Deducation US

From the most recent Deducation post

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:33:00 +0000

Jonathan Alter, Union Buster

Jonathan Alter, an unlikely candidate for enshrinement in the right-wing Hall of Fame, seems to be buying into the anti-labor, anti-education, anti-humanistic rhetoric of the far right with his latest editorial in Newsweek. , entitled "Obama's No-Brainer on Education."

He should know better. A regular contributor to the Huffington Post, a sometimes guest of Al Franken, the journalist who broke the "chads" story in the 2000 Florida Presidential election, the blogger who wisely counsels that the way out of the mess W. has led this country into is to "Listen to Gore," Alter adopts a disconcerting display of "no brains" by parroting right-wing lies and drivel about the NCLB. "Blah blah blah accountability blah blah teachers unions blah blah blah liberal blah blah blah outcomes blah blah blah assessment blah blah blah."

His reasoning would provide a course in logical fallacies and unexamined premises for any college freshman. Maybe we can even get a question on it on some state's NCLB test: In Jonathan Alter's piece ""Obama's No-Brainer on Education," how many logical fallacies does he commit? A. 5 B. 10 C. 15 D. More than 15

Let's take a couple. First, the famous sports analogy, much prized by conservatives. Quoting Bob Wise, president of an organization disingenuously calling itself the "Alliance for Excellent Education" which believes that the NCLB is not mean enough because it's only authorized to withhold federal funds form high schools that don't get its students to do well enough on the multiple-choice tests ("it lacks teeth at the high school level").

But I digress. According to Alter (the quotation is uncited, i.e., plagiarized), Wise says, "If I told you your basketball team finished in 25th place, you'd be outraged." Well, no, I wouldn't. Winning large numbers of basketball games just isn't that important in the larger scheme of things. Education is not a competition for first place, a basketball game writ large; it's a process that ensures all our citizens will be able to think and communicate effectively. Basketball isn't life; basketball isn't even very much like life. Many sports have a clear winner and a clear loser, no ambiguity, either-or, black and white. How is that like real life? Faulty analogy--one of the prime abuses of logic.

Another one: According to Alter (again, an uncited source), teachers unions should listen to one Andy Stern. Well, why should we listen to Andy Stern? Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't, but Alter doesn't really give us any reasons. We apparently should take Alter's word for it--listen to Andy Stern because he agrees with me on this.

Andy Stern, according to Alter, has said "Education is like any business. You need a return on investment. Outcomes do matter...." Well, no, education is not like a business, nor should it be. ExxonMobil is a business, Halliburton is a business, FreddieMac is a business, Enron was a business. Education is not a business. False analogy again, but even worse, it's another logical fallacy as well: the unproven minor premise. It's like saying "All white-tailed deer must die; Socrates is a white-tailed deer; therefore, Socrates must die." The goal of education is not to increase its shareholders' profits at all cost.

The conclusion Alter and Stern try to lead us to--teachers unions are bad--thus falls apart. But let's examine it even more closely. Union-busting is the oldest pastime for profit-hungry corporations. Unions fight to maintain civilized treatment for workers, a work environment where workers are free to contribute to the best of their abilities, receive a decent wage for their efforts, and remain relatively free of harassment and exploitation. Now more than ever a strong teachers union is crucial for this nation--they seem to be the only ones willing to stand up to a Congress and a President and a Secretary of Education who know nothing about education yet are more than willing to mindlessly impose their benighted ideologies on this nation's schools.

I have a challenge for Alter and Stern and Bush and Spellings and all the union-busters in Congress. Find an incompetent teacher and name him or her; lay out explicitly your criteria for the judgement of "incompetent" so we can see exactly where you're coming from and we can examine your criteria. Let's see who, according to you, deserves to be fired, and why. No generalizations, no abstractions, no easy pandering characterizations of "incompetent teachers." Name one.

The Return of Deducation

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:15:00 +0000

After a long hiatus, in which the NCLB has not been re-funded and I have taken the time to redesign the site using Wordpress, Deducation.US has returned. I'm back with weekly news and interpretation of forces destructive of American education. I'll try to keep up with my original pace of a new posting every week.

The fact that NCLB is temporarily unfunded should not lull us into sleep over it. It will return, perhaps in a slightly improved form, perhaps in a more dangerous form. But it too will be back.

If You Can't Beat Them, Test Them: NCLB as Child Abuse

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 18:07:00 +0000

In preparation for seeing Jonathan Kozol and hearing him speak in a couple of days in New York, I'm re-reading Shame of the Nation again, a dangerous thing to do as it never fails to make by blood boil. Just in passing, I'd like to know how many of the Presidential candidates have actually read it themselves (not just send a campaign aide to read it and prepare an executive summary). I suspect not one, surely not one of the Republican candidates, all of whom seem not to get it when it comes to education. But how interesting would it be to make them all read it and then respond in detail, in depth. How can anyone read this book and not immediately want to go out and dismantle NCLB? I'd be interested--really!--to see how supporters of the NCLB would respond. What kinds of arguments would they offer up in the face of this powerful book?

But that's not what I want to talk about today. In the Introduction to the book, describing the elementary school where he had his first full-time teaching job, Kozol writes, "Children who misbehaved were taken to the basement of the school where whippings were administered by an older teacher who employed a rattan whip which he first dipped in vinegar in order to intensify the pain...." (page 3). Now it's no surprise that corporal punishment has been used extensively throughout history, but, thankfully, more enlightened times have seen the almost total abandonment of the practice in this country. Even though "Every industrialized country in the world now prohibits school corporal punishment, except the U.S. and Australia" and nearly half of all American states still technically allow corporal punishment, a 2003 Position Paper of the Society for Adolescent Medicine notes "... during the past 30 years ... a growing outcry [has] emerged condemning such practices [i.e., corporal punishment] with school children as well." Reports of corporal punishment in our schools have declined.

Specific child abuse definitions vary by state, but certain federal guidelines overarch state policies: the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act defines Child Abuse and Neglect as "[a]ny recent act or failure to act on the part of a parent or caretaker which results in death, serious physical or emotional harm, sexual abuse or exploitation." It should be clear that schools qualify as "caretakers," so the only point of dispute would seem to be the "emotional harm" specification. While the theme of Shame of the Nation is not specifically that the NCLB is responsible for all bad things in education today but that for a variety of reasons current educational conditions for minorities have regressed to pre Brown v. Board of Education levels, the NCLB can be seen lurking behind much of the "restoration of apartheid schooling." And its results--tiny children reduced to to tears, forced extra drills in dumbed-down test exercises taking the place of elementary school recesses, a seething rage against the system or in some cases a complete numbness to the injustices, children taught to hate school, children deprived of the joy and light of the humanities and art and music--seem to me to qualify as "serious emotional harm." You could make a strong case that the NCLB meets the federal criteria for child abuse.

So, in the face of societal pressures not to beat children any longer, I just wonder if, given the mean-spiritedness of the conservative world-view in general that I've noted earlier and its highly visible instantiation in the NCLB, beating children into submission is being sublimated and resurfacing as testing and humiliating them into submission. The NCLB is the new vinegar-dipped whipping cane.

