Rebooting Public Education

The other day my year-and-a-half-old refrigerator stopped cooling. The lights were on but the compressor wasn’t working. I never actually lived with a true “icebox” but I did live in an apartment with a gas-powered refrigerator once. That was a revelation, that a refrigerator could have a pilot light. But mostly my experience has been with simple electric refrigerators. So when the repairman came and simply unplugged my refrigerator and then plugged it back in and it started working again, I was dumbfounded.

He explained that sometimes the refrigerator’s computer locks up and needs to reboot. A computer in my refrigerator? Wow! Actually, he said, it has three, and he pointed to the various locations. So many things are computer controlled these days. It hadn’t occurred to me that my refrigerator was one of them. But it stands to reason. My desktop computer locks up, I reboot. My iPad goes wacky, I power off and back on. A smartphone app seizes up, I turn off the phone and then turn it back on. Simple reboots usually solve the problems.

Maybe we need to apply this strategy to public education, which is struggling under a national—politically motivated, not educationally motivated—test mania and suffering the consequences of rightwing efforts to privatize and corporatize the schooling of American children, much directly or indirectly intended to further impoverish the poor and enrich the already wealthy. Maybe the best way to move forward would be to reboot.

Imagine simply stopping testing, maybe not forever but for a while, long enough to rethink why and how we might assess student learning and judge the quality of schools and teachers on bases of human social-emotional-intellectual development, rather than political ideology and rightwing economic dogma. Public education is malfunctioning, like a computer app locked up because we’ve tried to do too much too quickly and too confusingly. Time for a reboot.

Time to turn off the craziness of testing, testing, testing. Time to turn off the craziness of so-called standards that are based on political ideology, not human development. Time to turn off the craziness of vouchers, charters, and other efforts to diminish and impoverish public education in favor of privatized, corporatized, elitist schooling. Time to step back and let public schools operate without political interference. Instead, how about letting parents, educators, and students get on with learning on their own, using firsthand knowledge and experience instead of the secondhand ideology and second-guessing by pundits and politicians?

How about a five-year moratorium on all the craziness? Wouldn’t that be a reboot worth trying? It might just fix public education. And it might give us a chance as a nation to repair American democracy, which depends on a robust, fully functioning public education system.

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.)

Common Core: 2. The Myth of Failing Schools

Federal involvement in public education gained ground in 1979 with the establishment of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), which enlarged the federal role in education. Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, ED was controversial. Critics saw it as an intrusion into state and local affairs, and Ronald Reagan ran for the presidency on a pledge to dismantle the new department. However, he was not able to fulfill that campaign promise as president. Instead, Reagan appointed a National Commission on Excellence in Education, which, in 1984, published A Nation at Risk.

The publication of the commission report was a seminal event. It triggered an avalanche of federal, state, and local “reform” initiatives and fueled a largely erroneous sense that American schools were failing—a belief that persists to the present day despite evidence to the contrary. In fact, in 1990 the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico was commissioned to document the decline of American education reported in A Nation at Risk. What the scientists found was contradictory data. However, the Sandia Report was suppressed at the time. It eventually found its way into print as “Perspectives on Education in America, An Annotated Briefing, April 1992,” in the May-June 1993 issue of Journal of Educational Research, an academic journal little read by the general public. Thus the myth of failing schools persists.

Meanwhile, in the late 1980s, then president George H.W. Bush had convened an “education summit,” which ironically included no educators, cognitive scientists, or professionals in teaching and learning. The summit was entirely populated by state governors, who met to determine the future course of American education. Out of this and subsequent meetings the “standards-based education reform” movement rooted and grew.

The standards movement gained its next major version in the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1994. During the 1990s national subject-matter associations, such as the National Council of Teachers of English, were commissioned to develop standards for all subject areas and grades. Goals 2000 provided funding to states and communities to develop local curricula based on content and achievement standards set by the various subject-specific organizations. The goals themselves were not intended to be a curriculum.

Authorization for Goals 2000 was withdrawn with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), signed by President George W. Bush in 2001. Significantly, NCLB required states to develop assessments in basic skills in order to receive federal school funding. This requirement vastly expanded the use of large-scale, high-stakes, standardized tests in public schools across the nation. NCLB thereby also expanded the federal role in public education through testing, annual academic progress reporting, and changes to teacher qualifications and funding.

The Common Core State Standards go a step further toward restricting state and local authority by setting federal standards in place backed by national standardized tests that have yet to be fully developed.

Common Core: 1. Getting Started with Standards

Following is the first of eight posts that examine the Common Core State Standards.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), despite the word state in the title, define a national curriculum in two subject areas: mathematics and English language arts. The new standards for students in kindergarten through twelfth grade have the potential to profoundly affect education across the United States. Forty-five states, the District of Columbia, four territories, and the Department of Defense Education Activity, which operates schools on American military installations worldwide, have adopted them at this writing. Some states, however, are rethinking whether adoption is a good thing.

CCSS has generated both confusion and controversy. One way to dispel some of the confusion is to look at the origins of these standards. They are, in fact, merely the latest in a long line of attempts to define the purposes of education and to establish guidelines for what student should learn.

A starting point for the modern era is 1892. That year the National Education Association appointed a “Committee of Ten,” composed mainly of college presidents and led by Harvard University’s Charles Eliot. The controversy at the time was whether high school should be seen as an end in itself or as a preparation for higher education. The committee concluded that all schools should maintain a single rigorous academic curriculum and that all students should master it. This is essentially the same philosophical stance as the new CCSS.

A shift from this stance occurred in 1918, when the National Education Association published the “Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education.” These principles endorsed different curricula for different students with a focus on the whole child. They were a reaction to the rigidity of the single-minded academic curriculum promulgated by the Committee of Ten that was seen as detrimental, in particular, to immigrants and a cause of the increasing dropout rate during that era because the one-size-fits-all curriculum failed to consider the effects of students’ socioeconomic status. Poverty disadvantages students, and the rigid curriculum did nothing to address this problem. A more child-centered curriculum could better take into account external issues, such as poverty.

The next landmark occurred in 1940, with the culmination of the “Eight-Year Study” by the Association for the Advancement of Progressive Education, which had taken up the charge laid down by the Cardinal Principles. The study found that students engaged in a progressive education programs fared better than their counterparts in traditional programs. Progressive students attained better grades, demonstrated more intellectual curiosity, and participated in more student groups.

The progressive wave was challenged during the national hysteria following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, when America saw itself as falling behind in what was emerging as the space race during the Cold War period. In 1958 the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) was passed. This law provided funds to states and local school districts to beef up the teaching of mathematics, the sciences, and foreign languages. NDEA was the first major federal initiative in public education, which was (and remains by law) largely a state and local responsibility.

The 1960s and 1970s saw a resurgence of progressive education with many critics decrying the traditional curriculum as a perpetuation of social inequality. The U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 had declared that state laws establishing racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which had set in place a “separate but equal” doctrine that proved to be unworkable. The Brown decision was a tipping point for the civil rights movement that played out over the next two decades and added impetus to the revival of progressive education.