Citizen New Year's Resolutions

It’s a new year and so it seems to be a good time to make some resolutions with regard to education and a citizen’s responsibilities. In a free society parents with children in school are not the only stakeholders in education. Every citizen is a participant—and must be an active participant—in ensuring that our future citizens receive an education that empowers them to maintain our democratic way of life. Thomas Jefferson said as much in several ways, notably, “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”

To this end I would propose five citizen resolutions for education in 2016. As citizens we should resolve:

To uphold and advance our national commitment to effective, freely and fairly available public education. The public schools remain the best safeguard of democracy, and efforts to undermine public education, such as underfunding public schools and shunting public money into private education and corporate endeavors, must be viewed fundamentally as attacks on American democracy.

To ensure that all children, adolescents, and young adults are provided with educative experiences that enlarge their knowledge and understanding in ways that resonate both with the needs of our free society and with their individual interests, talents, and abilities. Narrowly defined, overly prescribed curricula inhibit personal development and should be anathema to free public education that is not solely in service to the state but, rather, is conceived to accommodate diversity in all dimensions as befits a fully developed nation.

To advocate for and work toward true safety for the nation’s young people, which means addressing safety issues across many dimensions, such as working for effective gun control to reverse the gun violence that has plagued the United States in recent years and working to establish and maintain learning spaces in which students are safe from prejudicial mistreatment and bullying related to racism, homophobia, or other detrimental conditions.

To strive through active engagement in democratic processes to ensure that elected officials at every level of government understand the importance of effective public education and work to craft laws and policies that commit resources, both real and philosophical, to the advancement of the public schools. Concomitant in this work must be real commitment by our elected officials to listen to the public they represent and to strive to act in a manner consistent with the public’s desires.

Finally, to work toward more appropriate use of standardized and other forms of testing, uses that truly contribute to the improvement of education. Mindless, mandated, mass testing, which has become rampant, is a misuse of instructional time and diminishes the educative experience. Moreover, the misuse of test results unfairly characterizes students, educators, families, neighborhoods, and communities and is a state-sponsored means to sort and select that often disadvantages the already disadvantaged, such as racial minorities and the poor.

None of these resolutions will be easy to keep or easy to accomplish. But the effort to enact these resolutions is worth making.

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.

Purpose, Please?

Where is the purpose-driven curriculum? It’s an elusive concept that loading on more so-called common core standards and high-stakes tests will not make evident.

There’s a cartoon of a man coming home from work, saying to himself, “Well, there’s another day I didn’t use algebra.” In fact, most days most people don’t use algebra or another other form of higher mathematics. Some days we don’t even use basic arithmetic. And yet we have enshrined mathematics as sacrosanct. Why? Because it helps students learn how to think in another language, to transfer learned concepts from one context to another. Those are actual purposes for teaching advanced mathematics. Calculus, for the vast majority of people, is not a life skill; thinking is. Teaching thinking skills is a fundamental purpose of education.

The overwhelming emphasis on reading and mathematics skills, minutely detailed in standards and curricula and tested ad nauseam using high-stakes, life-altering exams, trivializes these subjects in the same way that curricular neglect denigrates and trivializes everything else, from the arts to civic education. The actual purposes of education are lost in a morass of trivia.

We spend an enormous amount of time and effort, paper and ink, to answer the question, How should we teach mathematics? The real question is, Why? Why should we teach mathematics, literature, the arts, civic education, and everything else? Why questions lead to purpose statements, which in turn should guide standards setting and curriculum development. Modern “reform” efforts don’t start here and so put the cart before the horse. It’s hardly any wonder that they don’t get anywhere.

What if we made Why? the starting point for every conversation about education—what we teach, how we evaluate students and teachers, and all the rest? If we can’t come up with an honest, important purpose, then maybe we should stop right there—before we muck around and make things worse instead of better.

Is Resistance Really Futile?

Public school people—teachers to a lesser degree because they have less power, administrators and school boards to a greater degree because they have more power—have collaborated in the assault on public education by policy makers bent on privatizing and corporatizing truly public schools out of existence. Resistance is necessary, though difficult to be sure. But is it futile? I don’t believe so.