The Silence of the Dems

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:06:00 +0000

There's a lot going on in our country today, and the Presidential candidates have a lot to think about and a lot to talk about. Ending the war is number one, as well it should be. But that's just a short term goal--in a year or two we will not have the war to kick around anymore, though we have decades of recovering from this abomination mentally and spiritually to get through. We haven't even gotten over the Vietnam war. Health care and Social Security, a looming recession/depression, pervasive racism, the increasingly large gap between the rich and the poor, terrorism, and (my other most pressing issue) energy independence: all these are getting at least some attention from the candidates.

Yet the one issue that has crucial long-term implications for this country--the repeal of the NCLB--seems to be sliding into the background. The NCLB is a ticking time bomb planted by the Bush Administration, and its ticks are beginning to be increasingly ignored by the Democratic candidates. Edweek, in its November 6 article "The Next Education President?", writes, "But with the campaigns for the 2008 presidential nominations in full swing, few of the current candidates have laid out detailed strategies for improving the quality of American schools and increasing the knowledge and skills of the nation’s elementary and secondary students." And "Many political analysts expect education issues to remain a low priority during the primaries and in the general-election campaign."

Over the summer, it seemed as focus on the renewal of the NCLB and especially during the NEA Convention, when the candidates were trying to curry some favor with educators, there was a certain amount of awareness and lip-service from the candidates. I just searched YouTube for some candidates' video from the NEA convention and found a couple of interesting ones: Senator Clinton: "The test is becoming the curriculum"; and Senator Obama: "Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of the year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test." I confess that, for those few moments, at least, Hillary seemed to be more on top of what's wrong with the NCLB. But since then, in her public pronouncements and on her website, mostly silence on the matter. And the same with most of the other Democrats.

So what's the appeal of the NCLB for the voters or the constituencies or the financial backers that the major candidates are afraid to come out and say, with minor candidate Bill Richardson, "Scrap it!"?

When the Bush-NCLB timebomb goes off in 10 years or so, when today's sixth graders are beginning to enter the workforce, the voting ranks, major positions of power and authority and decision-making, we'll all look at each other, and say "how come everyone is so stupid? Why can't they think or imagine?" Because the NCLB has made us a nation of test takers, capable only of giving memorized answers that were correct ten years ago.

Wake up and speak up, Sens. Clinton, Edwards, and Obama.

Where the Candidates Stand

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 22:05:00 +0000

I've been away from the blog for a few weeks. Seems like nothing's happening on the NCLB front, with the exception of Jonathan Kozol's Hunger Strike. (By the way, the most distressing development in this is that Senator Ted Kennedy, a longtime friend of Kozol, is refusing to even return Kozol's calls now.)

<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZvZd8_wNm2c"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ZvZd8_wNm2c" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object> But a colleague recently sent me a link to a YouTube clip of John Edwards speaking on the NCLB, saying that this video had swung him over to the Edwards camp. It's powerful stuff, and Edwards is saying most of the right things. He's not saying repeal the NCLB, which he should be, but he seems to understand the immense problems the Act has occasioned and he's got a lot of good, if still rather vague, ideas about what to do.

He calls the NCLB "intrusive," and speaks of the absurdity of rewarding good schools that fall in their results but stay above the minimal competencies while punishing the underfunded and underperforming schools that make huge gains in their performances. Of the technocrats' mania for testing, he says, "the parameters of what we are measuring need to be more diverse."

So I decided to do a quick investigation of the other major candidates' positions on the NCLB.

First, Hillary Clinton does not explicitly mention it on her website. A summary by Margaret Paynich in the January 22, 2007, EdWeek says, "doesn't support school vouchers, supports types of performance pay, one-time testing for teachers - but no word yet on National Standards. My advice - don't hold your breath." In Clinton's publicly-released statement, she says, "While I firmly believe in the goals of the No Child Left Behind Act, the under-funding of this crucial law makes it impossible for teachers and schools to reach these goals." As I've noted previously, the only good thing about the NCLB is that it's underfunded, thus slowing down its rampage through American schools. So it seems that she's firmly behind the NCLB, not only its stated goals, which are indeed laudable, but its methods, which are dangerous. But in reality she is mostly vague, having chosen health care as the cornerstone of her candidacy.

Most disappointing to me is Barack Obama, whom I've supported from day 1 without, I guess, clearly seeing his position on the NCLB. Susan Ohanian's website (which, I should note in passing, is an excellent and thorough critique of NCLB--she has, I believe, coined the word "standardista" for people who maniacally preach standards). In her depressingly full section entitled "Outrages," she includes an article by Obama, "created by the Center for American Progress," which plays into the hands of the corporate technocrats who see the only function of education as enabling students to more fully participate in the "competition" for "global jobs." "Countries who are out-educating us today out-compete our workers tomorrow," he (or rather the Center for American Progress) writes. This is disappointing in two ways: first, that Senator Obama, as intelligent and articulate as he is (the two qualities I have admired in him), either isn't bold enough or wise enough to stand up to the corporate types who want to take over our educational system. Perhaps, it's just politicking, fence-sitting so as not to offend any powerful donors. Second, why is he allowing the Center for American Progress to write his position statements? Granted, the Center for American Progress is often progressive, and certainly sees itself as such, but its agenda is clearly economically-based--making good little workers out of our students. Its "State-by-State Report Card on Educational Effectiveness" is jointly written by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and contains troubling conclusions like "too many of our nation’s schools and students are unprepared for the demands of the 21st century’s knowledge-based economy" and "These shortcomings are unacceptable and spell trouble for the economic prospects of individual Americans and for the competitiveness of the country as a whole."

Then there's Governor Bill Richardson, who doesn't stand a snowball's chance of getting nominated. He writes, "I have a one-point plan for No Child Left Behind: Scrap it." Hooray for a voice of sanity.

And Dennis Kucinich, an original supporter of NCLB, who has seen the damage it's doing and has changed his position: "Yes, I would [throw it out now]. I would replace it with [...] a new educational structure where the focus would be on helping to bring forth the creativity of our children in stressing arts and language, music; to invite the participation of educational philosophers and psychologists and administrators and teachers and parents and children; to take a new focus on our education, to stop this incessant direction of trying to make us a nation of test-takers, of putting the pressure on teachers to teach to the test, and then school districts depending on the results of those tests for their funding."

It's trendy for the leading candidates to support the NCLB in general and bemoan the fact that the Bush administration's major failing is underfunding it. Only the second-tier candidates, who presumably can speak their minds without fear of losing the support of the wealthy corporate donors, can speak the truth about the NCLB's emperor and his garb.

Can either Clinton or Obama be shown the light before it's too late? Or can John Edwards actually win the nomination?

