Monday, August 6, 2007
"Rethinking Educational Accountability" recording
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Epistemological Redlining: The Price of Doing the Education Business
A couple of clips from the NY Times story earlier this week:
. . . .Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.
Such moves are being driven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatures to approve general tuition increases, university officials say.
�It is something of a trend,� said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
Even as they embrace such pricing, many officials acknowledge they are queasy about a practice that appears to value one discipline over another or that could result in lower-income students clustering in less expensive fields.
�This is not the preferred way to do this,� said Patrick V. Farrell, provost at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. �If we were able to raise resources uniformly across the campus, that would be a preferred move. But with our current situation, it doesn�t seem to us that that�s possible.�
At the University of Kansas, which started charging different prices in the early 1990s, there are signs that the higher cost of majoring in certain subjects is affecting the choices of poorer students.
�We are seeing at this point purely anecdotal evidence,� said Richard W. Lariviere, provost and executive vice chancellor at the university. �The price sensitivity of poor students is causing them to forgo majoring, for example, in business or engineering, and rather sticking with something like history.�
. . . .
�There was a time, not that long ago, 10 to 15 years ago, that the vast majority of the cost of education at public universities was borne by the state, and that was why tuition was so low,� he said. �That was based on the premise that the education of an individual is a public good, that individuals go out and become schoolteachers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers, that makes society better. That�s no longer the perception.�
. . . .
�The salaries we pay for entering assistant professors [in business] on average is probably larger than the average salary for full professors at the university,� Mr. Parker said of business professors. �That�s how far the pendulum has swung at the business schools, and I sure wish they�d fix it.�. . . .
Posted, too, at Schools Matter.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Resources Relevant to the Education Sessions at Yearlykos 2007
The material beneath the fold is a list of resources that are relevant to the two educational sessions I will be leading at Yearlykos, the panel Education Uprising: Educating for Democracy and the roundtable discussion Rethinking Educational Accountability
There will be handouts of this material available as long as they last. It is included in the handouts for the panel, which include copies for the "plan" and statements from Marion Brady and Peter Henry (the latter is included in hyperlinked form at the end of this diary). If those run out, I will also have copies of the the list of resources, which unfortunately due to space left out one important resource in which a number of people at dailykos participated, and thus will only be available in this online version.
Resources Relevant to the Education Sessions at Yearlykos 2007
This is being produced both as a handout and as an online posting, thus the urls will appear unmasked for the handout. It is intended to provide an annotated set of resources that may be relevant for the two educational sessions which have been organize by teacherken, Education Uprising: Educating for Democracy, and Rethinking Educational Accountability. The printed version will NOT include material already printed for distribution at the sessions, but the online version will include access to those materials, hyperlinked where appropriate.
For the most complete history and explanation of the sessions and the participant, the dakilykos diary entitled YEARLYKOS: Education Uprising / Educating for Democracy - the "plan"
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/7/15/73050/3250
is the best place to go.
For participant Sherman Dorn, his website http://www.shermandorn.com provides links to materials about his writing and about his books.
For participant Marion Brady, much of his work over the years can be found at his website, http://home.cfl.rr.com/marion/mbrady.html
For participant Peter Henry (Mi Corazon), he would like to direct you to the New Teacher Network at http://www.newteachernetwork.net/
Participant Kenneth Bernstein (teacherken) suggests the best single place for his thoughts on education is his user page at dailykos, http://teacherken.dailykos.com which does included writings on subjects other than education, although you can scroll down through the diaries to get past those.
Participant Doug Christensen is Commissioner of Education of the state of Nebraska. His official webpage, http://www.nde.state.ne.us/COMMISH/com.html has links to much of his writings about education.
