It's Politics

Anyone who was surprised by the news that Tony Bennett, Indiana’s former superintendent of public instruction, fudged his own school grading system to favor a heavy campaign donor’s charter school hasn’t been paying attention. Sadly, it can be put down to political corruption. The corrupting influence of politics on education is not an absolute; it may be widespread but I won’t argue that it’s pervasive. But happens whenever politicians have an agenda in place of a moral compass.

Increasingly, across the United States, decisions about what should happen in schools are being systematically taken out of the hands of parents and educators. Politicians at every level are attempting to run the nation’s schools, something most of them simply are not qualified to do. But the political exercise of ineptitude is too tempting for some to pass up, particularly if their agenda puts corporations (the “people” who fill their campaign chests and, in some cases, line their pockets) before kids.

Politicians routinely overstep their mandate, their authority, and their common sense to meddle in schools chiefly in two ways:

Offering Simplistic “Solutions” to Complex Challenges. Politicians are not educators, and educators who become politicians swim with sharks. Survival sometimes can seem to be a matter of becoming a shark. Fundamentally, then, politicians are office-holders with a limited amount of time to get done anything they want—or have promised—to accomplish. That pressure argues for simplistic solutions instead of thoughtful, complex responses to complex challenges. Tony Bennett’s A-to-F grading system is a prime example. One of my early articles, from the 1970s, dealt with designing report cards that really communicate. Forty years later, we’re still stuck with A to F. Ramping up a poor but entrenched system for sorting students as if we were sorting eggs to sort schools in the same manner was, and is, simplistic. The challenge of discerning whether individual schools are doing a good job of teaching their students and serving their community is complex and deserves thoughtful, locally driven consideration. Instead, Bennett touted a dumbed-down, top-down “system” that offered little more than a crap shoot.

Letting Money Trump Morality. Then Bennett got tripped up by his own scheme. That meant it was time to load the dice. The charter school of a major funder—one who could donate hundreds of thousands of dollars to Bennett’s campaign chest and did, thanks to Indiana’s nonexistent campaign-funding laws—“earned” a C. Oops! Big oops! Or as Bennett put it, according to emails obtained by the Associated Press, “Oh, crap.” So, rather than offend a big donor, Bennett parked his morals outside the door and followed the scent of money into a dark closet where he changed that C to an A. It’s all a bit circular at this point, isn’t it? By letting money trump morality, Bennett went back to the previous tactic, grasping at the simplistic solution—simply changing the grade—rather than dealing with the complex questions his mindless grading system ignores.

It would be peachy if we could just believe the old playground maxim that “cheaters never prosper.” Unfortunately, in the politics of public education, they sometimes do. Indiana voters may have booted Bennett out of office, but he wasn’t pounding the pavement looking for a new job for long. Florida’s Governor Rick Scott snapped him up to head that state’s public education system. Of course, that was before the Bennett debacle hit the proverbial fan. Right about now, Governor Scott might be thinking, “Oh, crap.” But then, it’s Florida. So maybe not.

ADDENDUM: Shortly after I posted this, news arrived that Tony Bennett had resigned his position in Florida. Governor Scott will have to find another politician to mismanage the state's schools. Novel idea: Find a real educator.

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.)

Keeping It Civil

Divisiveness, rancor, and polarization have become the hallmarks of the current era in American political discourse. While a radical left still exists, it is largely silent within the liberal segment of the U.S. polity. In contrast, the radical right is strident and aggressive, often drowning out the voices of moderation within conservative ranks. Alternatives to this dominant continuum are negligible—or at least unheard in the torrent of expressed factionalism.

Many people, educators among them, lament the discordant incivility prevalent today in public gatherings, on talk radio and television, in advertising, and elsewhere. Consequently, for educators struggling to counter this negativity and foster civil discourse, following are a few resources that may be helpful.

Civil Politics

http://www.civilpolitics.org

Nastiness, Name-calling, & Negativity

(Allegheny College Survey of Civility and Compromise in American Politics)

http://sites.allegheny.edu/civility/

Center for Civil Discourse

(University of Massachusetts Boston)

http://www.umb.edu/civil_discourse

National Institute for Civil Discourse

(University of Arizona)

http://nicd.arizona.edu

Civil Discourse in the Classroom (Teaching Tolerance)

http://www.tolerance.org/discourse

“Reclaiming Civil Discourse” (Bill Moyers Journal, PBS)

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2008/09/reclaiming_civil_discourse.html

Center for Civic Education

http://new.civiced.org

School Librarians Under Attack

Under what scenario have school librarians now become disposable? Used to be—and still ought to be—the school library was the heart of the school, often literally positioned at the architectural center of the school building. Just as our nation's public libraries have been a democratizing essential of civic life by giving free access to knowledge regardless of socioeconomic status, so, too, our public school libraries have been vital in extending equal access to learning to students from all backgrounds.

So, is the attack on school librarians part of the corporatizing of public schools? If public schools can be further undermined by eliminating some professional educators—which is what librarians are—then will it be even easier to condemn the public schools and widen the gap between monied education "haves" and the impoverished education "have-nots"?  Pretty slick. Mischaracterize librarians as mere shushers and book-shelvers, and it's easy to advocate replacing them with lower-cost nonprofessionals.

Why bother? Why not just get rid of libraries altogether? Oh, wait! That's already happening. After all, everything in books can now be found on the Internet. Schools are beginning to transition away from bricks and mortar—or volumes and shelves, in this case—to virtual libraries. Is that why some policy makers and short-sighted school people think we don't need librarians, simply because the form of library resources is in transition?

Let's think about that. I'm sure there was hand-wringing when papyrus and parchment replaced all those tidy clay tablets, and then the scroll lovers probably wept when codex came into vogue. Well, now codex may be giving some ground to digital. None of those transitions eliminated the need for librarians. In fact, precisely the opposite is a more logical conclusion. In the uncertain territory of Digital Age libraries, "collections" stretch the very definition of that word, and professional librarians are more necessary than ever.

School librarians today are called on to undertake all of the traditional professional responsibilities attached to that career and to add a few new ones, such as vetting digital resources. They are certainly not merely shelvers and shushers. They are digital curators, a role that is vitally important if students and teachers are to take full advantage of the vast educational resources now available in true Digital Age schooling. 

As Joyce Kasman Valenza notes in School Library Monthly, "Librarians are uniquely qualified to curate. School librarians are perhaps most ripe for this function, because they understand the curriculum and the specific needs and interests of their own communities of teachers, administrators, learners, and parents." Seems as though that's an excellent reason to keep and to nurture school librarians, not get rid of them.

Critics act as though librarians are artifacts of the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. School librarians are architects of the future. 

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.