NCLB and the Commoditization of Education

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 18:03:00 +0000

One of the issues bound up with the conservatives' view of education is "commoditization, " the belief that something has become so commonplace and unremarkable that it can be mass-produced, packaged and sold, like potato chips or ten-penny nails or Windows computers. Originally the person who invented potato chips had something new and remarkable; over time the process for making them became so refined and streamlined and advanced that almost anyone could make them, and the only difference between potato chips became price. The item in question thus became a commodity. As Thomas Friedman has shown in The World is Flat, when an item becomes commoditized, it can be outsourced to Asian workers who will do it more cheaply or it can be computerized, mass-produced by algorithms that can be programmed, measured, and assessed.

In some ways it seems that education is in danger of becoming commoditized. And I'm not sure if it's a cause or an effect. Probably some of each. You see this happening already, and, even worse, in the way in which education is talked about, you have to fear that it's only going to get worse. The forces of rampant capitalism are closing in on American education.

Item: In the book Many Children Left Behind, Stan Karp makes the point that, "critics see NCLB as part of a calculated political campaign to use achievement gaps to label schools as failures" (page 54). Anyone who knows the first thing about probability and bell curves knows that in any group of people, by any measure there will be gaps. Since there will always be gaps between the best and the worst, this means there will always, inevitably, be "failures" which opens the door for "market measures, vouchers, and other other steps towards privatization" to move in and "reform" public education (58). It's either planned from the start (which I sort of doubt, knowing that at the very least Ted Kennedy was one of the co-authors of the original No Child Left Behind legislation), or a lucky break of cosmic proportions for the free-marketers. But the door is open.

Item: Blogger TeacherJay has noted that some schools are beginning to pay their students for attendance and achievement, thus making good little consumers of all their students. Get and A and earn a hundred bucks! Can there be anything that makes a clearer link between education and commoditization?

Item: Educational corporations are jumping into the NCLB game with both feet. It's getting to be big business--there's lots of money (LOTS of money) to be made by declaring some children, teachers, and schools to be failures. Special privatized schools, charter schools, commercial after-school programs--veritable cash cows.

But even worse, I think, are the pre-packaged "Pass state-mandated tests" programs, sold over the Internet and also increasingly hawked by large publishing houses. These are often the worst kinds of education imaginable, flash-cards, rote drill and kill memorization, phonics (don't get me started on the futility of phonics!). Often these are computerized, the CD version of flash cards. Mass-produced, pre-packaged education. Reading as a salable, measurable commodity: a thing.

Real education--the kind that requires attentive and informed intervention by real teachers--can't be commoditized, so it apparently must be sacrificed to mindless computer programs and state tests of trivia. For they can be commoditized. And sold at Walmart.

NCLB NIMBYism

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 12:20:00 +0000

A new study co-sponsored by "Education Next" from Stanford's Hoover Institution and the "Program on Education Policy and Governance" at Harvard reveals some interesting insight into the turmoil surrounding the re-authorization of NCLB. The study, a survey entitled The 2007 Education Next—PEPG Survey, shows that a slim majority of surveyed Americans favor re-authorizing the NCLB with few or no changes, with the strongest support registered for "accountability" in the abstract, whatever that means. Most interesting to me, however, was the disparity in respondents' view of their own school vs. other schools: nearly all respondents graded their own school much more highly than other schools. My school is fine; all those others out there are failing. This suggests to me a kind of lurking NIMBYism.

A NIMBY, you might remember, is one who is in favor of such and such social or political reform, but Not In My Back Yard. Yes, I favor nuclear power to help solve the energy crisis, but I don't want a nuclear reactor in My Back Yard (i.e., my town). Build it, but build it somewhere else. Yes, we need to lock up more criminals, but build those prisons somewhere else. In New England right now, we are seeing the same attitude regarding the "wind farms" proposed off the coast of Cape Cod, a large collection of huge wind-powered turbines that would make a dent in our region's energy crisis. Yes, we want renewable energy sources, but Not In Our Back Yard. Build those windmills, but build them somewhere else.

I remember in the energy crisis of the 70s, when the national speed limit was reduced to 55 mph. Surveys showed that the nation was overwhelmingly in favor of the mandate (in the abstract), yet studies showed that the lower speed limit was being overwhelmingly ignored. Yes, I want all you other people to drive 55, but I don't have to. Those surveys were poorly worded: they should have asked, "Are you in favor of a national law whereby YOU will receive a speeding ticket the minute you drive over 55 mph?" Then we would see how much support there was for a national 55 mph speed limit.

But I digress, sort of.

One of the interesting tangential conclusions of the survey was that support for the NCLB's "if it breathes, test it" accountability policy rises if the phrase "NCLB" is not mentioned, just referred to generically as "federal accountability legislation." Which shows that "No Child Left Behind" is for whatever reasons beginning to lose its conservative-manufactured halo (this is good) but that "accountability" in the abstract is still a god-word. I want to make all those other schools toe the line that I set--that's the meaning of "accountability," in more concrete and understandable terms.

Another tangential finding from the survey is the disparity of results between educators and non-educators. The professionals and the competents in the field of education, those who know and understand the challenges of modern education, oppose the reauthorization of the NCLB. Those who don't know favor its re-authorization. A telling finding, I think.

But cut through the abstractions, the words with an aura around them that allows you to interpret them any way you desire, the mother-apple-pie words that mask the realities. What if the survey had asked concrete and specific questions which clearly highlighted in personal terms the impact of the NCLB? I'd like to see the Education Next-PEPG survey re-done, asking the question, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that requires that your child fail the entire grade if he or she doesn't pass a specific multiple-choice test at the end of the school year?"

Or how about, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that allows wealthier parents to remove their children from the public schools and send them to private charter schools with support from your tax dollars?" Or maybe "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that may identify your school as not good enough and then withdraw federal support from your school as punishment?" Or perhaps, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that has the effect of forcing your school to lower its standards in order to keep its funding?"

Or, given that 68% of African-Americans support vouchers, ask, "Are you in favor of re-authorizing the Federal legislation that would allow students from poor black school districts to attend your child's school instead at taxpayer expense?"

Hey, wait a minute....I'd support that.

NCLB: Old Education for a New World

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 00:55:00 +0000

I'm rereading Daniel Pink's book A Whole New Mind, and though it's not a book about education, it's a book about the future, in fact the future that is already so close as to be tangible. I think that A Whole New Mind is one of the two most important books of the first decade of this century (the other is Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat). Both give pretty clear portraits of the world of the 1990s and the early part of this century, and both are able to clearly extrapolate what the coming world will be like and, mostly by implication (since they are not education books), what education for American citizens must be right now. And of course No Child Left Behind and what Pink calls "test-happy America" have it all wrong.

Pink's general thesis is that, because of what he calls "Abundance, Asia, and Automation," the old jobs associated with the Information Age are going, going, almost gone. Those jobs--the ones that can be automated by computers or outsourced to Asian workforces who are skilled, educated, and willing to work for 20 cents on the dollar--cannot be reclaimed by American workers. And they are characterized by mostly left-brained skills--logic, repetition, programmability. And, for our purposes here, they are comprised of mostly testable skills: right or wrong, black or white.

