Democracy and Education in an Election Year

This is an election year, a crucial one for public education. Republican control of Congress and in many state legislatures has advanced a longstanding assault on democracy, only partially enacted—though devastatingly for our nation’s young people—through a comprehensive war on the public schools. The war began in the Reagan era of the 1980s and despite intervening Democratic administrations has continued largely without significant interruption to the present. The objectives of this war are privatization and corporatization of education, objectives that have nothing to do with the common good.

In their weakened state, in classrooms underfunded and overburdened, in an era when testing is valued more than teaching, the public schools will be hard pressed to teach children, and perhaps through them, their parents, about the electoral processes that are fundamental to life in a free society. Perhaps it is the pessimist in me, but I fear that teaching about American democracy may become history instead of current events unless public school educators take up this challenge. And the rest of us must support them, especially at the ballot box.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a revolutionary period in American history that saw major cultural strides in civil rights and public education. Those strides did not come easily, and the backlash was deadly. We remember the martyrs: John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and many more. President Lyndon Johnson persevered, however, and oversaw two vital pieces of legislation: the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Both have been attacked over the decades, most vigorously in recent years. 

The Bush era No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law was a reauthorization of ESEA that perverted many of the positive intentions of the original act and promulgated the current era of test mania that is damaging learning for all children and undermining American democracy. The latest reauthorization, Obama's Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), offers little improvement over NCLB, because it is a watered-down piece of legislation passed by a largely do-nothing Republican Congress.

It is clear that the United States desperately needs a new revolution to move forward a progressive agenda on education and civil rights to counter decades of regression on these issues. Free and fair public education, the only sure guarantor of American democracy, is not a topic that springs to the lips of most candidates, whether at the presidential level or lesser offices, and that is unfortunate. But it is an issue embedded in the very ground of all of today’s candidates’ positions. The choice is clear: a hoped for return to social and cultural progress, a movement we envisioned sixty years ago and only partially realized, or a continuation of the current path toward final destruction of the American experiment in democracy.

It is possible that a populist revolution is brewing in this election year. As a child of the Sixties I can only hope that is the case. It will take nothing less to reclaim America for us, its people, and to save American democracy from the destructive corporatist forces led by the monied elites, who form a burgeoning and unwelcome aristocracy in this land of, admittedly fraught, equality.

Postscript: This is my final post on this blog. Many others write on similar topics with eloquence, and I have decided that I must devote my efforts to other matters at this point in my life. Readers may be interested in two other blogs that I will continue to write: Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com/) and Living With...A Cancer Journal (http://livingwithcancerjournal.blogspot.com/). During the writing of this blog I have appreciated the support and comments from readers both in the United States and abroad. For this I am truly grateful.

Two Goals for the New School Year

Working for positive change in public education often seems like poling a flat-bottomed boat through a stagnant swamp; however, some glimmers of progress have appeared in recent months that, one hopes, are more than merely swamp gas. As fresh-faced school children head back to classrooms tidied and buffed over the summer recess, it seems to be an apt moment for concerned citizens, parents, and educators to rededicate ourselves to two goal that, if achieved, would be monumental in the future of American public education.

First, the pushback against mindless mass standardized testing has begun to gain momentum, and now is the time to push back even harder. Apart from the wasteful shunting of public money into the coffers of the corporate testing industry, mass testing demoralizes teachers and students because it narrows the curriculum and forces rote learning, which displaces higher-level thinking and the acquisition of true problem-solving skills. Mass testing codifies compartmentalized, segmented curricular structures that fail to take into account individual differences and discourage innovative teaching and learning. Questionable test results and their consequent misuse artificially segregate students, mischaracterize schools, and disproportionately affect the disadvantaged in multiple negative ways. The ills of mass standardized testing are now well documented, and proponents of continued use of such tests increasingly find themselves challenged to justify testing beyond the hollow platitudes about preparing students for “college and careers” and comparing achievement between schools, communities, states, and countries. The time is now to push for transparency and the reallocation of public money to support education for the common good, not the corporate good.

