ADDIO PER ORA

I have some news: I am retiring from the PBS NewsHour and Learning Matters.

For the past 41 years I have been covering public education mostly here in the USA but also in China, Hong Kong, France and Spain. I began at NPR in 1974 (when it was still known as National Public Radio), and I’ve reported for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and the PBS NewsHour ¹

I look forward to traveling with my wife and catching up with other areas of my life in the coming months, but retiring from Learning Matters is not a hard stop for me. I have one more report to finish for the NewsHour, and our new film, “School Sleuth: The Case of the Wired Classroom,” will be on most PBS stations in November.

My passion and desire for engagement remain strong. Rather than putting myself out to pasture, I hope to keep active as a moderator, an activity I love, and seize other opportunities and adventures that await, out of sight around the corner. I’ll be weighing in on critical issues in education in Raleigh-Durham in August; DC in September; and Chicago in October.

There’s certainly plenty to talk about:

****Will we hold charter schools, both for-profit and not-for-profit, accountable for their spending and their educational outcomes?
****If the resistance to over-testing continues to grow, how will that change what happens in schools on a daily basis?
****Will technology be used to let students soar and explore, or will educators harness it to improve management of information and fact-based learning?
****Will leadership emerge that will help develop sensible ways of assessing schools, students and teachers–and in so doing drive a stake through the heart of ‘test-based accountability’ that is playing gotcha with teachers?
****How will the new Elementary and Secondary Education Act, when it eventually replaces the much-detested No Child Left Behind, change the power dynamics between Washington, DC, and the states?

Friends have asked me what I will miss most. That’s easy: the challenges of reporting and the joys of teamwork. Television is truly a team sport, and I have been blessed with wonderful teammates. Because it’s my face and voice that have been in your faces and ears, I’ve received more credit and attention than I deserve. I hope that, at 74, I am mature enough to cope without the attention.

By now, blogging has become second nature to me, and I will continue to post at least weekly. I invite you to take a look at my new blog, The Merrow Report. (Fun fact: This was the name of my original television series back in the 1990’s.) You will find it at themerrowreport.com

Please consider subscribing.

My departure is not a hard stop (or any sort of stop at all) for Learning Matters and its reporting for the NewsHour. Within a few days, expect an announcement. I’m thrilled that my talented colleagues will continue to do the work they love, and I am extremely grateful that a number of leading foundations are supporting this enterprise.

In later posts I will weigh in on current issues and trends, while also reflecting on the past 41 years of interviewing teachers, students, Secretaries of Education and others in America’s most important venture.

As I sign off, please know that it has been a rare privilege to report for you. I appreciate your trust, and I pledge to do my best to preserve it, whenever our worlds connect.

An Italian friend once cautioned me, “Never say arrivederci to people you care about. Say addio per ora instead, because that means ‘goodbye for now.’”

Addio per ora. I look forward to hearing from you.

John

(john.merrow@gmail.com)

Public Law 94-142, “The Education of All Handicapped Children Act of 1975,” passed not long after I began reporting on education, and it became the first issue that I dug into deeply on my weekly NPR series. A lot has happened since then, much of it very positive, which makes the 40th Anniversary an occasion to celebrate–while continuing to search for ways to improve the learning opportunities for kids with special needs.

The term “Handicapped” was soon cast aside, and “Special Needs” became the term of choice. Before long “Handicapped” became the field’s “H word,” never to be spoken in public. Word games ensued. Some preferred “Exceptional” as the descriptive adjective–and in fact it had been the Council for Exceptional Children in Washington that pushed hardest for passage of legislation in the 1970’s. Militants often referred to non-disabled children (and adults) as “temporarily able-bodied,” but that did not catch on.

Although the vote in the House and Senate had made it veto-proof, PL 94-142 was not universally popular. In a break with tradition, President Gerald Ford refused to allow photographers into the room when he signed the bill. He was upset and angry about the precedent the law was setting–requiring services but not providing the money. Somewhere in our video archive is an interview with then former President Ford, in which he reflects on the ‘unfunded mandate’ of PL 94-142, which required schools to serve these students but did not come close to providing the funds. He predicted–correctly–that this would become an albatross around the necks of school boards.

PL 94-142 required that every child who was diagnosed and labeled be provided with an IEP, an “Individualized Education Plan,” that would serve as a road map for their education. That essential provision also created a bureaucratic situation, sometimes a nightmare, for parents and administrators.

The new law also created, almost overnight, a new area of specialization for teachers and a growth industry for schools of education. Even today, it’s the easiest area of education to find a job.