Though left-brained skills will not disappear from the new society, right brained skills will be of equal or greater value. Pink calls this new age the "Conceptual Age," and he makes a strong case that the Industrial Age and the Information Age have been left in its wake. The conceptual age is here.

And what specifically are the skills, the knowledge, needed to succeed in the  Conceptual Age? Pink lists what he calls the "six senses": Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. It's not my purpose here to go into any of these six in detail, but suffice it to say none of them are testable. These are all right brain, high-concept qualities and they are the skills that will be needed by American citizens in the future. None of these can be tested; none of these can be objectively assessed, and adequate yearly progress can not be unambiguously documented. "More important are qualities that are tougher to quantify," Pink writes. Tougher to quantify: quantification is exactly what the NCLB is trying to do, and because of this it's missing the more important qualities of a 21st centruy education.

One of the impetuses that drives the conservative support for the NCLB is the need to ward off ambiguity and change, to reduce the world to neat tests of correct answers. But, as Pink shows, the word will have none of it. Regardless of Bush and Spellings and the rest of the NCLB supporters, the world is changing.

The NCLB, giving in to this outdated urge for correct answers and left-brained algorithms, is doing a great job of preparing American children and future citizens with all the skills they will need to compete for 19th and 20th century jobs. We are testing our children back into the cotton mills and auto assembly lines.

However, someone should tell test-happy and obsessed-with-punishment Congress, as it debates the re-authorization of the NCLB, that it's unfortunately now the 21st century.

The Definition of Proficiency and, Ultimately, of Education

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:01:00 +0000

An entry, pretty insightful in many ways, by Erin Richards in the July 21 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel School Zone Blog brings up a couple of interesting points, but I believe that she has misunderstood the value of her observations and misinterpreted the results. After attending a session at the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, she writes, "In [Tony] Wagner's opinion, one problem is that nobody agrees on what constitutes 'effective education.'" Yes, of course that's true. Nobody agrees on what makes great music, beautiful figure skating, or excellent marinara sauce, either. (I know that in all cases here--including Wagner's--the "nobody" part is an exaggeration: of course there are groups of people who agree that Beethoven is great. Let's let that slide for the sake of discussion.)

For the most part, this lack of agreement is not a problem: it's a reality and in fact a strength. It's called "many ideas," "two heads are better than one, " or even the "D" word that so many conservatives loathe, "diversity." The current trend in education to test everything that breathes, best exemplified by the NCLB, runs directly counter to this, however. It's an attempt to remove this wonderful multiplicity of ideas and substitute for it a hegemony of ideas (actually, one idea). And to further exacerbate this, it's a hegemony of bad, even dangerous, ideas.

A few days later, in the same blog in the same newspaper, Alan J. Borsuk makes a very telling point: "What gets tested gets taught." He concludes from this, rightly, that "[s]chools are spending more time on reading and math [the two areas required to be tested by the NCLB]and less time on other subjects such as science, social studies and various kinds of arts, as a general trend." The intersection of these two ideas reveals the danger: if we all agree with Bush and Spellings and swallow the NCLB's wrong assumptions and bad policies, we damage American education.

For the NCLB assumes that the only things that matter are those that can be tested by mindless tests. Even the report from the Center on Education Policy, which occasions Borsuk's article, falls into the trap: The press release, kind of an executive summary, states, "[t]he weight of evidence indicates that state test scores in reading and mathematics have increased overall since No Child Left Behind was enacted." Of course they have increased! That's all that's being taught--how to pass these tests. What is happening here is that "proficiency" and "education" are being re-defined as "passing tests." It forces schools to concentrate on the meaningless--passing tests--rather than education, whatever it is. In fact, decrying the demise of other subjects such as social studies and science, the Center on Education Policy's report calls for more testing in these subjects. They just don't get it.

The impetus behind this reduction of education to tests of testable trivia comes from the belief in the value of objectification. It's akin to the difference in the Olympics between swimming and diving, or between speed skating and figure skating: swimming and speed skating are races, and excellence is determined by who wins, an assessment that can be objectively determined (and with modern technology, there can't even be any arguments in the case of races that are decided by .001 second and cannot be assessed by the eyes of observers).

But diving and figure skating are more iffy. While there are rubrics for the judges to follow and clear scales of performance to be applied, it comes down to the judges: experienced experts carefully who apply all their knowledge and skill and experience to determine a "winner." It's to some extent a subjective matter: identical performances by skaters or divers on different days with different judges very easily will give different results. And this is what drives the testers like Spellings crazy, this is what they can't handle: diversity.

Richards writes, "an 8-year-old knows that the only way she gets better at gymnastics is by watching videotapes of herself and listening to her coach's evaluation." Her use of a gymnastics example is felicitous: gymnastics is one of those judged sporting events, where proficiency cannot be unambiguously measured. This is a great model of education, a sort of No Gymnast Left Behind (Really!), if you will: you have experienced coaches [teachers]; you have an almost one-to-one educational situation, not 8 classes a day of 35 students each; you have the necessary equipment and supplies; you have careful and constant feedback [not one-time, high stakes tests] from the coach [teacher]; and the result of a poorly executed move is positive advice and feedback designed to help, not punish; the penalty for a mistake [such as failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress] is not immediate termination. Yet, in the Bushy education model we are supposed to agree on, what are these evaluations, tests, and assessments; and who are the coaches? Multiple choice tests of grammar and memorized word definitions pass for measures of writing proficiency. What is the value of this?

You have to be very careful of "education" reports that profess to show increases in "proficiency" when what they really show is that force-feeding our children a steady diet of test-taking strategies produces higher scores on a limited number of trivial tests. We don't all agree on what education is, but whatever education is, it's not this. NCLB stinks like rotten fish in a marinara sauce.

Funding for NCLB?

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 16:03:00 +0000

One major focus of all the criticism directed against No Child Left Behind is the fact that it makes excessive demands on students, teachers, and schools, without providing the necessary federal funding to implement all its directives and achieve its goals. To that, I say, hooray for lack of funding. That's the best part of the whole NCLB package. It's such destructive legislation we can only hope it will never be funded enough to achieve its ends.

Typical criticism (I could quote many many more): "No Child Left Behind attempted to curtail the problem [narrowing the achievement gap], but simply continued the administrative trend of over-mandating and under-funding initiatives." Narrowing the achievement gap is, of course, what we all want. (Actually, I want the achievement gap eliminated, but that's another story for another day.) And of course, as a teacher I'm all for increased pay for teachers, which presumably would trickle down from increased funding for NCLB in general.

But let's imagine for a moment what a fully-funded NCLB means: as more resources are poured into the tested subjects ("math" and "reading"), funds will be pulled out of non-tested subjects. We have already seen that time is being taken away from non-tested subjects--everything from kindergarten naps and elementary school recesses to music, art, and social studies is being cut to the bone to make time for teaching to the math and reading tests. Now, as money for these programs continues to dry up, more time and resources will be spent on testable stuff, such as reading and math.