OTHER RESOURCES:
Some different models of schooling:
Coalition of Essential Schools, based on the thinking of Ted Sizer: http://www.essentialschools.org/
Forum for Education and Democracy, founded by a group of prominent thinkers in education, including Deborah Meier, Angela Valenzuela, Pedro Noguera, Linda Darling-Hammond, Ted and Nancy Sizer, and others: http://www.forumforeducation.org/
Waldorf Schools, based on the work of Rudolf Steiner: http://www.awsna.org/
On Montessori education, the American Montessori Society, http://www.amshq.org/
Also, the International Montessori Index: http://www.montessori.edu/
On issues of child development and early childhood education, it is worth exploring the material at the Erickson Institute in Chicago, http://www.erikson.edu/home.asp
On issues of assessment and accountability:
National Center for Fair and Open Testing (Fairtest): http://www.fairtest.org/
Forum on Educational Accountability: http://www.edaccountability.org/
Four books that are relevant, two of which are by authors appearing at Yearlykos 2007
Nichols, Sharon & David Berliner, Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools
Dorn, Sherman, Accountability Frankenstein: Understanding and Taming the Monster
Perlstein, Linda, Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade The author will be signing copies at 3 PM on Saturday, August 4, and then again around 5:15.
Meier, Deborah & George Wood, editors, Many Children Left Behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools
Both National Teachers� Unions are good sources of information. For the National Education Association, go to http://www.nea.org/index.html You will see links for the blogs on the homepage. The American Federation of Teachers has a home page at http://www.aft.org Their blog, NCLB: Let�s Get It Right http://www.letsgetitright.org/blog/ has a fairly complete list of important educational blog sites along the left-hand side, as well as a detailed list of categories of posts on the right-hand side. DISCLOSURE: I (teacherken) have worked with them (although I am an NEA member) and they do feature links to my work on occasion. There is also a link for Sherman Dorn.
The Education Policy Blog http://educationpolicyblog.blogspot.com/ is group blog in which both Sherman Dorn and Ken Bernstein participate. It has the purpose of examining education from a social foundations perspective, and many of the participants teach social foundations of education in teacher training programs.
One important resource not included in the printed version, which ends with the Education Policy Blog, is the Educators Roundtable http://www.educatorroundtable.org this is the product a group of educators who came together to attempt to stop reauthorization of NCLB in anything like its current format. There are many terrific resources there, and many who participated in planning for the Yearlykos sessions also participated there.
Finally, here is the hyperlinked version of Peter Henry's handout for the education panel on Friday:
Teachers and Teaching: Prospects for High Leverage Reform
Peter Henry (aka Mi Corazon) http://www.newteachernetwork.net
Wedged between two Byzantine bureaucracies�unions and school districts, constrained by unreasonable public expectations, hammered by ideologues, criticized by the media, saddled with policies shaped by non-educators, America's teachers have almost no room to maneuver. Their training, workplace, schedule, and assignment are mostly determined by others, and their curriculum arrives �canned� in the form of textbooks from large, well-connected corporations. In some schools, extreme instructional strategies tell them what words to say, when, and how, as if teaching can be reduced to a standard script.
Is it any wonder then that as many as half of teachers quit in five years?
The vast potential of America's teaching corps is not only under-utilized and poorly managed, it is structurally imprisoned to the point that it's inaccurate to even call it a profession. Where there is mastery and commendable performance, it is usually due to an individual who succeeds despite the system rather than because of it.
There is, however, reason for hope: If teachers are liberated from these structural limitations, they have tremendous potential as "high leverage" reform agents. As Peter Senge maintains in his thoughtful classic, The Fifth Discipline, small, subtle modifications of a key organizational element can have a major systemic impact.
Most teachers enter the profession for reasons other than material reward---love of a subject, the drive to "make a difference," a need for personally meaningful work. Throwing money at them without first dealing with the structural limitations imposed by the current system will have little or no effect on their performance or attrition. Merit pay, vouchers, test-score competition, grading schools and other market-based initiatives make assumptions about human nature which apply to few teachers. Indeed, current efforts to bring market forces to bear will actually end up being counterproductive.
Two fundamental changes to teaching are essential. First, it must be realized that increased responsibility enhances accountability. Teachers must be given autonomy, power, control and authority over tasks they perform, taking on some roles and responsibilities now performed by administrators and district personnel. They should be evaluating programs, creating curricula, interfacing with the public and generally taking responsibility for school "climate." Their experienced, practical voices are essential to the shaping of wise policy and effective management of our public schools.
Second, teacher isolation must end. The traditional routine---teachers alone in their classrooms most of the day, five days a week---must be replaced by arrangements which allow them to collaborate, to coach and be coached, to learn and draw strength from others, to demonstrate to students the merits of teamwork. Only by routinely working together and collaborating to identify and address the particular, constantly changing challenges their individual school faces, can their strengths and human potential emerge.