Second, the disastrous results of legislative “leadership” in education are more and more evident with each passing month. Education determined by political ideology is a weak system, particularly when the ideology is anti-democratic, anti-public, and anti-common good. It’s time to get politics out of education because the bottom line is that politics is driving educators out of schools. States, including Indiana, are suffering from artificial teacher shortages—artificial because there is no lack of teachers. Rather, teachers are being driven out of the profession because public education is under constant attack. Good teachers are fleeing public schools in the way that any sensible person would flee a war zone. Current conditions are not likely to encourage newcomers to enter the profession either. While many school problems can be laid at the statehouse door, local school boards and administrators are not blameless. Local school boards are communities’ education leaders, elected by local citizens not to be the lapdogs of the state legislature but, rather, to be the voice of the public school citizenry. The time is now to urge local officials to stand up for local concerns, to institute innovations locally that blunt the negative effects of legislative missteps, and, above all, to listen—not merely nod and smile—and truly respond to local concerns.

Neither of these goals is at all modest. They are massive. But they cannot remain unaddressed if we are not only to preserve public education for our democracy but also to reinvigorate public education for a brighter future for all.

Power, Politics, and High-Stakes Testing: Part 2

Note: This is the conclusion of a two-part post.

Part 2: Rhetoric and Political Power

Strip away the rhetoric used to describe high-stakes testing as a mechanism for school reform and the raw goals of such testing are revealed to be political power and ideological dominance. Authors Madaus, Russell, and Higgins (2009) comment that “high-stakes tests empower policymakers, who control the content and form of the test, to shape what and how teachers teach and students learn” (p. 101). The real bullies in education aren’t on the playground but in Congress, the statehouses, and similar seats of political and bureaucratic power.

The maxim that what gets tested is what gets taught is reified in a narrowing of the school curriculum in proportion to the amount of testing imposed on schools by federal and state mandates. High-stakes tests require an extraordinary, exclusionary focus if schools are to ensure their students’ success—not in terms of actual learning but rather in test-taking. To focus so much time on one subject, or narrow band of subjects, means that other subjects are pushed to the periphery because schools lack the capacity (time and money) to expand the school day in order to accommodate this added focus and still have sufficient time for other subjects.

One recent nationwide indicator is the Department of Education report, Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999 – 2000 and 2009 – 10 (Parsad, Spiegelman, and Coopersmith 2012). This is the decade of NCLB and it echoes still and, in fact, even more loudly. Comparing arts education availability from studies a decade apart, researchers found that visual arts instruction in elementary schools had declined from 87 percent to 83 percent, dance from 20 percent to 3 percent, and drama/theater from 20 percent to 4 percent (p. 5). Secondary school arts fared similarly: visual arts down from 93 percent to 89 percent, dance from 14 percent to 12 percent, and drama/theater from 48 percent to 45 percent (p. 9). Music across the decade stayed roughly the same at both levels.

Arts organizations decry the trend away from arts education, which has proven links to higher-level thinking and the advancement of learning in other subjects. CCSS skews learning, arguably as much as or more than previous standards movements because the Common Core is linked to and advanced by narrow standardized testing.

While political rhetoric flips logic on its head to assert that high-stakes testing leads to school improvement and higher student achievement, the facts are starkly at odds with this idea. Funding testing at the federal and state levels is a multimillion-dollar enterprise that shunts much-needed money into the corporate coffers of test developers, producers, and scorers and away from districts and schools, where it could be better used to improve instruction. Mandatory testing, which is sold to the uninformed public as good policy for schools and students, is not about education but competition—and a fundamental remaking of public education into a narrowly defined, corporatized, politicized form that is anything but “public” in a positive sense.

References

Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum. (2004). The Committee of Ten. Columbia, Mo.: Author.

Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education. (1918). Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, Bulletin, 1918, No. 35. Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education.

Madaus, G.F.; M.K. Russell; and J. Higgins.  (2009). The Paradoxes of High Stakes Testing: How They Affect Students, Their Parents, Teachers, Principals, Schools, and Society. Charlotte, N.C.: Information Age.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983, April). A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Parsad, Basmat; Maura Spiegelman; and Jared Coopersmith. (2012). Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999 – 2000 and 2009 – 10. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Education.