Of course, it's not testable--it just gives the vote-grabbing illusion of being testable. A score on invalid current tests of reading and math is meaningless, but it seems to mean something, and the politicians currently hawking NCLB use these meaningless scores to create votes for themselves, giving the illusion that they are doing something. "Accountability," they call it, and it's a "god-word" that masks the control over curriculum and education Washington is trying to establish.

The illusion of testability, the reliance on test scores as if they meant something, is one of the most dangerous aspects of NCLB that threatens to spread beyond education and into society in general. Of course, the American public is already overly-enamored of test scores (look at the almost unquestioned trust in SAT scores today, and the previously unquestioned trust in now discredited IQ scores. SAT scores are well on their way to becoming discredited as well.). The reduction of American education to that which can be simple-mindedly measured will only be furthered if NCLB is fully funded.

Much of Daniel Pink's recent work deals with the skills that future citizens will need to have. In A Whole New Mind he shows that left-brained abilities (the kinds of tasks which can be reduced to rote or automation or algorithm) were valuable in the Industrial Age and even the early parts of the Information Age, but that right-brained abilities are crucial to success in the 21st century. He notes "Six Senses" of right-brained thinking:

Design (by which he means the holistic and emotional apprehension and manipulation of space and objects),
Story,
Symphony (synthesis not analysis),
Empathy,
Play,
Meaning ("not just accumulation").

Check out CNN's Business 2.0 for examples of new careers in the new century; note the synthesizing of skills which cannot be tested. (Thanks to Daniel Pink's blog for highlighting this article).

Not one of these can be tested, nor can "mastery" of any one of these be demonstrated by tests. Yet these are exactly the skills and types of thinking and activities that are being dumped by NCLB. Fully fund the NCLB, and you relegate our children to a nineteenth-century skillset in the 21st century.

Is the NCLB Horrific?

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 15:44:00 +0000

On the home page of his Eduwonk blog, Andrew Rotherham quotes someone who has praised it for "separat[ing] the demagogic attacks on NCLB from the serious criticism." In his July 5 entry, Rotherham, who, among his numerous books on education counts a book he has co-edited with Chester Finn (remember him?), notes "I'd still really like to see someone make the true and courageous point that while hardly perfect, No Child Left Behind isn't nearly as horrific as it's made out to be."

In serious rhetorical criticism, we call this "begging the question." The question to be asked is not, "why is no one of courage and truth standing up for NCLB?" as Rotherham would have it; it's "is the NCLB 'horrific'?" (to use Rotherham's word). Let's determine the answer to that first, before we attribute courage and love of truth to supporters of the NCLB.

The context of Rotherham's statement was the appearance of the major Democratic presidential hopefuls before the National Education Association Convention. In his blog, Rotherham waxes ecstatic over Senator Obama's supposed support for merit pay and Senator Clinton's supposed support for charter schools. Also commenting on Rotherham's observation is blogger TeacherJay, who offers caution about jumping on the NCLB-bashing bandwagon because, "When you get right down to it though isn’t NCLB’s goal to help children and reform schools?"

To TeacherJay, I answer, no, at least not as I understand "helping children" and "reforming schools." I agree that education is in trouble and I assert that children are not being helped by it as much as they deserve to be. I also agree that it needs to be reformed. But the NCLB's "reforms" are analogous to reforming the tax code to increase Exxon-Mobil's profits: it's not the way the country needs to go.

Merit pay and charter schools have been two cornerstones of the conservative attempt to "reform" American education for a long time. But what's behind these two principles?

Merit Pay

Merit pay sounds like a good idea: in true capitalist fashion, meritorious teachers get rewarded by receiving more money. Non-meritorious teachers don't get more money. The dirty little secret of merit pay, however, is who determines merit? And how do they do it? (For a grimly humorous but oh-so-telling look at this issue, see "No Dentist Left Behind.") For the sake of illustration, let me hypothesize an exaggerated example: suppose in an advanced algebra course, the final "assessment" consisted entirely of questions on plumbing. (This is what we call an "invalid test," by the way--a test that doesn't really measure what it says it's measuring.) And further let's assume that teachers' merit pay is based on their students' scores on this invalid assessment.

You can see where I'm going: unless the means of evaluating "merit" are valid, i.e., give accurate results about the items being evaluated, the awarding of merit pay becomes very problematic. But what if the assessment (evaluation) is manipulated, controlled by forces with political agendas? Can you imagine a biology teacher's merit being based on his students' score on a Creationism assessment? A geography teacher's merit being based on his students' scores on multiple choice tests that include questions such as, "The capital of Yugoslavia is (A, B, C, or D)...?" Or an English teacher's merit determined by her students' ability to parrot back pre-determined and un-thought-about interpretations of great works of literature?

By the way, Elizabeth Kantor has come very near to advocating this in her speech before the Conservative Women's Network, reprinted on the Heritage Foundation's site: ranting about "politically correct" liberal English teachers, as one example, she laments the loss of "...the 'permanent things' that conservatives are supposed to be defending. Some of those things—like the chivalrous attitude toward women that you find in Chaucer's poetry—are wonderful inventions for which we can thank Western civilization." Imagine a teacher's merit being determined by whether she can get her students to accept, unquestioningly, the permanent value of chivalry. If you can think imaginatively and creatively about a work of literature, she seems to be saying, you fail. And, under merit pay guidelines, your teacher fails.

In short, "assessment" underlies "merit pay," and assessment equals control. Teach what we tell you to teach or you lose your merit pay.

This is not educational reform; this is educational hijacking. And the metaphor is not that strained: Paul D. Houston has written of the NCLB: "For example, pilots, while subject to rules and regulations, are still presumed to know better how to fly the plane than their passengers." Or those who try to hijack their planes.

Charter Schools

The concept of charter schools is part of the larger goal of privatizing education, based on the theory that anything people like parents and teachers and local school boards can do, private corporations can do better, or at least make money from it. (A number of observers--see Stan Karp's chapter in Many Children Left Behind--have asserted that, underneath, this is the real goal of the NCLB--to manipulate the tests so public schools will be deemed failing, and then re-channel the money into private for-profit schools.) Under the much-hyped voucher system, charter schools get to take money from the public coffers intended for public education and spend it on their own students, whom they have taken out of the public school systems.

Now, who do you suppose will get the vouchers to go to those for-profit and charter schools? The same ones whose parents shop at Bloomingdale's and Hammacher Schlemmer. And who will get what little is left of the educational money? The ones who shop, if they can afford to shop at all, at Walmart. This ever growing split in the education afforded the haves vs. the education afforded the have-nots in our society is devastatingly documented by Jonathan Kozol in his most recent book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. It is not courageous to support this.

When charter schools and private for-profit schools are supported with public educational funds, the result is the Walmartization of public education. When teachers' pay is based partly on how well they teach their students to be little more than mindless test-takers, the search for truth suffers.

Horrific indeed.