Every school is different. Each has its own assets, problems, demographics, and community setting. Teachers, because they deliver direct service, are in a unique position to understand, define and resolve their particular and unique challenges. By building a collaborative ethos where consensus is sought and every voice valued, schools can become dynamic laboratories for innovation, democratic process and local decision-making. They can, in short, become true "learning organizations", where relationship, trust and meaningful work make the job desirable and fulfilling, with teacher satisfaction and increased retention being significant long-term benefits.
Making these changes---vastly increased responsibility and accountability, and structural alterations which support cooperation and collegiality---is more relevant and possible than ever. Over the next decade, America will need approximately 2.5 million new teachers, roughly half the current force. A new generation, technologically savvy, oriented to teamwork, bringing idealism which often accompanies youth, is well-positioned to make these changes work. And teacher induction, the term for moving novices through three years of training to tenure, is an ideal vehicle for achieving what will amount to the �re-culturing� of public schools. Remarkably, such changes would require no new legislation and few changes to labor contracts, while resulting in rapid increases in teacher performance and tax savings through decreased rates of attrition.
Sadly, the current thrust of education "reforms" threatens not only to weaken teacher professionalism and satisfaction but to erase from collective memory the connection most Americans feel for a great educator in their past. "Teaching," said Parker Palmer, "stands where the personal and the public meet." In our schools we should be promoting the best of American individuality and ingenuity in teachers and using that to renew and revitalize the civic body in the form of America�s youth. Of all places, schools should be in the lead, inspiring hope and idealism, supporting individual initiative and mastery, enhancing creativity and collaborative people skills. They are essential to our survival, and only by allowing teachers more autonomy, creativity, and collegiality are we likely to get them.
Teaching will always be, as Palmer notes, an intensely personal job. Government decrees, institutional demands, threats, sanctions, and penalties don't create great teachers. The current emphasis on "measurable accountability," focusing as it does on minimum standards, is weakening the profession and repelling the most promising candidates. Instead of imposing new limits and burdens, instead of heaping ever more approbation on teachers, policymakers need to re-think, re-imagine and recast what teaching looks like in the 21st century.
A great and resilient society, capable of successful adaptation and change, cannot thrive with an educational system built in the 19th century�managed by top-down hierarchies, one-size-fits-all models and ruled by the cudgel of fear. Excellence is achieved through individual mastery, a collegial network awash with inquiry and creativity, undergirded by trust and tangible support from the larger community. If we want teaching excellence and the resultant development of full student potential, teachers must be lifted up, given the responsibility, authority and training which enhance their natural human abilities, and then respected for taking on this most crucial and challenging work.
Monday, July 30, 2007
New Research: Test Score Progress Weaker and Advances in Narrowing Racial and Income-based Achievement Gaps Have Faded Since NCLB
New Research on Achievement
Test Scores Slow Under No Child Left Behind Reforms, Gauged by States and the Federal Assessment
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 30, 2007 � As Congress reviews federal efforts to boost student performance, new research published in Educational Researcher (ER) reports that progress in raising test scores was stronger before No Child Left Behind was approved in 2002, compared with the four years following enactment of the law.
The article �Gauging Growth: How to Judge No Child Left Behind?� is authored by Bruce Fuller, Joseph Wright, Kathryn Gesicki, and Erin Kang, and is one of four featured works published in the current issue of ER�a peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the American Educational Research Association.
Bruce Fuller, lead author and professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that the strong advances in narrowing racial and income-based achievement gaps seen in the 1990s have faded since passage of �No Child�. �The slowing of achievement gains, even declines in reading, since 2002 suggests that state-led accountability efforts�well underway by the mid-1990s�packed more of a punch in raising student performance, compared with the flattening-out of scores during the �No Child� era,� he observed.
�We are not suggesting that �No Child� has dampened the earlier progress made by the states,� Fuller said. �But we find no consistent evidence that federal reforms have rekindled the states� earlier gains. Federal activism may have helped to sustain the buoyancy in children�s math scores at the fourth-grade level, seen throughout the prior decade.�
The researchers pushed beyond earlier studies by tracking progress in both state and federal test scores in 12 diverse states, going back to 1992 in many cases. This approach captured the generally positive effects of maturing state-led accountability programs in both reading and math, gauged by state officials and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Using this longer time span as the baseline, annual changes in student performance generally slowed after 2002, as gauged by state and federal testing agencies, and the earlier narrowing of achievement gaps ground to a halt (NAEP results), according to the study.