The law and its successors have created other problems, most notably the “lawyering up” of parents determined to force public schools to pay for expensive private school education for their children with special needs. It’s not a ‘cottage industry’ for lawyers, the special education attorney Miriam Freedman notes, but a “mansion industry.”

The new law required that students with disabilities be educated in the “least restrictive environment,” a reaction to the widespread practice of isolating and segregating these students. However, the practice of ‘mainstreaming’ in regular classrooms has created its own issues, and many teachers continue to complain that they have not been adequately trained to work with this population of students.

Complaints and problems aside, PL 94-142 and its successors have transformed the lives of millions of children for the better. Because the 1975 law allowed states to ‘phase in’ their compliance, I was able to visit a few states before they began providing services. That allowed me to report on how these unfortunate children, and their families, were dealt with by public schools.

And it was a nightmare. No other word suffices. In New Mexico, for example, severely physically disabled children were locked up, with little or no consideration for their mental capacity. Some desperate families kept these children at home, rather than condemn them to life in an institution.

Before 94-142, schools did not have to make any special effort to educate children with disabilities, and I visited middle school and high school classrooms where a disabled child was simply assigned to draw pictures or weave bracelets while the other kids studied American history or French. Those days are over, or should be anyway.

PL 94-142 and its successors have created opportunities and occasions for those without disabilities to learn about differences, to learn empathy. That’s no small thing.

A nation and its people can be judged by how it treats its least fortunate. In this respect, the United States deserves some credit.

Like this country, public schools will always be a work in progress. It’s easy to criticize schools, and often the criticism is warranted, but it’s important to stop every once in a while and give ourselves credit for doing the right thing.

The 40th Anniversary of the Education of All Handicapped Children Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and other iterations is one of those occasions. Well done, America. (Now let’s do it better!)

Because America is committed to testing every child in every subject in order to make sure teachers are doing a good job, the number of high-stakes tests is increasing, and that means that we have to act boldly to eliminate cheating, which, coincidentally, also has been increasing.

Some background is in order: We have a cheating problem in our schools¹. While a handful of students cheat because they are competing to get into top colleges, many more principals, teachers, and administrators either cheat or encourage cheating. After all, their jobs are on the line because we now judge, reward and fire them based on student test scores..

The situation has gotten out of hand. In Atlanta, Washington, DC, Austin, Texas, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Dayton, Ohio and many other places, adults have worked together, even holding ‘erasure parties,’ to change student answers from wrong to right.

So what can we do to punish cheaters? Unfortunately, we cannot just fire the cheating teachers and administrators. After all, who would replace ² them? Education is fast becoming an undesirable occupation, largely because of the pressure to demonstrate academic achievement (I.E., high test scores), and that is making it extremely difficult to recruit new people into education.

No, we have to work with what we’ve got, just as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had to fight the war with the army he had. There are two obvious steps: 1) increase surveillance to catch the cheaters and 2) make the punishments more obvious to the outside world.

Increased surveillance will cost more, of course, but we can trim other expenditures, perhaps in the subjects that aren’t being tested and therefore not occasions for cheating. I’m thinking of art, music and physical education, but, if schools have already cut those, then electives like journalism, minor sports, and theatre are places to look for savings.

Publicly shaming the cheaters is essential. Making the punishments more public should curtail cheating. For younger students, the shaming should be temporary. Perhaps cheaters should have to wear bright yellow shirts emblazoned with a huge letter ³ “C” for a month or more.

But for anyone cheating after 5th or 6th grade, a shaming shirt isn’t enough. After all, 10-year-olds are mature enough to understand consequences. Here’s where I think a permanent tattoo would do the trick. The first offense should produce a stern warning. But a the second offense demonstrates they are beyond redemption, so let’s tattoo the letter ‘C’ or the word ‘CHEATER’ ⁴ on the back of the criminal’s dominant hand. Should there be a third offense, the tattoo ought to be placed more prominently, perhaps on the cheater’s forehead. While I doubt matters would ever get to that point, leadership has to be ready to make the hard decisions, for the greater good. ⁵

Would prominent tattoos on hands and foreheads be enough to stop principals and adults from cheating to save their jobs? Perhaps not, and so we ought to be willing to have a free and open discussion about other penalties, including–hopefully as a last resort–lopping off the index fingers of persistent violators.

It’s important to do whatever is necessary to protect the integrity of the learning and testing process.

