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.

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 

Competition Is Harming Our Schools

The predominant theme in our education system has been—and is—competition. Schools in one neighborhood are compared to schools in another, town against city, state against state, and our nation against all others. Often such comparisons are ill conceived and without merit. Nevertheless, the idea that competition is good is conventional wisdom. Policymakers at every level promote competition, embedding it in the very language of policy. “Race to the Top” is a prime example.

However, that phrase and the concept behind it are incompatible with a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats philosophy presumed to be foundational in American public education. Horace Mann, the “father of American education,” believed that the common school would be the “great equalizer.” That ideal has yet to be realized.

Politicians and policy leaders prize the sentiment. The titling of No Child Left Behind bears witness. But NCLB rhetoric rang hollow from the beginning. No broad-based, legitimate effort has been made over the past three decades and more to address affirmatively the fundamental public education goals of equality and equity, regardless of rhetorical pandering to these notions by pundits, politicians, and policymakers of every stripe. Public schools today are more poorly funded than ever, the gap between haves and have-nots has widened, many schools are experiencing resegregation, and the culture of competition ensures that the education playing field will never be level.

Technology is inextricably intertwined in today’s education. From the federal office to the local classroom, from attendance software to apps on students’ tablet computers, technology is integral to schooling at all levels. Technology proponents, echoing Horace Mann, have envisioned technology as the “great equalizer.” Often, to the contrary, education technology is being coopted to serve the national mania for competition. The use of technology to support testing based on the Common Core State Standards is an example.

Sarah Irvin Belson, dean of the American University School of Education, Teaching, and Health, recently commented, “If reformers were interested in making real change, they would address the real issues that underpin the school quality, such as increasing teachers’ professional authority and encouraging high quality curriculum and instruction (note that standards do not equal curriculum). Current school reformers (including the current secretary of education, Arne Duncan) are focused on a misguided principle that competition and disclosure can be a powerful tonic for school improvement.”*

All available evidence points in precisely the opposite direction. Unbridled competition is harming our schools and the children they serve.

(*Quoted in Valerie Strauss, “Is Competition in Education Killing Our Sense of Community?” Washington Post, June 17, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/17/will-competition-in-education-kill-our-sense-of-community/)

The High Cost of Bad Tests

The Common Core State Standards are euphemistic on several levels. They are national in character and were made with little to no real input from educators in the various states. And they are detailed to such an extent as to create a set of curricula rather than standards per se. The Common Core is a national curriculum—plain if not simple.

Layered on this curriculum is a panoply of mandated tests, most intended to be administered on computers using the Internet. The notion of scattershot high-stakes testing is a bad idea largely conceived by a few misguided, well-intentioned politicians and a large number of not-so-well-intentioned lawmakers who are hell-bent on destroying public schools in their end run on democracy. The latter group wants to further corporatize the United States and get rich(er) doing it. I will assume that readers already know that this is bad public policy, regardless which side of it they’re on.

If the test pushers have their way, they will certainly enrich the testing corporations. Yesterday one of the two federally funded national testing consortia, PARCC (the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) released a new cost estimate for its testing vehicles: $29.50 per student. Fortunately, there’s some pushback. As might be imagined, this news has infuriated already irritated state education folk, even those nominally in favor of bad tests. Georgia has been particularly incensed.

Georgia’s Criterion-Referenced Competency Test costs $8 to $9 per student and covers five subjects. PARCC’s tests cover only two subjects at a cost three times higher. Consequently, Georgia has announced that it is withdrawing from PARCC. If three more states follow suit, PARCC’s $186 million in federal funding with be in jeopardy, which wouldn’t be a bad thing. Kentucky and North Dakota both withdrew in June.

Oklahoma, earlier this month, didn’t officially withdraw from PARCC but decided to design its own tests. Officials estimated that they could save at least $2 million a year using the DIY approach.

Indiana is a “governing state” in PARCC, but since Indiana lawmakers voted to “pause” the implementation of the Common Core, there has been a concomitant scaling back on participation in PARCC. Admirably, Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz said last month, “We will not be participating in consortiums that decide for us the cost of the test, the questions on the test, the cutoffs. Indiana will be doing that on its own.”

High cost is propelling a rethinking of Common Core testing. What we need next is some additional rethinking about the whole question of whether mass high-stakes tests offer any real value at all. (Spoiler alert: They really don’t.)

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.