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.

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.

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.

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.