 2006. In science, the United States ranked twenty-ninth out of forty, sandwiched between Latvia and Lithuania. These rankings and scores had dropped from 2000, when the No Child Left Behind Act was introduced. While the United States performs closer to international averages in reading, its scores also dropped on the international reading tests during the NCLB era.
Declines on international tests and a flattening of growth on the National Assessment of Educational Progress occurred even as state test scores used for NCLB were driven upward. This is partly because the international assessments demand more advanced analysis than do most US tests. They require students to weigh and balance evidence, apply what they know to new problems and explain and defend their answers. These higher-order skills are emphasized in other nations' curriculums and assessment systems but have been discouraged by the kind of lower-level multiple-choice testing favored by NCLB.
In addition, inequality has an enormous influence on US performance. White and Asian students score just above the average for the European OECD nations in each subject area, but African-American and Hispanic students score so much lower that the national average plummets to the bottom tier. The United States is also among the nations where socioeconomic background most affects student outcomes. This is because of greater income inequality and because the United States spends much more educating affluent children than poor children, with wealthy suburbs often spending twice what central cities do, and three times what poor rural areas can afford.
Both segregation of schools and inequality in funding have increased in many states over the past two decades, leaving a growing share of African-American and Hispanic students in highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities. Thus, the poor US standing is substantially a product of unequal access to the kind of intellectually challenging learning measured on these international assessments.
During his historic campaign for the presidency, Barack Obama described our large race- and class-based achievement gaps as "morally unacceptable and economically untenable." At a time when three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require postsecondary education, our college participation rates have slipped from first in the world to seventeenth. While more than half of young people are becoming college graduates in many European and Asian nations, fewer than 40 percent of American young people—and fewer than 20 percent of African-American and Hispanic youth—receive a college degree.
In minority communities, a greater number join the growing ranks of inmates in what the New York Times recently dubbed our "prison nation," which incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. With 5 percent of the world's population, we have 25 percent of the world's inmates, at a cost of untold human tragedy and more than $50 billion annually to taxpayers. In an economy that requires knowledge and skills for employment and success, most inmates are high school dropouts and functionally illiterate—with literacy skills below those demanded by the labor market. States that would not spend $10,000 a year to ensure adequate education for children of color in under-resourced schools later spend more than $30,000 a year to keep them in jail.
Since the 1980s, national investments have tipped heavily toward incarceration rather than education.
As the number of prisoners has quadrupled since 1980, state budgets for corrections have grown by more than 900 percent, three times faster than funds for education. With prisons and education competing for limited funds, the strong relationship between under-education, unemployment and incarceration creates a vicious cycle. Today, at least five states spend more on corrections than they spend on public colleges and universities, and some, like California, are decreasing slots in their higher education systems, as other nations are aggressively increasing theirs.
Also unlike high-achieving nations, we have failed to invest in the critical components of a high-quality education system. While we have been busy setting goals and targets for public schools and punishing the schools that fail to meet them, we have not invested in a highly trained, well-supported teaching force for all communities, as other nations have; we have not scaled up successful school designs so that they are sustained and widely available; and we have not pointed our schools at the critical higher-order thinking and performance skills needed in the twenty-first century. Some states are notable exceptions, but we have not, as a nation, undertaken the systemic reforms needed to maintain the standing we held forty years ago as the world's unquestioned educational leader.
A Glimpse of What High-Achieving Nations Are Doing
Other nations have been transforming their school systems to meet the new demands of today's world. They are expanding educational access to more and more of their people, and they are revising curriculums, instruction and assessments to support the more complex knowledge and skills needed in the twenty-first century. Starting in the 1980s, for example, Finland dismantled the rigid tracking system that had allocated differential access to knowledge to its young people and eliminated the state-mandated testing system that was used for this purpose, replacing them with highly trained teachers educated in newly overhauled schools of education, along with curriculums and assessments focused on problem-solving, creativity and independent learning. These changes have propelled achievement to the top of the international rankings and closed what was once a large, intractable achievement gap.
In the space of one generation, South Korea has transformed itself from a nation that educated less than a quarter of its citizens through high school to one that graduates more than 95 percent from high school and ranks third in college-educated adults, with most young people now completing postsecondary education. Egalitarian access to schools and a common curriculum, coupled with investments in well-prepared teachers, have been part of the national strategy there as well.
Similarly, starting in the 1970s, Singapore began to transform itself from a collection of fishing villages into an economic powerhouse by building an education system that would assure every student access to strong teaching, an inquiry curriculum and cutting-edge technology. In 2003, Singapore's fourth and eighth grade students scored first in the world in math and science on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study assessments. When children leave their tiny, spare apartments in high-rises throughout the nation, they arrive at beautiful, airy school buildings where student artwork, papers, projects and awards are displayed throughout; libraries and classrooms are well stocked; instructional technology is plentiful; and teachers are well trained and well supported.
