If you ask professional educators in a public forum whether they view parents as assets or liabilities, the answers will vary only in decibel level: “Assets,” “Our greatest asset,” “invaluable partners,” and so forth.  But what if you caught them off guard, late at night after a few drinks, say?

Or, better yet, what if you simply examined how most schools treat parents?

In my experience, most administrators and many teachers hold parents in low regard, and their behavior and policies reflect that.

Perhaps that’s an inevitable consequence of attempting to elevate education to a high-status profession.  “After all, you wouldn’t expect a heart surgeon to consult with a child’s parents before replacing a ruptured valve and saving the child’s life,” the thinking goes, as if the work of educating a child were the equivalent of complex surgery.

It seems to me that most schools push parents away in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.  There’s the once-a-year “Back to School Night” and perhaps a “Parent Involvement Committee’ or a “Parent Advisory Board” that meets occasionally with the Principal.  Many schools expect parents to hold bake sales, auctions and fundraising drives (which can be a large chunk of a school’s budget these days) but that doesn’t treat parents as partners in their children’s education.

Unfortunately, it’s the rare educator who says “We cannot do a good job of educating your child without you,” actually means it–and then proves it by his or her actions.

Why this negative attitude toward parents?  Some educators feel that low income parents do not have the time or energy to get deeply involved in their children’s schooling.  But even if their dismissal of parents is rooted in empathy or sympathy, it adds up to the same thing: the exclusion of parents.  Unfortunately, however, plenty of administrators and teachers are genuinely disdainful of parents and apt to dismiss them as uncaring, uninvolved or ignorant.  “Just leave the education to us” is how I would characterize their attitude.

As evidence of parental detachment, these administrators and teachers often cite the low turnout at ‘Back to School Night,’ concluding from the large number of no-show parents that they don’t care.  But I suggest we look carefully at how ‘Back to School Night’ is structured: a quick series of show-and-tell presentations by teachers, one-off lectures that make parents feel like visitors or strangers who happened by. The educators will tell the parents to make sure their kids do their homework assignments and don’t watch much TV.  Why would most parents bother to attend more than once?  What’s inviting about being talked down to?

The problem of ‘summer learning loss,’ sometimes called ‘summer slide,’ offers an insight into what might be labeled the professional arrogance of educators.  Summer slide is a real and significant phenomenon that is more pronounced among lower income children whose parents do not take them on big trips or provide a wide range of stimulating experiences in the summer.   When school begins again in the fall, poor kids tend to have regressed, while middle- and upper-income kids have either gained or not lost ground.  The cumulative effect of many summers of sliding is a significant achievement gap.

Cure ‘summer slide,’ and graduation rates would improve, et cetera, et cetera.  But what to do?

Educators, naturally, see ‘more education’ as the solution to ‘summer slide,’ and so they propose to extend the day, extend the year, send kids to summer school–or all of the above.  After all, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail….

But suppose the achievement gap is the symptom of something else, the result of a different problem?  If educators are misdiagnosing the problem, then their solution (‘more school’) is not likely to be effective in the long term.

We’re editing a story for the PBS NewsHour about a young man, a first grade teacher, who–probably because he’s not a professional educator–looked at summer learning loss very differently.

Perhaps summer slide happens, he hypothesized, because parents (who spend far more time with their children than do teachers) are not involved in the nitty-gritty of their kids’ schooling.  What if parents were taught the skills to help their kids become better readers and treated as partners in the education process?  No lectures, no ‘parent involvement committees,’ no window-dressing, but a genuine partnership that required openness and commitment from everyone?

Suppose the root problem is education’s failure to recognize that parents want their children to succeed but may not know how to contribute?  Suppose the real problem is education’s failure to treat parents as assets?

But could parents be treated as valuable assets?  Would teachers–long accustomed to holding parents at arm’s length–learn humility and acknowledge that parents were essential?  And would parents accept this responsibility (because, after all, many have become accustomed to educators saying ‘leave the education to us.’)?

He’s had some success in Philadelphia over the past couple of summers, and it’s intriguing to speculate about what might happen: could this radical idea—parents matter–spread to regular (September-June) school? What would that look like?  How much change would be required, and by whom?

You may learn more about this young teacher, Alejandro Gac-Artigas, and Springboard, the promising program he established in Philadelphia, at springboardcollaborative.org.  Or wait a few weeks and watch our report on the NewsHour.  Or weigh in with your insights here…which might help us with our reporting.