The university team focused on 12 states, including Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington. They selected these states because they are demographically diverse, geographically dispersed, and were able to provide comparable test score data over time. Following passage of the �No Child� law, federal reading scores among elementary school students declined in the 12 states tracked by the researchers � after climbing steadily during the 1990s.
The share of fourth-graders proficient in reading, based on federal NAEP results, climbed by one-half a percentage point each year, on average, between the mid-1990s and 2002. But over the four years after the legislation was passed, the share of students deemed proficient declined by about one percent.
The annual rise in the percentage of fourth-graders proficient in mathematics improved slightly in the same 12 states, moving up from 1.6 percent per year before �No Child� was signed to a yearly growth rate of 2.5 percent following enactment of the law. This is the one out of six federal gauges where a post- NCLB gain was observed by the research team, tracking NAEP results.
The researchers simultaneously tracked achievement trends gauged by state and federal testing agencies over the 14-year period. �The correlation between the two barometers was close to zero,� Fuller said. �We worry about the capacity of states to report unbiased test score results over time. But even state results generally confirm the more reliable NAEP pattern showing that progress in raising achievement has largely faded since 2002.�
The authors urged Congress to improve the capacity of states to reliably track the performance of their students over time. �The fundamental principles of transparency and simplicity might guide state and congressional leaders,� Fuller said. �The hurdles defining basic and proficient student performance between federal and state assessments should become more consistent.�
Fuller added that �state and NAEP officials could do more to inform the public on how student demographics are changing, and achievement trends should be interpreted in this context.�
The article is based on studies of accountability policies that Fuller directs with grant support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Noyce Foundation.
Editor�s Note: The full text of Fuller�s study, �Gauging Growth: How to Judge No Child Left Behind?� is posted on the AERA Web site: www.aera.net (pdf).
To interview Professor Fuller, call (510) 643-5362 or (415) 595-4320.
To reach AERA Communications, call (202) 238-3200; Helaine Patterson (hpatterson@aera.net) or Lucy Cunningham (lcunningham@aera.net).
The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the national interdisciplinary research association for approximately 25,000 scholars who undertake research in education. Founded in 1916, AERA aims to advance knowledge about education, to encourage scholarly inquiry related to education, and to promote the use of research to improve education and serve the public good.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Jim Cummins dismantles NCLB
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Community Organizing and Urban Education XII: Locating a Target
A key term in the neo-Alinsky community organizing toolbox is �target.� Fundamentally, in this model, if you don�t know what (or preferably who) your target is, then you can�t really act in a coherent way.
A target is �the institution or person who can make the change you want.�
Imagine, for example, that you are a leader in a local action group that wants to get sports re-funded in your district. The first thing you need to do is find out who makes that funding decision. And this involves not only figuring out how power works in your district, but also the different ways that sports teams might get funded within that system. For example, the superintendent might have the power to shift some funds to the sports teams. In other districts, the school board might need to decide. And the amount of money involved would be important, too. The smaller the amount of money, the lower on the totem pole the decision will probably be made. And generally you want to go for the weakest link, the target that it will be easiest to influence.
Figuring out the target is crucial, because once you figure out how the decision you want is made, you can start figuring out what might influence the person or institution that makes the decision. To act, you need to understand what motivates your target: its interests, fears, powers, etc.
Another example: About a year ago, a local conservative radio personality made a pretty repugnant statement about latinos in our city. So one or more groups decided to try to get this personality removed. They protested, and picketed in front of the radio station, and (as usual) basically had little or no impact. In this case, they knew in general terms who their target was (the radio station), but they don�t seem to have done much analysis of the internal power structure of the station, or even of its interests and concerns in more general institutional terms.
Around this time, a local organizer came to my class and used this case as an example. He asked the class what a radio station cared the most about, and after some prodding they gave him the answer he was looking for: money (although I thought some of their other answers were good, too). He then informed the class that the largest advertiser for this radio station was a local car dealership. He speculated: what if instead of doing yet another picket line, this group had targeted the car dealership? They could have first met with the owner of the dealership. If the dealership refused to pull its ads, they could have moved to the development of some creative actions. They could have sent fifty people a day to test-drive new cars, or to picket outside the dealership with signs declaring that it supported hate speech, until, hopefully, the owner caved.