A visit to Nan Chiau Primary School, for example, finds fourth and fifth graders eagerly displaying the science projects they have designed and conducted in an "experience, investigate and create" cycle that is repeated throughout the year. Students are delighted to show visitors their "innovation walk," displaying student-developed projects from many subject areas lining a long corridor. Students study plants, animals and insects in the school's eco-garden; they run their own recycling center; they write and edit scripts for the Internet radio program they produce; and they use handheld computers to play games and create mathematical models that develop their quantitative abilities. Teachers, meanwhile, engage in research sponsored by the government to evaluate and continually improve their teaching.
Certainly there are schools that look like this in the United States. But they are not the norm. What distinguishes systems like Singapore's is that this quality of education—aimed at empowering students to use their knowledge in inventive ways—is replicated throughout the entire nation of 4.8 million, which is about the size of Kentucky, the median US state. Furthermore, Singapore is not alone. The pace at which many nations in Asia and Europe are pouring resources into forward-looking systems that educate all their citizens to much higher levels is astonishing. And the growing gap between the United States and these nations—particularly in our most underfunded schools—is equally dramatic.
Contrast the picture of a typical school in Singapore with the description of a California school, from a lawsuit filed recently on behalf of low-income students of color in schools like it throughout the state, a half-century after Brown v. Board of Education:
At Luther Burbank, students cannot take textbooks home for homework in any core subject because their teachers have enough textbooks for use in class only.... For homework, students must take home photocopied pages, with no accompanying text for guidance or reference, when and if their teachers have enough paper to use to make homework copies.... Luther Burbank is infested with vermin and roaches and students routinely see mice in their classrooms. One dead rodent has remained, decomposing, in a corner in the gymnasium since the beginning of the school year.... The school library is rarely open, has no librarian, and has not recently been updated. The latest version of the encyclopedia in the library was published in approximately 1988.... Luther Burbank classrooms do not have computers. Computer instruction and research skills are not, therefore, part of Luther Burbank students' regular instruction.... The school no longer offers any art classes for budgetary reasons.... Ceiling tiles are missing and cracked in the school gym, and school children are afraid to play...in the gym because they worry that more ceiling tiles will fall on them during their games.... The school has no air conditioning. On hot days classroom temperatures climb into the 90s. The school heating system does not work well. In winter, children often wear coats, hats, and gloves during class to keep warm.... Eleven of the 35 teachers at Luther Burbank have not yet obtained full, non-emergency teaching credentials, and 17 of the 35 teachers only began teaching at Luther Burbank this school year.
Under these kinds of circumstances, when the school lacks the rudiments needed to focus on the quality of learning and teaching or the development of higher-order thinking, it is impossible even to begin to talk about developing the deep knowledge and complex skills required of young people in today's and tomorrow's society.
Learning From the Past
These declines are not inevitable. We have made strong headway on educational achievement in the past and can do so again. It is easy to forget that during the years following Brown v. Board of Education, when desegregation and school finance reform efforts were launched, and when the Great Society's War on Poverty increased investments in poor communities, substantial gains were made in equalizing educational inputs and outcomes. Childhood poverty was reduced to levels almost half of what they are today. Investments were made in desegregation, magnet schools, community schools, pipelines of well-qualified teachers, school funding reforms and higher education assistance.
These investments paid off in measurable ways. For a brief period in the mid-'70s, black and Hispanic students were attending college at rates comparable with whites, the only time this has happened before or since. By the mid-1970s, urban schools were spending as much as suburban schools, and paying their teachers as well; perennial teacher shortages had nearly ended; and gaps in educational attainment had closed substantially. Federally funded curriculum investments transformed teaching in many schools. Innovative schools flourished, especially in the cities. Large gains in black students' performance throughout the 1970s and early '80s cut the literacy achievement gap by nearly half in just fifteen years. Had this rate of progress continued, the achievement gap would have been closed by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Unfortunately, that did not occur. While nations that today are high-achieving built on the progressive reforms they launched in the 1970s, the United States backpedaled in the Reagan years, cutting the education budget in half, ending most aid to cities and most supports for teacher recruitment and training while also slashing health and human services budgets and shifting costs to the states. This caused states to reduce equalization aid to schools in order to pick up other social service costs.