We owe Secretary of Education Arne Duncan a debt of gratitude. Thanks to his “Race to the Top” program, teacher evaluation has finally moved out of the 19th Century. Thanks to him, the outmoded and unfair approach–an administrator sitting in the back of the room once or twice a year–is history. And it’s about time, because that approach was susceptible to favoritism, laziness and sexual harassment.

My first school principal at Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, New York, evaluated us that way. Mr. Henderson, who was approaching retirement the year I began teaching, was known for playing favorites. He liked coaches who also taught, and he loved teachers who kept their classrooms quiet; those folks received glowing reports. Noise, even if it was a lively classroom discussion, was a bad thing in Mr. Henderson’s book, and those teachers received a talking-to. (I was one of those.)

Secretary Duncan has effectively replaced that outmoded approach with a performance-based, data-driven system where teachers are evaluated based on the scores of students on standardized tests. He did this with “Race to the Top,” the competition for scarce resources at the height of the Great Recession. To qualify for funds, states and districts had to commit to judging teachers by test scores.

Although most states didn’t get the money, nearly all of them fell into line in their efforts to qualify. In some states, 50% of a teacher’s rating is now based on test scores.

Of course, like any forward-looking innovation, this new approach isn’t perfect. For example, because most subjects are not tested, quite a few teachers can’t logically be held responsible for test scores. Some districts have gotten past this small bump in the road by linking those teachers to the scores of students in other classrooms, in other subjects, and even in other schools (but in the same district).

Another solution to this problem has been to add tests in more subjects. While this means more tests for kids and more money out the schoolhouse door and into the pockets of testing companies, this bold, progressive step will help achieve the goal of holding all teachers accountable.¹

Secretary Duncan’s new approach has another tiny problem: The results generally don’t affect students, just teachers. The scores don’t determine whether kids advance a grade or graduate, for example, and it’s not unheard of for students to fill in answers randomly. So it’s ‘no stakes’ for kids and ‘high stakes’ for the adults. That’s led to occasional revolts, like the one led by idealistic students in Colorado who refused to take a test that would have been used to judge their teachers. It’s also led to cheating by adults, worried about their jobs, in too many places to mention. ².

However, one very important teacher is not being held accountable by this new system. I’m referring to our Secretary of Education, arguably the nation’s number one teacher. He’s now being judged in the old way, through informal and formal contact with and observations by his ‘principal,’ President Barack Obama.

Wouldn’t test scores be a fairer way? President Obama likes athletes, and Secretary Duncan is an exceptional basketball player who scrimmages fairly regularly with the President, which could mean that his performance on the job is not being truly measured. And if the President has actually visited the Department of Education, it probably wasn’t much more than a drive-by. I believe the President needs some standardized test scores to measure just how effective his Secretary of Education is.

I have a modest proposal: Let’s hold Secretary Duncan accountable in the same way that regular classroom teachers are. To help move the process forward, I’m developing a standardized test to be administered to the nearly 4300 employees at the U.S. Department: The “Measuring Arne Duncan’s National Effectiveness with School Systems,” or MADNESS.

MADNESS will be a multiple-choice test, with questions of varying degrees of difficulty. I’m releasing a few sample questions here but, for obvious reasons, cannot publish the entire test.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 was passed by Congress in:
A. 1964
B. 1965
C. 2001
D. None of the above

2. The first person to receive an Associate’s Degree from a community college in Indiana was:
A. Clark Harris
B. Harrison Clark
C. Clarissa Harrison
D. None of the above

3. How many people work in the U.S. Department of Education?
A. About 3930
B. About 3712
C. About 4230
D. About half of them

Wander the halls of the Department of Education, as I have done over the years, and you will see men and women at their desks, apparently working on grants to states and districts. Sometimes they’ll be on the phone, perhaps explaining rules and regulations that govern how federal funds can be legally spent. After all, the Department distributes about $60 billion, money that school districts count on receiving in a timely fashion, and so the work of these anonymous bureaucrats is essential to keeping our public education system functioning.

Unfortunately, their important work will have to come to a halt for at least three weeks before MADNESS is administered, to give USDE employees time to become familiar with the test format and to study the material that the test will cover. Some may have forgotten–or never even studied–Indiana community college history, for example, and that makes test-prep vital. Even though they know that the MADNESS results will not affect their own status, many will want to help their boss keep his job.³ If some employees decide to blow off the test, there’s nothing that can be done about that. Let’s just hope that doesn’t put the Secretary’s job in jeopardy.

To acknowledge Secretary Duncan’s prowess as a basketball player, MADNESS will be administered in March. As with most standardized, machine-scored, tests, the results will not be available until late August.