In this specific case, this organizer was talking about what is sometimes called a �secondary target.� A secondary target is some powerful group or institution that can influence the target. The car dealership couldn�t make the decision to pull the personality, but had pretty impressive influence over the station�s management.
The point is not that this organizer was right or wrong. What�s important is that his process of analysis fits right within the neo-Alinsky tradition I�m talking about, here.
Another thing about a target is that, in most cases, it is helpful to pick a person rather than a group or institution. In this model, you want to generate some outrage about the actions the target has taken in its public role. And it�s easier to get pissed off at an actual person. It�s hard to get mad at the legislature as a group, for example. It�s too abstract. The speaker of the Assembly who is blocking your plan is easier to be upset at. But sometimes you are stuck attacking an abstraction rather than an actual individual. And sometimes it isn�t better to have an actual person. Every organizing campaign is unique.
The amount of power your group has will affect both the issue you choose to address (see this earlier post) and the target this issue requires you to influence. For example, as I have noted earlier, the organization I work most closely with is based in
A couple more examples.
First let�s talk about the
Don�t get me wrong, I don�t have anything against sign waving or big marches etc. And I�m sure they have some effect, especially if you can get a lot of people out in them. And there are many different ways to approach any problem. But it may be helpful to look at the
There is actually at least one group taking this approach. The group Americans Against Escalation in
Second, let�s talk about NCATE�s decision to drop �social justice� from its list of �dispositions.� I have to admit, I�m not really up on the details of this controversy, but let�s look at it from a neo-Alinsky perspective anyway. To start with, who is the �target�? This isn�t clear to me, but it might be Arthur Wise, the president, or it might be the people (or key persons) on the task force that Jim Horn said was looking at this issue. Or it might be �NCATE� more generally.
You might say, well, it�s not really fair to target individuals on a task force or Arthur Wise. They�re just doing their jobs. And they may be your friends. From a neo-Alinsky perspective, however, this answer is part of the problem. In taking on particular roles, they have inserted themselves into the public space in a particular way and they should be held accountable for their public roles. Part of what organizing does is transform roles people would like to keep somewhat �private� into more public stances. And it�s not personal. Or, at least, it�s not supposed to be. Remember, �no permanent enemies, no permanent friends.� (I�ll speak in more detail about �public� and �private� from this perspective in a later post.)
Once you have chosen a target, you need to think about the specific interests and motivations and fears of the target as you have framed it. For example, one of NCATE�s key interests as an institution is to have universities that are interested in being accredited. What if a number of universities were willing to sign a letter refusing to re-accredit with NCATE unless the disposition were added back? What if a group of powerful professors at key institutions were willing to sign such a letter? Of course, what you can do depends on the particular resources your organization (or potential organization?) has.
You may discover that you just plain don�t have the right set of resources to effectively influence the person or institution you would most like to target. If this is the case, maybe it�s time to face reality. Maybe it�s time to switch your issue and pick another target.
In any case, if you are going to act, it is almost always helpful to figure out who the key targets are (or might be) and what motivates them, regardless of the set of strategies you will eventually end up using.
Monday, July 23, 2007
Testing: an examination of its effects on one school
Let me start by noting that I am no fan of No Child Left Behind, and have opposed it since before it became law in 2002. I am actively involved in lobbying for major changes in the current efforts to reauthorize the law. As a high school social studies teacher I am not directly impacted by the law, because social studies does not count for Adequate Yearly Progress. I do have to prepare students for tests required for graduation, and I see the impact of NCLB in the lack of preparation in many of the students arriving at our high school. While I can write about my observations and describe what the literature is saying about the effects of NCLB, that probably does not give the full negative impact of the law, which is felt most fully in elementary and middle schools full of lower-income and minority students.
Linda Perlstein has written a book that gives as good a portrayal as I have seen of those negative impacts. In Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade, Perlstein follows one elementary school in Annapolis for a full year as a means of showing us how school life and learning are changed by the need to meet AYP.