Conservatives introduced a new theory of reform focused on outcomes rather than inputs—that is, high-stakes testing without investing—which drove most policy initiatives. The situation in many urban and rural schools deteriorated over the ensuing decades. Drops in real per-pupil expenditures accompanied tax cuts and growing enrollments. Meanwhile, student needs grew with immigration, concentrated poverty and homelessness, and growing numbers of students requiring second-language instruction and special education services. Although some federal support to high-need schools and districts was restored during the 1990s, it was not enough to recoup the earlier losses, and after 2000 inequality increased once again.
What's to Be Done?
Although some of America's schools are among the best in the world, too many have been neglected in the more than twenty years since the clarion call for school reform was sounded in the 1980s. Clearly we need more than a new set of national goals to mobilize a dramatically more successful educational system. We also need more than pilot projects, demonstrations, innovations and other partial solutions. We need to take the education of poor children as seriously as we take the education of the rich, and we need to create systems that routinely guarantee all the elements of educational investment to all children.
What would this require? As in high- and equitably achieving nations, it would require strong investments in children's welfare—adequate healthcare, housing and food security, so that children can come to school each day ready to learn; high-quality preschool to close achievement gaps that already exist when children enter kindergarten; equitably funded schools that provide quality educators and learning materials, which are the central resources for learning; a system that ensures that teachers and leaders in every community are extremely well prepared and are supported to be effective on the job; standards, curriculums and assessments focused on twenty-first-century learning goals; and schools organized for in-depth student and teacher learning and equipped to address children's social needs, as the community schools movement has done [see David L. Kirp, "Cradle to College," page 26].
Thus far, the Obama administration has taken affirmative steps on a portion of this agenda. Healthcare for children has been secured in the healthcare reform bill, and investments in early childhood education have been increased, although thus far with more emphasis on expanding access than investing in high-quality teaching. The president has increased federal funding for college, which had previously dropped to a level that precluded college-going for many qualified young people who couldn't afford it.
The administration's stimulus package, which made $100 billion available for schools, has stanched some of the acute hemorrhaging of resources and staff that would otherwise have occurred last year as a result of the recession. And the president has signaled his interest in more intellectually thoughtful assessments that "don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test but whether they possess twenty-first-century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity." This concern will be pursued through competitive grants to state consortiums that develop new assessments linked to new common core standards of learning in math and English.
The most touted aspects of the Race to the Top initiative, however, focus on peripheral issues rather than investments that have characterized major improvements in education systems at home and abroad. No nation has become high-achieving by sanctioning schools based on test-score targets and closing those that serve the neediest students without providing adequate resources and quality teaching. The implementation of Race to the Top has not required states to equalize funding to underresourced schools or even to maintain their existing commitments to these schools, many of which have had to slash budgets deeply, laying off tens of thousands of teachers, raising class size to more than forty in some cases and cutting successful programs.
In this context, schools serving high-need students are called on to raise achievement or face closure, despite evidence from the Consortium on Chicago School Research that closing more than 100 low-performing schools in that city and replacing them did not result in higher achievement.
Race to the Top requires that states expand charters but fails to assure quality and ensure access, despite evidence from the largest national study to date (conducted at Stanford University's Hoover Institution) that charter schools more frequently underperform than outperform their counterparts serving similar students; evidence from a UCLA study indicating that charters exacerbate segregation; and evidence from many studies that charters serve significantly fewer special education students and English-language learners. Some excellent charters do exist, along with excellent schools run by regular public school districts, but the law does not aim to spread excellence so much as it aims to change governance. Nations that are focused on spreading quality—like Singapore, Finland and Canada, for example—have developed strategies for schools to share successful practices through networks, creating an engine for ongoing improvement for the system as a whole.
Rather than establishing a framework for dramatically improving the knowledge, skills and equitable distribution of teachers, as high-achieving nations have done, Race to the Top encourages states to expand alternative routes to certification and to reduce coursework for prospective teachers, despite findings that hiring teachers from low-coursework alternatives reduces student achievement. Further, Race to the Top largely misses the critical investments needed to prepare and distribute excellent teachers and school leaders. Pay bonuses alone cannot succeed in recruiting and retaining teachers without efforts to create competitive, equitable salaries and working conditions. Removing low-performing teachers cannot improve teaching or student outcomes without strategies to ensure a stable supply of highly effective teachers who stay in their communities.
Teacher evaluation needs to become more rigorous, and rewards for effectiveness should be encouraged, but these strategies can succeed only if they are embedded in a system of universal high-quality preparation, mentoring and support—including adequately resourced and well-designed schools that allow and enable good practice. Rather than short-term incentives and quick fixes, federal policy should focus on building capacity across the entire system.
Achieving these conditions will require as much federal attention to opportunity-to-learn standards as to assessments of academic progress, and greater equalization of federal funding across states. It will require incentives for states to provide comparable funding to students, adjusted for pupil needs and costs of living, as well as incentives and information that can steer spending productively to maximize the likelihood of student success. Finally, an equitable and adequate system will need to address the supply of well-prepared educators—the most fundamental of all resources—by building an infrastructure that ensures high-quality preparation for all educators and ensures that well-trained teachers are available to all students in all communities.