Education and the Unemployed

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 16:05:00 +0000

Barbara Ehrenreich makes the point in her new Bait and Switch that modern corporate practices of laying off workers of long-standing loyalty and productiveness will ultimately be counter-productive for this nation. (She doesn't say "for the world," but I think it may be extrapolated to that.) And it seems to me that modern America post-NCLB education will be a central player in the continuance of this.

Bait and Switch, a follow-up to her eye-opening Nickel and Dimed, is an account of how Ehrenreich went undercover as an unemployed woman looking for a job in early 21st century America. It is a long and painful and sad journey through an America that is cold, heartless, phony, exploitative, and demeaning beyond belief. It shows how the unemployed and underemployed white collar workers in America, seven million in number yet uncounted by cleverly massaged governmental statistics on unemployment, have been sold a bill of goods by our society. They were told, get a good education, work hard, be creative and thoughtful, and you will have a rewarding job, health insurance, and security for life. In fact, those who get a good education and work hard are likely to be among the tens of millions of workers laid off summarily and unable to find any form of employment even close to what they have a right to expect or what the nation and world need of them. As educated and skilled workers commanding good wages in the new American economy, they are most threatening to mega-corporations' profits and thus need to jettisoned in the name of the bottom line.

It is of course too early for the NCLB to have affected these people, most of who are in their forties or fifties with decades of productive work behind them, but it's important to examine the role the current trends in education will play in perpetuating that world. On one hand, it may be argued that a mindless education that teaches nothing so much as how to take dumbed-down tests, follow orders, and not think may be the perfect education for a corporate America that values exactly those traits. Ehrenreich notes that as her job searches proved more and more futile, it became clear that one thing working against her was her intelligence and ability to think independently. (Others were of course her age and her femaleness, as you might imagine.) For corporate America, the much-sought-after "Team Player" is really just bizspeak for "Unquestioning Order-Taker." She ends her book with a sobering recounting of the challenges facing America's educated and experienced and skillful unemployed and a sort of call to action: "Nothing will change until America's disposable and disposed-of white-collar workers begin to come together to reclaim their dignity and self-worth...." (page 247). She has developed a website, http://www.unitedprofessionals.org, to jump-start this coming together.

Now, who better to come together in a mass refusal to take it anymore than millions of highly educated, creative, intelligent people who have been grievously wronged? Imagine a new Cesar Chavez stepping up and mobilizing all that intelligence!

Which is why education is such a threat to the wealthy Republican right, why they take such amazing steps as teaching "creationism" in place of real science, promoting private school vouchers so that privatized schools can make more money off our children, continuing to channel huge amounts of money into already wealthy suburban white school systems while withholding funds from inner city schools as "punishment" for failing to meet "standards," and, most important, using the NCLB to dumb down education to ensure generations of non-thinking, multiple-choice-test-taking, order-accepting students.

Now, if this were just a matter of isolated entities like Exxon-Mobil or IBM existing in their own little worlds, with no effect upon most of us, I would have no complaint. But in fact, these corporations engaged in laying off, downsizing, outsourcing in the pursuit of ever-larger profits are citizens of America and of the World. Ehrenreich makes a good case that it's not only profits that impel them; even worse, it's sheer incompetence, a culture built on firing the educated and talented and experienced and creative and successful, and rewarding the glassy-eyed yes-men. (The sexist reference is intentional here.)

We have the resources and education and brain-power in this country right now to solve many of our problems, indeed many of the world's problems. We need medical researchers and nurses and software engineers and writers and accountants; most of all, we need thousands and tens of thousands more teachers. And we have them, but they are being systematically cut out of useful positions, stripped of healthcare, forced to spend 10-12 hours a day looking for a job--any job, even if it's a people greeter at a Walmart. Our economy, once the envy of the world for its ability to marshall its brains and resources to solve huge problems, allows New Orleans to drown and doesn't even know how to save it. Children educated under the NCLB, multiple-choice tested into submission, won't have a clue about how to come up with a smart, creative solution to anything.

Dihydrogen Monoxide and the NCLB

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:32:00 +0000

There's a joke--a hoax, really--circling about the Internet, codified in countless professional-looking websites, about a mysterious and dangerous chemical compound called "dihydrogen monoxide." It's described in the most dire terms imaginable, "colorless, odorless, tasteless, and kills uncounted thousands of people every year," etc. One city in California almost passed a city ordinance banning it until they realized....dihydrogen monoxide is water!

It's all in how you describe something.

The latest dihydrogen monoxide-type scam has been perpetrated by--who else?--ETS, the testing mega-organization formerly known as the "Educational Testing Service." ETS surveyed a large number of Americans about the NCLB and found a roughly even split in favor of and opposed to renewal of the program. Not satisfied, they reworded the survey questions, throwing about vague terms like "standards" and "accountability" and "flexibility," apparently apple-pie terms for the survey respondents, and the second time around concluded that a strong majority of Americans support the law's renewal and also that most Americans don't really understand the law. "Despite the American public’s clear lack of knowledge about the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and the strong misgivings of teachers and school
administrators have about the legislation [sic], the public and public school teachers and administrators strongly support reauthorization" ("Standards, Accountability and Flexibility:
Americans Speak on No Child Left Behind Reauthorization").
The irony of a majority of people supporting something they don't understand is apparently lost on ETS.

Nowhere on the ETS site can I find the actual before and after questions of the surveys, but let me postulate another survey question:

"In 2002 Congress passed, and the President signed, a major educational reform package. The effects of this package have been:

the elimination of naps for kindergartners in many schools
the elimination of recess for many elementary school children
the exodus of many discouraged teachers
the imposition of simple-minded true-false and multiple choice tests at almost every level of school
the elimination of teaching the arts, music, social studies, and other subjects no longer tested for
wholesale "teaching to the test" instead of wide-ranging instruction in interesting subjects
logjams of students stuck in the ninth grade year after year so they won't have to take the 10th grade achievement tests and possibly embarrass the school systems
students being forced out of school before they can take--and possibly fail--the tests
schools lowering standards so more of their students will pass the tests
students who have not yet learned to speak English well (like every one of our ancestors) are forced to take all their math, science, and other courses in English, thus guaranteeing they will fail
opposition by over 3/4 of teachers and school administrators--the trained professionals who know more about education than any politician
schools which have the highest failure rates and presumably need the most help are instead penalized by having their federal aid funds drastically cut

Should this law be renewed?"

How do you think a majority of Americans will feel about the NCLB when they know these truths and see the sugar-coated and highly-spun Washington-speak selling of the NCLB for what it is?

"To Know NCLB Is to Like It, ETS Poll Finds," trumpets Education Week. To know dihydrogen monoxide is to ban it, they may as well have written.