Perlstein is a former Washington Post education reporter, whose previous book, Not Much Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers enabled readers to understand the perceptions and experiences of middle school students. In that work she closely followed 5 students at Wilde Lake Middle School in Howard County Md. For the current work she was given full access to Tyler Heights Elementary School in Annapolis. She was able to sit in on classes, talk with students, teachers, and administrators, observe faculty meetings and conferences. All of the school and district staff agreed to allow the use of their names, while pseudonyms are used for the students and their families.
The school was an interesting choice. Tyler Heights is the kind of school testing advocates and supporters of NCLB like to cite. The principal, Ernestine (Tina) McKnight had arrived in 2000 to a school in which only 17 per cent of the student performed satisfactorily on the state tests. By 2004-2005, the year before Perlstein spent in the school, the percentage of students scoring at least "proficient" (the euphemism for passing) was up to 85.7 in reading and 79.6 in math. On the surface, this was the kind of school that would seem to demonstrate the effectiveness of a high stakes approach. After all, it was not exactly full of white, middle class kids from stable families:
When Tina arrived at Tyler Heights, three in five of its students were under the poverty level or not far above it - a number that would increase within five years to 70 percent. - p. 34Nearly one-fifth were children of immigrants, with the Hispanic population having grown from 85 to one-third, with many of these either not speaking English at home or before arriving at Tyler Heights at all. The overwhelming percentage of students were black, but of the classroom teachers one was half black and the ESOL teacher was Hispanic, while the rest were white. There were other blacks on staff, including McKnight.
Maryland has changed its testing program since I first began teaching in a middle school in 1995-96. In those days there was a program called MSPAP, for Maryland School Performance Assessment Program. The testing, which was in selected elementary and middle school grades, did not give individual student scores, and required integration of the four core subjects of English, Math, Science and Social Studies. NCLB required testing in Reading and Math only, but in all grades, 3-8 (and once in high school, for which the High School Assessments in English and Algebra required for graduation also serve as the tests to measure AYP). Schools in which students arrive at school with strong language skills, from upper middle class backgrounds, do not have to worry so much about their scores. In fact, unless they are designated as a Title I school (with a significant number of economically poor students) they have little to fear from the sanctions of failing to make AYP. Title I schools like Tyler Heights face significant sanctions should their students not continue on the eventually impossible task towards all student proficient by 2014. Yet describing the nature of the problem in general does not have the same impact as telling the story of one school and its students and staff: perhaps this is an ironic illustration of Stalin's famous statement that the death of one person is a tragedy, but the death of millions is just a statistic. And in the context of Tyler Heights, by the standards of NCLB the school is a success. What Perlstein is able to show us is that below the surface and behind the test scores, the cost of achieving that "success" is at least disturbing if not horrific.
The school system required the use of certain packaged curricula, Saxon Math and Open Court Reading. The latter has highly scripted lessons that the teachers are supposed to follow. Perlstein succinctly addresses this at the beginning of a chapter entitled "A Bank Teller Could Pick Up the Lesson"
Think about your favorite teachers from your youth: the ones who changed your life. The ones who taught you lessons you carry with you years later. Chances are, these were the teachers with a gift for improvisation, artists of the classroom who brought a spark of life to the most mundane subjects. Chances are, they didn't teach from a script. - p. 50)This is illustrative of how Perlstein presents the reality of what she saw. She will weave in observations, extracts from research, and combine these with the detailed recording of the experience of those in the school, the staff and students. In the process she brings life to the issue in a way missing in many of the debates over educational policy. Thus in a discussion about how companies are profiting from No Child Left Behind, Perlstein recounts McKnight's experience at attending a presentation at a principals' conference of a vendor who had been brought into her school during the 2005-2006 year using the success of Tyler Heights in its promotion. She was furious because they were implying they were responsible for the success in 2004-2005:
Like these guys had anything to do with third-grade math proficiency jumping 24 points? Fourth-grade reading jumping 49? p. 195She was too polite to make a public scene, even when the vendors pointed her out to the audience. This anecdote is presented at the end of a section where Perlstein has explored the costs of NCLB in transfers of funds to the private sector, starting with the gross costs in the billions, tracing through the connections of individuals like Neil Bush and people who had helped promote in implement NCLB in the government like Sandy Kress and Gene Hickok to the individual consultants and firms McKnight had had to hire under pressure from the school system. Thus the elements of distortion and possible corruption are placed in a context beyond that of the mere numbers of dollars.