While the administration's blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (whose most recent iteration was No Child Left Behind) carries some hints of such strategies, its framework still envisions competition and sanctions as the primary drivers of reform rather than capacity-building and strategic investments. If this remains the primary frame for federal and state policy, it is unlikely that we will rebuild good schools in every community.
To meet twenty-first-century demands, the United States needs to move beyond a collection of disparate and shifting reform initiatives to a thoughtful, well-organized and well-supported set of policies that will enable young people to thrive in the new world they are entering. We must also finally make good on the American promise to make education available to all on equal terms, so that every member of this society can realize a productive life and contribute to the greater welfare. This is the challenge that Obama pledged to take on, and the one we should hope he will vigorously pursue.
Press Release--Hispanics, High School Dropouts and the GED
Press Release
May 13, 2010
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Mary Seaborn
info@pewhispanic.org
202-419-3606
or
Paul Fucito
pfucito@pewresearch.org
202-419-4372
Hispanics, High School Dropouts and the GED
Hispanic high school dropouts are much less likely than white or black high school dropouts to attain a General Educational Development (GED) credential, according to a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. The GED is widely regarded as the best "second chance" pathway to college, vocational training and military service for adults who do not graduate high school. Just one-in-ten Hispanic high school drop-outs has a GED credential. By contrast, two-in-ten black high school drop-outs and three-in-ten white high school drop-outs has a GED, according to an analysis of newly-available educational attainment data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The relatively low level of GED credentialing among Hispanic high school dropouts is especially notable because Hispanics have a much higher high school dropout rate than do blacks or whites. Some 41% of Hispanics ages 20 and older in the U.S. do not have a regular high school diploma, versus 23% of comparably aged blacks and 14% of whites.
Among Hispanics, there are significant differences between the foreign born and the native born in high school diploma attainment rates and GED credentialing rates. Some 52% of foreign-born Latino adults are high school dropouts, compared with 25% of the native born. And among Hispanic dropouts, some 21% of the native born have a GED, compared with just 5% of the foreign born.
The report also analyzes labor market outcomes of Hispanic adults based on whether they dropped out of high school and lack a GED; have a GED; or obtained at least a regular high school diploma. Among the key findings, in 2008, Hispanic adults with a GED had a higher unemployment rate than Hispanic adults with a high school diploma - 9% versus 7%. However, Hispanic full-time, full-year workers with a GED had about the same mean annual earnings ($33,504) as Hispanic full-time, full-year workers with a high school diploma ($32,972).
The report, "Hispanics, High School Dropouts and the GED", authored by Richard Fry, Senior Research Associate, Pew Hispanic Center
May 13, 2010
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Mary Seaborn
info@pewhispanic.org
202-419-3606
or
Paul Fucito
pfucito@pewresearch.org
202-419-4372
Hispanics, High School Dropouts and the GED
Hispanic high school dropouts are much less likely than white or black high school dropouts to attain a General Educational Development (GED) credential, according to a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. The GED is widely regarded as the best "second chance" pathway to college, vocational training and military service for adults who do not graduate high school. Just one-in-ten Hispanic high school drop-outs has a GED credential. By contrast, two-in-ten black high school drop-outs and three-in-ten white high school drop-outs has a GED, according to an analysis of newly-available educational attainment data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The relatively low level of GED credentialing among Hispanic high school dropouts is especially notable because Hispanics have a much higher high school dropout rate than do blacks or whites. Some 41% of Hispanics ages 20 and older in the U.S. do not have a regular high school diploma, versus 23% of comparably aged blacks and 14% of whites.
Among Hispanics, there are significant differences between the foreign born and the native born in high school diploma attainment rates and GED credentialing rates. Some 52% of foreign-born Latino adults are high school dropouts, compared with 25% of the native born. And among Hispanic dropouts, some 21% of the native born have a GED, compared with just 5% of the foreign born.
The report also analyzes labor market outcomes of Hispanic adults based on whether they dropped out of high school and lack a GED; have a GED; or obtained at least a regular high school diploma. Among the key findings, in 2008, Hispanic adults with a GED had a higher unemployment rate than Hispanic adults with a high school diploma - 9% versus 7%. However, Hispanic full-time, full-year workers with a GED had about the same mean annual earnings ($33,504) as Hispanic full-time, full-year workers with a high school diploma ($32,972).
The report, "Hispanics, High School Dropouts and the GED", authored by Richard Fry, Senior Research Associate, Pew Hispanic Center
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