It's a Bad, Bad, Bad World

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:55:00 +0000

In the May 28, 2007, Washington Post, staff writer Jay Mathews opens his article "Core Classes Not Enough, Report Warns," with a standard lament about the wussiness of American education: "It's no secret to most high school students that taking the required courses, getting good grades and receiving a diploma don't take much work." And later in the same article he writes, "Many students pick up diplomas having taken ... 'concepts of physics' rather than a physics course with labs and tough exams." (The "Report" that does the "warning" comes, not surprisingly, from testing mega-corporation ACT, Inc., which claims to be a not-for-profit organization, but it will be happy to sell each prospective test-taker a "Prep Guide" for $25.00)

What is it that's so attractive to the Republican right about getting "tough" with our children?

It comes down to a world view: the world is a mean place, it says, full of competitors and predators. (By the way, this view is much older than the 9/11 attacks, so it can't be blamed on a temporary world situation. It's endemic.) In order to survive, you have to be tough--do a lot of work, take tough exams, pass do-or-die high-stakes tests at every available opportunity. Eat or be eaten, no middle ground.

There are two ironies I see here. First, there is a certain amount of competition (in the Darwinian sense) and predation in the world. No one would deny that. Yet, there is a good deal of altruism, cooperation, and (dare I say it?) love in the world too. To the world of the high-stakes testings and the NCLB, this latter fact must be ignored. In fact, if the world not not such a mean place after all, the intent of high-stakes tests is to make it a mean world. Let me say that again, the intent of NCLB-type testing is to make the world a meaner place than it already is. In places where there is (or at least should be) no competition, no predation (such as, oh, say, first grade), the NCLB introduces it. Stories of first-graders throwing up out of nervousness over their make-or-break tests make me sick. To the proponents of the NCLB, it is a means of toughening up the students. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Get mean and nasty or die, weed out the weakest. School as war; first grade as Camp Lejeune.

Even more ironic is the model this is all based on: Darwinisn. Now I'm sure that not all the supporters of the NCLB are also supporters of Intelligent Design and anti-evolution and natural selection, but I'd guess there is a large overlap between the two. Yet the NCLB testing program is pure natural selection, educational Darwinism. We are in competition, so goes the reasoning, and either we are stronger than the [fill in the enemy du jour] or we will not survive. Even loonier is the fact that this kind of Darwinism subscribed to by the Right is a misunderstanding of Darwin anyway. It's best characterized as survival of the fittest culture. There is no survival of the fittest culture in Darwin, only survival of the fittest genes.

Tough exams do not make for better education, only a Hobbesian "solitary, poor, nasty, [and] brutish" life for Americans.

Bushy Logic: Clear Thinking in Kansas

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 16:22:00 +0000

Bemoaning the lack of tough standards in schools ("all they have to do is be there and they will pass"), a Kansas great-grandmother has posted the following in a letter to the editor in the June 7, 2007, The Kansan: "...No Child Left Behind is just another way of passing your child even if they are below average." Presumably the outrageously strict testing requirements of NCLB aren't strict enough.

Let's look at this for a moment: by definition, at any given moment, by any criterion, half of any group is "below average." That's what "average" means: half are above, half are below. So the only interpretation of this statement that's possible is that in all cases, half of every student body should not pass. A guaranteed failure rate of 50%! Bush and Spellings would be in heaven if they heard this (assuming that you believe, as I do, along with Stan Karp that "the AYP [Adequate Yearly Progress] formulas and the 'Leave No Child Behind' rhetoric are transparent attempts to set up schools to fail.")

However, it would be really easy to pummel this writer for her thinking, or lack of skills in making a point clearly, or any number of other flaws. But I don't really want to do that. This woman is a great-grandmother, on a fixed Social Security income, and I have no wish whatsoever to embarrass her. I sympathize with her situation, and figure if I were in her shoes, betrayed and overwhelmed, I'd want to blame somebody, too. Why not the schools? On a very personal level, it's not her fault.

It's just that this kind of bizarre thinking is what's behind the NCLB: the way it's worded, the way it operates (if your school is in trouble and you need to fix things, your federal money will be withdrawn), the way it's promoted by the Bush marketeers. We need to get tougher on chldren.

W in Wonderland. Bushy logic makes truthiness and wikiality look downright factual.

Massachusetts Considers De-emphasizing High Stakes Test

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 15:35:00 +0000

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, the first Democratic Governor of Massachusetts in recent memory, has called for an improvement of the state's MCAS (High-Stakes Tests) scores and adding new assessments as well, according to the June 6, 2007, Boston Globe. This new idea--expanding the ways in which high-school students may prove they are worthy of graduation--has led to a proposal and hearings before the state legislature's Joint Committee on Education. Patrick was criticized for this in an editorial in the Boston Herald, the city's conservative inflammatory tabloid-style newspaper, who predictably called it "backsliding" and, ironically, a "concession to mediocrity."

The MCAS, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, was passed in the mid-90's and became the state's make or break testing system, as required by the NCLB. In 2003, the MCAS became the state's graduation requirement.

From my experience as an educator in Massachusetts colleges for thirty years, I can testify that in the past five years or so there has been a noticeable shift in freshman students' writing skill: where once there was a wide range of skills--ranging from a percentage of students of extraordinary creativity and imagination and writing abilities to, yes, a percentage of extremely weak students. Now things are much more level--the weak students aren't appearing in the same frequencies as before, and that's good (although it's been documented how weak students are simply forced out of high schools before graduation in order not to bring down aggregate test scores, and thus never even get to apply to a college, so forced attrition may be as much a cause as improved educational practices). But the really exceptional writers are also gone, for the most part, beaten down by school systems teaching to the test and promulgating a mindless essay format known as the "five-paragraph-essay" which guarantees, if mastered, passing the test and never having a creative or useful thought to express. Thanks to the MCAS and other high-stakes test, mediocrity is rampant.

Many critics of the NCLB have been asking for relief from the mindlessness of high-stakes testing. Educators know that all a child is and knows cannot be summed up in a few true/false and multiple-choice tests (to its credit, the MCAS does allow for a student to actually write an essay as part of the test). And requiring students to pass this one test before graduating is harmful to the country. There is no evidence, one way or the other, on how these tests correlate with later success in life. Do those students who pass these tests turn out to be better citizens, better parents, better workers, better soldiers, than those who don't pass them? "Unless we can link scores to some measure of success after leaving school," George Wood has written in Many Children Left Behind, "they should not be given."

The Genesis of NCLB: Chester Finn's "A Nation Still at Risk"

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 13:29:00 +0000

The Genesis of NCLB: Chester Finn's "A Nation Still at Risk"

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) did not spring up suddenly, out of nothing. Its principles have been bandied about for probably as long as there has been public education, but the genesis of the current incarnation can be traced back specifically to the mid-1980's and the Reagan administration. Even that was a reaction to the reforms in education started in the 1970's (the CUNY Open Admissions program, the rise of the whole-language and writing-process movements, and other liberating trends in education), but that's another story.

Specifically, 1983's "A Nation at Risk," not in and of itself a particularly reactionary document, was followed by 1989's "A Nation Still at Risk," by Chester Finn, former Reagan Assistant Secretary of Education under William Bennett. (The title of the article has been recycled by Finn and his followers and collaborators numerous times since then, but as nearly as I can find, the article in the May, 1989, issue of Commentary magazine was the first to use that title.) Finn asserts that that nation is still at risk because despite the previous six years of spending and good intentions, the nation's educational system is as bad as ever and in need of serious reform. Out of these initial calls for reform has come the NCLB.