Perlstein is a gifted writer. She also does a solid job of weaving the relevant professional literature into her story. My copy of the book is heavily annotated. Often we find examples of one sentence placing everything in context, and I can offer two examples from one page, 68. After a discussion of a guidance counselor attempting to help a child deal with his stress, Perlstein writes
But it's expecting heroics to ask a child who feels he doesn't matter - who leaks hope even at age seven - to derive enough solace from a tightly gripped tennis ball to change his worldPerlstein immediately follows this by beginning to analyze why some expectations of the reformers who insist on "no excuses" are unrealistic. Before getting to the specifics of the situation at Tyler Heights she notes
To deny what happens outside of school affects what happens inside is to deny realityThe reality is that the students at Tyler Heights do not come from middle class families, with all the support associated with such a setting. Parents may themselves lack literacy and organizing skills. They may not speak or read English, and thus be unable to assist with school work, or to check a school website for assignments. They may have a history of conflict with authority, or be unable to get to school because of work or lack of transportation to meet with teaches. And they may also lack parenting skills, so that their children arrive at school not only without sharpened pencils, but also without control of emotions and impulses, thereby severely complicating the the process of educating them and the other students in the classrooms they disrupt.
When you read this book, you cannot help but begin to grasp how narrow the education has become for the children at Tyler Heights. Until the MSAs are completed in March, their education has been restricted to little more than test prep. When reading instruction (including preparation to write the formulaic brief constructed responses required for the MSA) is expanded to 3+ hours of each school day, all McKnight (herself a former social studies teacher) can do is suggest that some of the reading passages be on science or social studies, since those subjects basically disappear from the school day - after all, they are not part of the testing for AYP. And the approach required in the mandated curriculum makes it even worse. Students learn key phrases and "hundred dollar words" that they are supposed to remember to include in their BCRS (brief constructed responses - about a paragraph). Perlstein is focused on the 3rd graders, the youngest children tested on NCLB. One teacher has them write 5 times "I know this is a poem because it has rhyme, rhythm and stanzas" but only write 3 poems. Again Perlstein is able to place all in the proper context (p. 128):
Even if the students were going to write a paragraph instead of a poem, why couldn't they have been given anything interesting to write, to stretch their minds. One week the Open Court reading passage told the story of a hallucinating cat who burst into verse upon sleeping in catnip and took a strange medicine from a witch - the tale was so kooky Miss Johnson could barely keep a straight face - and all the BCR asked was, "How do you know this is a poem?"
The Open Court Unit was Imagination.
I received the book unsolicited in the mail, accompanied by a note from the director of marketing. When I checked, I was informed although I have never met nor corresponded with Perlstein, she had placed my name on a list of people to whom she wanted the book sent in the hopes that I might write about it. The book is officially published this week. Tyler Heights would be considered a success by proponents of the high stakes testing approach of No Child Left Behind. Certainly under the leadership of Tina McKnight the school has produced test scores that are notable. What Perlstein is able to do is provide the reader with the reality of the cost of those scores. Most parents would probably recoil from having their students in such a restricted learning environment. And for many students they are able to succeed on the tests because of intense focus on test preparation without necessarily learning the underlying skills those tests are supposedly assessing. Given the pressures placed on educators this should not be surprising.
I have been involved with the issues around NCLB since before it became law, having even at the beginning of my career had to deal with earlier testing mandates. I found the time spent reading the book worthwhile, which is why I decided to write about it, although there was no obligation for me to do so. Because the book is new this may be your first encounter with it, and you may question how much reliance you wish to place upon my analysis and judgment. Perhaps the best way I can assure of the effectiveness and utility of the book is to quote the only blurb on the dustcover. It is written by someone with whose writings on educational matters I often have strong disagreements, E. D. Hirsch: that the two of us find ourselves concurring on something should by itself be worthy of note. So let me end by quoting his words:
If you want to know what is going on in our schools in the age of No Child Left Behind, this is the book o read. To the heroism of our overly-blamed teachers and to the cluelessness of our administrators and policymakers, especially those who have imposed unwise test regimens in response to the new law, Linda Perlstein's gripping story is an indispensable guide.
Peace.