Not All Politicians Are Elected

It may seem as though I am painting all politicians with a broad stroke, and indeed I am, with some justification. Public education is under attack, as it has been arguably since the 1980s. Rightwing politics is the politics of privatization and corporatization; and that ethos has dominated across elected governing bodies, from local school boards to state legislatures to the halls of Congress, for forty years. So-called local control has not ensured that public schools operate for the common good because local governance, even when a community’s elected officials are centrist or liberal in orientation, often is overwhelmed by regulations laid down at higher levels and mired in the multilayered bureaucracy by which they are enacted.

Local school bureaucracies are as much to blame for the woes of public education as is the distant machinery of state and federal entities. Superintendents and lower-rank administrators often rise in the profession because they are politically savvy, rather than because they are knowledgeable about education or committed to public schools that truly serve their local community. The common law phrase “in loco parentis” has been applied to teachers, in particular, and other persons or organizations who function “in the place of a parent.” I suppose the phrase “in locum a legislatore” might equally apply to a superintendent or other bureaucratic functionary who serves “in the place of a legislator.” I have written previously that school leaders need to stop viewing themselves as vassals of the state and instead reclaim their intended role as servants of their local community.

Parents and teachers are justifiably frustrated when they see firsthand the demise of learning and the destruction of potential among their children and students because local leaders, instead of listening to and acting on community concerns, are marching to the faceless corporate cadence of distant masters. For example, testing instead of teaching is a counterproductive strategy if real learning is the goal. But that’s a big “if.” Learning for too many politicians is not the goal at all; control is. And money pays for control. Public education is expensive, and more and more public money is being funneled into private enterprises where a significant portion is used to line politicians’ pockets to keep them voting “right,” which is invariably counter to the common good.

The simple solution—though one that is hard to attain—is to vote out those politicians at every level who act contrary to public will and the common good. But that’s not really enough. Local communities also need to root out bureaucrats who work “in locum a legislatore” and by so doing fail to serve the public that employs them.

World at War

As I write this on November 13, 2015, the city of Paris is under siege. Several coordinated terrorist attacks—at a stadium, at a restaurant, at a concert hall, and elsewhere—have taken place, and the death toll is mounting. This unfolding tragedy is further evidence, following the recent downing of a Russian airliner, suicide attacks across the Middle East, and other incidents small and large stretching back across years and locales, that we are a world at war. For most Americans, and much of the rest of the world, this new and very different war began with the attacks of 9/11 in the United States.

President George W. Bush on September 20, 2001, used for the first time the phrase, “war on terror.” He could just as well have declared war on abstraction. Terror is a conceptual strategy. It is, as every affected country has found, which includes a large and growing number of countries, notoriously difficult render concrete or specific. Who are the terrorists? Where are they? What end do they seek? It is impossible to attack an abstraction in the manner that wars have traditionally been fought.

The Bush administration and its allies did not fully understand this new concept of war and so pursued a substitute war, a war that could be fought on more or less traditional terms against a substitute enemy, one that turned out to be largely unconnected to the events that sparked America’s bloodlust. Many scholars believe that this action increased the likelihood of future terrorist attacks.

Moreover, on the domestic front these dual wars against abstract and concrete (if mistaken) enemies provided the impetus—excuse?—for limiting and in some cases overriding civil liberties. This is not an unusual consequence of war. However, it is a troubling one, especially as there is no end to the war on terror in sight. The national security versus civil liberties debate has paralleled the war on terror; neither has yet been resolved. Nor is resolution of this debate in sight.

This moment in history seems to be opportune to affirm, once again, the need to educate our citizenry about the nature of democracy, particularly when democracy itself is under fire. In the years since 9/11 the United States has experienced far more threats from domestic terrorists than from foreign terrorists, which conservatives, in particular though not exclusively, have consistently failed to acknowledge or to deal with in any manner other than to institutionalize restrictions on certain civil liberties, while ignoring pro-terrorism factors such as lax gun control. It is not within the scope of public education to school the general populace, but it is a specific responsibility to educate our future adults who will—or will not—defend and extend our democratic way of life.

Deborah Meier, writing some years ago in “Democracy at Risk,”* suggested that such education ought not to consist merely of more civic education classes. Rather, education in democracy should be a pervasive theme in our schools, one that is actively pursued across the educative experience. This will require, Meier avers, designing “all our courses to focus on the habits of mind that we think are most central to an informed and intelligent democratic citizenry, whether it’s math, history, literature, science, or the rules that govern us in our hallways.”

The Paris battles of this ongoing “war on terrorism” should move us to ponder anew the future of our democracy. As President Obama, responding to the situation in Paris, reminded the nation, “This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share.