Like much ultra-conservative propaganda, the article is rife with fallacious reasoning and almost laughable assertions, but I'd like to examine the principles underlying the article as a way of getting a handle on what drives the insanity of the NCLB today.

Finn lists a litany of problems with current (i.e., 1989) education principles, and follows that with four "obstacles" to education "reform" (which is his term for what most educators see as a return to the dark ages of education.) I think his general complaints about education practices can be lumped into a few categories:

Modern education is not the way I remember it
Knowledge consists of unchanging lumps of fact and nothing more; modern education does not teach the facts
Modern education is not industrial-age capitalistic enough
Modern education is not mean enough
Modern education is too democratic
Teachers are lazy, overpaid and incompetent

Education is changing, which is always a frightening thing for conservatives (that is what the word "conservative" means, after all). In many ways, it has changed for the better, and mostly it's changing in ways to meet the new challenges of the 21st century: new communications media, a new globalization, new knowledge, new kinds of students. And no, it's not the way Finn remembers when he was going to school; it should not be. (Finn even recounts an embarrassing anecdote about his mother's education.) Jessica Stern's book Terror in the name of God, an in-depth study of violent religious fundamentalists, discovers that what drives fundamentalists (both Islamic and Christian) is "fear of modernity." I'm struck by how much a "fear of modernity" drives these conservative calls for a reform that is actually a regression.

"Our students know too little," writes Finn. But what does he mean by "know"? Time and time again he returns to the refrain which can be paraphrased as modern education does not teach facts. In hindsight, one of his examples tells all you need to know about his take on the facts: "Given a blank map of Europe and asked to identify particular countries,...just ten percent [spot] Yugoslavia." Yugoslavia no longer exists, of course, and all the students who got it wrong on the map-test are now exonerated. This blinkered view of "knowledge" and "learning" is characteristic of the Industrial Revolution, a 19th concept that has little applicability today. If you want to teach people how to work in mills and factories, how to mindlessly follow fixed procedures, teach these facts. But this is a bankrupt concept for today's world; it's no longer enough to teach supposed facts; they change, like it or not. The earth is not the center of the universe; the atom is not a series of concentric circles; Yugoslavia is not a country. (God did not create the universe and all species 6000 years ago, and man does indeed contribute to global warming, and because there is overwhelming irrefutable evidence for both, education has no business teaching otherwise, but I'm not going there in this blog.) Knowledge is not clumps of fact that never have changed and never will change, and for American education pretend otherwise is global suicide.

The implication of this for Finn is that our students should return to memorizing "facts" and stop thinking. He takes some breath-taking potshots at critical thinking: "'Thinking critically' avoids the relativist's agony of having to designate 'right' and 'wrong' answers," he writes. It's curious that an Assistant Secretary of Education would denigrate thinking, but there you are. For Finn, knowledge is clearly static, stuff to be memorized, all the while knowledge is changing and our students, under his proposals, will have no intellectual tools whatsoever to keep up with the world.

And finally we come to the real heart of Finn's (and the current crop of conservatives') principles: Educational Darwinism. It's a mean, tough, nasty, dog-eat -dog world out there, and education has to be mean and nasty to equip its "products" (Finn's word, not mine) to survive in this kind of world. Memorize facts as if they never changed; take one-chance-and-out tests on those facts (easy to do if there are clearly right and wrong answers) is the way to cull out the weak. "Tough standards" is the new watchword.

Imagine the students who did get the Yugoslavia question "right" in Finn's example: they are now creating and and trying to sell stuff to Yugoslavia, and probably wondering what happened. "Yugoslavia doesn't exist?? I never got the memo."

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Steve Jobs And Teachers Unions

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 17:10:00 +0000

I'm going to do something I've almost never done before: disagree with Steve Jobs. I've used Apple computers since the first Apple II came out in the 1970's, and I've used Macs since the early 1990's. I'm a confirmed Mac user. I buy from iTunes, I have an iPod, I think Steve Jobs is one of the true visionaries of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. True visionary.

I've disagreed with him in the past once or twice, and I was always wrong.

But on this one, he's dead wrong. At an educational conference on February 16, he said, "I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way." He's already taken some flak for this this, and not all of it from teachers unions, who you could expect to react strongly.

Perhaps from his limited view of education, he believes that school-CEO's (AKA principals and deans) are wise and just and knowledgeable about their "product." But they are not.

In a perfect world, principals and deans and Academic Vice Presidents and School Boards and State Boards of Education would be wise and just and knowledgeable about education, and unions would not even be necessary. And Jobs would be right. But the world is not perfect. The people who run schools today are mostly hangers-on, bureaucratic paper-pushers, political hacks. (The former President of the University of Massachusetts, William Bulger, a staunch opponent of busing and integration of Boston public schools, was President of the Massachusetts Senate before being appointed to his post, and is the brother of one of the most wanted mobsters in the history of the state.) These are the people calling the shots in educational circles today.

So when they deem someone worthy of firing, it is almost always for the wrong reasons, and done out of ignorance of how teaching and learning happen. It is to keep their job, to puff up some irrelevant statistical measure of success, to brown-nose a superior who also knows nothing about education, to look good on paper, to get an undeserved raise--everything except how well do the kids learn.

Into this mixture, then, come the teachers. Yes, there are some bad ones (I have known a few and right know can think of a few others), but for the most part they are well-trained, dedicated, and experienced teachers. They know what needs to be done, and their superiors won't listen to them, because their superiors' superiors won't listen to them, and so on up the whole sorry line to the state boards of education, populated by political appointees and not people who know the ropes of education.

So until there is a visionary worthy of Steve Jobs running the boards of education and indeed the federal Department of Education, we have to have unions to protect the teachers, the educational system, and our children from the know-nothings who are running our country's education right now.

Deducation: Repeal the No Child Left Behind Act

noreply@blogger.com (Rick) — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 14:22:00 +0000

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is, perhaps outside of the PATRIOT Act, potentially the most damaging and far reaching legacy of the Bush administration. It applies misguided notions of how kids learn and how to teach them to further a conservative agenda that will guarantee our students will graduate with little more than a mass of irrelevant, testable, and ultimately wrong "facts" and have not the least clue how to think. It believes in tests, it tests the wrong things, it rewards those who score highly on these wrong-headed tests. The damage it has done, and continues to do, to our nation's children is incalculable. It may take generations to undo this.

Our educational system is being killed: it's almost dead. Deducation, I call it. Mind-numbing, teaching to invalid tests, memorization of facts that won't be facts tomorrow, stifling all ability to think critically, taking all teaching decisions out of the hands of teachers, funneling educational funds into the best white schools, leaving behind all children except upper class whites. Repeal the NCLB today and put education back in the hands of people who know what they are doing.