What if, for example, school people stopped buying into the notion that school curricula must, in our standardized test-driven era, be reduced to teaching to the test? School “leaders” have forced the operational notion on many classroom teachers—and convinced many parents—that tests measure excellence and, thus, to achieve excellence all teaching must be concentrated directly on succeeding at the tests. In other words, teachers are compelled to teach to the test. Some teachers do this willingly; others are scared not to. This attitude narrows curricula, cutting out important learning and, in fact, diminishing learning in precisely those areas that are the focus of testing.

Simply put, teaching to the test doesn’t work. So why don’t we stop doing that and, instead, teach well-rounded curricula that allow students to excel in areas that truly interest them while gaining the so-called basics that are tested by the invasive, over-priced tests foisted on schools by misguided (and, in some cases, not even well-meaning) policy makers?

Explicating the ills of teaching to the test would take more space than is practical in this blog and so I’ll point readers to two worthwhile articles. The first is “How Standardized Testing Damages Education,” a July 2012 update on FairTest, The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, at http://fairtest.org/. Because international comparisons are so important to policy makers, however ill-conceived and misused such comparisons are, it is worth noting in this report: “The U.S. is the only economically advanced nation to rely heavily on multiple-choice tests. Other nations use performance-based assessment to evaluate students on the basis of real work such as essays, projects and activities. Ironically, because these nations do not focus on teaching to multiple-choice and short-answer tests, they score higher on international exams.”

A second article is Craig Jerald’s “Teach to the Test? Just Say No,” a July 2006 article on Reading Rockets at http://www.readingrockets.org/article/26096. The article is even more pertinent today than it was nearly a decade ago. Jerald writes, “It is time to overturn the common assumption that teaching to the test is the only option schools have when faced with high-stakes testing. Over-reliance on ‘drill and kill’ and test-preparation materials is not only unethical in the long-term but ineffective in the short-term.”

Resistance to the pervasive yet unfounded notion that standardized tests must perforce control curricula and teaching must become a priority of school people. Absent a reassertion that teaching is much, much more than testing—or teaching to the test—public schools will continue along a path to obsolescence and eventual abandonment as thinking parents seek alternatives and rapacious policy makers jump in to offer privatized, corporatized schools that are the antithesis of public education for the common good of American democracy.

Power, Politics, and High-Stakes Testing: Part 1

Note: This is a two-part post. References can be found at the conclusion of Part 2.

Part 1: Evolving Standards and Curriculum Development

Standards movements have cycled through schools and statehouses regularly, the latest in the succession often repudiating its predecessor. In 1894, to pick an arbitrary starting point, the Committee of Ten, a group of well-known scholars, called for a rigorous academic curriculum for all high school students, regardless of whether the students were college bound. This overturned a prior focus, namely that high schools were specifically for the college bound (Center for the Study of Mathematics Curriculum 2004). The Progressives came along twenty years later in the form of a commission appointed by the National Education Association, which largely repudiated the Committee of Ten’s work and issued its own “Cardinal Principles” (Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education 1918). And so it has gone across the decades.

U.S. reaction to the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, for instance, triggered a new look at the school curriculum and flipped the prevailing focus on low-achieving students to concentrate on the needs of above-average students in order to win the space race. But something new happened this time: The fix came not from educators but from politicos—an amalgam of legislators and bureaucrats at federal and state levels. This was an era when an already slightly expanding role of the federal government in education was further enlarged. An example is the hurriedly passed National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958, which funneled unprecedented funds into public education (SIFEPP 2009). In the 1960s Johnson’s Great Society initiative turned the focus back toward the underserved and gave us the first incarnation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

Some standards movements have been helpful, others harmful to schools and students. But virtually all such movements in the last seventy years or so have begun from a premise that schools and educators are on the wrong track and so politicians, policy makers, and pundits need to step in and set things right. A stunningly ill-considered product of this thinking was the 1983 publication, A Nation at Risk, with its infamous declaration that the nation was facing a “rising tide of mediocrity” (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). Although debunked repeatedly in the years since its publication, the Reagan administration-appointed National Commission on Excellence in Education’s condemnatory report not only spurred a new round of school improvement initiatives but also ramped up various legislatures’ interest in directing the course of public education, in large measure through increased oversight that could be achieved indirectly by increased testing. At the federal level one result was NCLB and its iterations in the states.

Thirty-plus years after A Nation at Risk the momentum to control schools through testing has increased, and local control by parents and teachers has markedly decreased. A recent uptick has been the promulgation in most states of new high-stakes tests, led by those mandated by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), a wolf-like curriculum and sheep-like standards clothing.

Part 2: Rhetoric and Political Power