Meier, in her article, wrote of the need for more pervasive civic education: “Democracy is embedded in the work of living in a socially shared space, and it becomes a habit as we go back and forth between living it and studying it, over and over, and then passing on our accumulated wisdom to the young.” The assault on Paris is a piquant reminder that we need to work harder to make democracy a habit.

*Meier, D. (2009). “Democracy at Risk.” Educational Leadership 66(8): 45-49.

Cut Score Shenanigans

Periodically (as in now, incidentally) controversy arises over the setting of “cut scores,” that point that demarcates pass from fail or several points denoting A from B, B from C, and so on. As any student can tell you, one point can mean the difference between success and failure. Where that point sits on the continuum of possible points, or scores, on a given test is critical—and, in fact, almost wholly arbitrary.

There is no such thing as an objective test. All tests are subjective, from the choice of test topics to the construction of individual test items, from the determination of correctness to the number of correct responses that constitutes success or proficiency or mastery or what have you. These are human decisions up and down the line and therefore subject to human idiosyncrasies.

Let’s say a test is composed of 100 items, thus 100 possible right answers. One group might decide that a score of 50 or more correct answers constitutes success. This group bases its cut score on one set of factors. However, because the factors that go into determining success are so numerous, it is impossible to consider all of them. Another group, basing its decision on a different but equally reasonable set of factors, might set 70 or more correct answers as the cutoff for success on the same test.

The point is that because cut scores are arbitrary—based on whatever criteria the decision makers choose to use or to ignore—they can be infinitely manipulated. Want to make a test look rigorous? Raise the cut score—in other words, make it harder to score enough points to pass. High failure rates often are referenced by our snake oil politicians and education “reformers” to say, “Look, we have high standards—and most student can’t meet them because schools are lousy.” But set the cut score lower and those same oily folk are likely to lament, ”Look, too many students are skating by, so our standards must be too low because our schools are lousy.”

If the same snake oil sellers want, they can (and do) change cut scores from year to year for essentially the same test, and so can make it appear as though students are scoring better or worse over time, depending on which result resonates with their ideology and political ambitions. Beating the drum of rigor to an accompanying wail about the lack of student “progress” on standardized achievement tests is the theme song of the ongoing manufactured crisis, to use Berliner and Biddle’s term, in public education—that “crisis” in which the public schools are the scapegoat for all of America’s ills.

Cut score shenanigans victimize test takers—students—and, through the misuse of standardized tests to judge teachers, rate schools, and characterize communities, a host of other stakeholders, all of whom are held hostage to ideologically driven policies regarding the importance of testing. Faith in the power of testing and the accuracy of cut scores is ill placed. It’s not going to cure any supposed ills of our public schools. It’s just snake oil, folks.

Note: For the uninitiated I recommend David Berliner and Bruce Biddle’s The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. It was published in 1996—twenty years ago next year—but it remains spot-on.

Combatting Racism

The election of a black President, far from demonstrating our progress as a society in eradicating racism, ripped away a polite veneer of covert racism to reveal the racist core of American culture. At no other time since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s have we been called on as a people to confront not only our racist past but also our racist present.

Racism to a large degree is founded on and fostered by ignorance, and ingrained by segregation. The public schools have never been a complete answer to the problem of racism, but they have, at times, been one mechanism for addressing issues of inequality, of which racism is an inherent element. In fact, schools in the distant past contributed to our national racism, for example, during the “separate but equal” period under doctrine set down by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It wasn’t until 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that “separate but equal”—a mantra as disingenuous as Fox News’ “fair and balanced”—was discarded and a national effort was begun to dismantle school segregation.

However, racial minority status and low socioeconomic status are strongly linked.  Any number of scholarly reports have affirmed a correlation between poverty and poor school achievement, and minority children are mostly likely to feel the consequences. Indeed, the spurious emphasis on evaluating students and schools on the basis of standardized test scores is a tacit expression of racism. Instead of spending thousands of dollars to line the coffers of testing corporations, a glance at existing economic census data would yield substantially the same results in identifying “successful” and “unsuccessful” schools. Superficial interpretations and misuses of test data are, at their center, racist—by result, if not (and I am being generous here) by intent.

“Success” is misdefined if it is characterized solely by test scores. Set aside the question of testing altogether, and the deck is still stacked against poor and minority students by the structure of our society. Public education has the potential to address racism but that potential is diminished during the current era because the persistent attacks on public education are imperiling its very existence. Overuse and misuse of standardized tests, union-busting, cuts in funding, and other destructive maneuvers by policy makers at every level have undermined public education and are contributing to the destruction of American democracy.

Public education could be a powerful instrument in the battle to eradicate racism. But public education in its currently weakened state is on life support. Until we, as a society, stop attacking and start rebuilding our nation’s public education system, we cannot realistically hope that our schools will be able to contribute meaningfully to the elimination of the racism that mars us as a society.

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.