As we celebrate our nation’s independence, it might be worth recalling that the first stanza {{1}} of our National Anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” poses two questions but answers only the first, leaving the second for each generation to wrestle with.

Some of you may now be singing the song to yourselves, figuring out just what the anthem poses. Let me save you the trouble. The first question is presented in the song’s opening lines:

O, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?”

In other words, did our flag survive the bombardment of Fort McHenry in what is known as the Battle of Baltimore in 1814? It was still flying, the lyrics assure us:

And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.

However, Francis Scott Key poses a second question–which he does not answer–in the last two lines of the first stanza:

Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

I suspect that most of us do not think of it as a question. We sing it, loudly and proudly, telling the world that we are the land of the free and the home of the brave. But Key wrote it as a question, not an exclamation. So let’s ask Key’s question–about the America we live in now.

Can we describe America as ‘the land of the free’ when one quarter of our children are growing up in poverty, when the richest one-tenth of one percent of our population controls more wealth than the bottom half, when politicians in dozens of states are maneuvering to keep groups of people from voting, and when millions of college graduates are in debt and millions more leave college without a diploma but with a heavy debt burden? {{2}}

Can we call America ‘the land of the brave’ when we no longer call on our young people to serve but rely instead on a professional military–which our leaders send, over and over and over, to serve tours of duty in hostile environments and then fail to provide for when they return home?

This Independence Day we might want to think about how easily we can lose what we prize. We might ask if the America envisioned in ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is slipping away because we lack the lift of a driving dream and because we ask almost nothing of our young people…and very little of ourselves.

Could it be time to revive the idea of national service and reinstitute the military draft? What if all young people were obligated to give two years of their lives in service to our country? Serving in the military could be one choice, but it should be just one of a menu of options that we could come up with. In return, we taxpayers would commit to paying for two years of post-secondary education or training for young people after they serve..

Living in the land of the free should not be a free ride, nor should patriotism be an empty word.

What is your answer to Francis Scott Key’s second question?

—-

[[1]]1. Who knew that Francis Scott Key wrote four stanzas? I did not. http://www.usa-flag-site.org/song-lyrics/star-spangled-banner.shtml[[1]]

[[2]]2. Each of these issues can be addressed (and is being addressed by good and earnest people), but I think this is akin to repairing lifeboats at a time when the ship of state may be off course.  We need to debate bigger changes.[[2]]

How much does a sign reading “CHARTER SCHOOL” reveal about the education being offered inside the building? My answer: About as much as a ’RESTAURANT’ sign reveals about the food it serves. That is, nothing at all. This sad state of affairs makes me wonder whether the charter school movement has been hijacked or, at a minimum, has strayed off course. If it has lost its way, whose responsibility is it to restore order and integrity?

I posed that general question to a number of leaders in the charter school arena and will share some of their answers below, but let me explain why I am bringing up the subject.

I’ve been following the story since 1988, when a number of educators convened near the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Minnesota to develop an idea that had been put forth–separately–by Albert Shanker, the teacher union leader, and Ray Budde, a Massachusetts educator. You will recognize the names of some of those who participated: Mr. Shanker, Joe Nathan, State Senator Ember Reichgott, Ted Kolderie and Sy Fliegel. (I was there as the moderator.)

The basic idea that emerged was than any school district could create a ‘charter school’–essentially free of nearly all regulations–that would allow exploration of new models of teaching and learning. These charter {{1}} schools, people hoped, would incubate and then spread innovations.  Taking risks would be OK because only a small number of willing parents, students and teachers would be involved.

In the era of great enthusiasm for parental choice, the planners didn’t want people to be allowed to open charter schools just because they were ‘enthusiastic’ or public-spirited.  As Ted Kolderie explains in his new book, the planners insisted on an authorizing body that would scrutinize applicants and grant charters only to those who had the qualifications to run a school. {{2}}

Three years later Minnesota passed the first charter school law, and in 1992 the nation’s first charter school opened {{3}}.  Today at least 5,000 charter schools {{4}} in 41 states enroll about 2.4 million students–but almost none of these charter schools are ‘incubators of innovation’ working with a school district, as the planners had envisioned.