States’ Impact on Federal Education Policy Project (SIFEPP). (2009). Federal Education Policy and the States, 1945 – 2009: A Brief Synopsis. Albany: New York State Archives. http://www.archives.nysed.gov

Big Test

Remember when the term Big Oil was coined? It was actually popularized in print beginning in the 1960s. It encompasses the world’s five or six largest publicly owned oil and gas companies: BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, etc. The term has become a pejorative, linking the excesses and blunders of the oil giants to the negative effects they have had, from political manipulation to environmental damage. When people think Big Oil, they think of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989 or the Deep Horizon (BP) oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. Effects of both are still being felt.

Now we have Big Test. I use this term in the same manner as Big Oil, to describe a conglomerate of companies that, following the pattern of Big Oil, are in cahoots with politicians and policy makers to shape a sphere of influence to their own ends, with little regard to who gets hurt along the way. Big Test is doing the same “environmental” damage in schools as Big Oil did along the shores of Alaska and the Gulf Coast. People and institutions are being negatively affected as testing companies are raking in unprecedented profits. Unlike Big Oil, however, Big Test is not yet being held accountable for the damage they are doing.

Schools are suffering from a massive “test spill.” Students are being enslaved—and I use that term intentionally—by seemingly unrelenting tests that deprive students of real learning time and rob schools of funds they need that are, instead, now diverted into the deep corporate pockets of Big Test. The message from the disasters promulgated by Big Oil should offer cautionary tales for citizens, parents, and concerned educators. Big Test needs to be called to account—before further damage is done to children, schools, and the very future of our democracy.

(As a side note: I use the term Big Test in a different manner from Nicholas Lemann, who wrote The Big Test: The Secret History of American Meritocracy, which is about the SAT. Lemann’s book, written more than a decade ago, is worth another look, however, in light of recent maneuverings by the College Board. Readers may be interested in a recent New York Times article, “The Story Behind the SAT Overhaul,” in the Sunday, March 6, 2014, issue. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/magazine/the-story-behind-the-sat-overhaul.html?_r=0)

Corporatizing Testing

Valerie Strauss begins a recent commentary in the Washington Post’s “Answer Sheet” (April 20, 2013) this way: “Talk about corporate-based school reform. New high-stakes standardized tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards are featuring plugs for commercial products.” Then, in the very next sentence, she undermines her own argument by saying, “And the companies didn’t have to pay a penny.”

It would be different—and far more damning—if Pearson were making money à la Hollywood movies by charging for product placement, or what is also called embedded marketing. Ever wonder why your favorite movie star is drinking Pepsi instead of Coca-Cola? It’s because Pepsi paid for the product placement, not Coca-Cola.

Companies are not paying Pearson, according to Strauss. Therefore, Pearson’s claim that the tests merely use authentic text, brand names and all, is accurate—to a point. They are being slightly disingenuous, however, if we are meant to believe that brand-name mentions are wholly unavoidable.

In fact, Pearson is following a long history of creeping commercialism in public schools. Once upon a time, school boards, parents, and educators fretted over allowing certain commercial products into the public schools. Vending machines initially were resisted as much on grounds that their placement implied acceptance and promotion of the products they sold as over the issue that the products were void of nutritional value. The machines were widely adopted anyway, and next some cafeteria foods, particularly at high school and college levels, were outsourced to brand-name companies, such as Pizza Hut.

Readers may remember some of the controversy surrounding the launch in 1990 of Chris Whittle’s Channel One, which broadcasts specially prepared television news in middle and high schools. Whittle’s enterprise provides the TVs—and the commercials. While critics decry Channel One for “forcing” students to watch ads, supporters argue that the ads keep the programs running and pay for the TV leases.

There should be little doubt in anyone’s mind that brand-name product placement and “embedded” advertising in public schools implies endorsement of the goods and services on offer. Conspiracy theorists might argue that commercialization is a slippery slope toward even more sinister forms of corporatization of public education, such as the siphoning off of public monies to support vouchers for private schools and the selling off of “failing” public schools to corporations that promise but often don’t deliver a turnaround.

The conspiracy theorists might even be right.