Both school districts and teacher unions ended up opposing the idea. The ‘authorizer as means of setting a high standard’ was diluted to the point of meaningless when some states decided to allow just about anybody to authorize the opening of charter schools. And in some states, authorizers have in turn allowed every Tom, Dick and Harry to set up charter schools.

Some states banned charter schools outright, while others set limits, often low ones, on the number that would be allowed.  Some states appeared to approve charter schools but added a crippling condition: no state funds could be used for facilities. That meant would-be charter school operators had to first raise enough money to acquire a building before they could enroll students or hire teachers and quality for state funds.

A few states–notably Michigan, Ohio and Florida–specifically encouraged for-profit charter schools. To see how disastrously that’s turned out in Michigan, you must read the results of a 1-year investigation by the Detroit Free Press.  It’s a stunning story of greed, mismanagement and failure of oversight that is being reported this week.

Earlier this year the left-leaning Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education published “Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud and Abuse,” its title taken from a report by the U.S. Department of Education’s Inspector General.

This report charges that $100 million in taxpayer funds have been lost, stolen or misspent. it cites six areas of abuse:

Charter operators using public funds illegally for personal gain;
School revenue used to illegally support other charter operator businesses;
Mismanagement that puts children in actual or potential danger;
Charters illegally requesting public dollars for services not provided;
Charter operators illegally inflating enrollment to boost revenues; and,
Charter operators mismanaging public funds and schools.”

Overall, charter schools have not been a smashing success academically speaking.  Several studies (.pdf) have indicated that about one-third of charter schools significantly outperform their traditional counterparts, while another third underperform them.

These waves of bad news threaten to obscure the movement’s successes. Over the years a number of Charter Management Organizations (called that to distinguish them from the for-profit charter groups, which are known as “Education Management Organizations”) have established successful chains of charter schools. The best-known CMO is KIPP, for Knowledge is Power Program, but Yes Prep, Achievement First, IDEA Public Schools and a few others have attracted a strong following among parents dissatisfied with traditional public schools…and have demonstrated significant academic gains.

The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools will be meeting soon in Las Vegas, which is why I raise the issue of the movement’s future at this point. In fact, I posed my questions to Nina Rees, the Executive Director of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, Reed Hastings, the Californian who strongly supports charter schools, Joe Nathan and Ted Kolderie, two who were key players at that 1988 meeting, and Greg Richmond, the leader of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

Greg Richmond and Reed Hastings were quick to point out that the influence of the profit-seekers was diminishing. Here’s part of Greg’s response:

The share of charter schools run by for-profit companies appears to have been flat for the past few years. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools shows a range of 11% to 13% over their most recent years of data (2008 to 2011) with a decrease in for-profits as a percent of the whole sector from 13% to 12.3% for the most recent year. The National Education Policy Center, no fan of charter schools, in its most recent report (released November 2013 with 2011-12 data) states “we estimate that the actual number of EMO-managed public schools has remained relatively stable over the past few years, and that large companies are diversifying into supplemental educational services rather than expanding in the full-service management area.

However, Richmond believes that the profit-seeking 100% virtual charter schools, which are growing in number, are a big problem in the charter community.

Their results are uniformly bad, and they have undue political influence in state capitols. Some important charter advocates would like to figure out a way to “kick them out” of the charter school movement.

My colleague John Tulenko did a piece for the NewsHour about one cyber-charter in Pennsylvania that you may have seen. Shortly after John’s piece aired, the founder was indicted.

I also asked about the influence of ideologues on the charter school movement. Some dismissed this, but Greg Richmond believes that those with blind faith in the free market–complete deregulation and parental choice–have been hurting the charter movement.

What I saw in New Orleans {{5}} supports Richmond’s point about the need for some regulation, because Recovery School District Superintendent Patrick Dobard learned that the independent charter schools had to be regulated and supervised or else some of them would play fast and loose {{6}} with the system and weed out (or not admit) students who might not do well academically or who were more expensive to educate.  Dobard saw it happening and worked to create universal standards on behavior, suspension and expulsion.

Richmond cites an activist group, the Center for Education Reform (CER), as the leading voice of this free market philosophy but adds,

The CER is much less influential than it used to be. After two decades of experience, few people in the charter movement believe that choice and deregulation are guaranteed to produce superior results. Those are good things, but talented teachers, great school leaders, adequate funding, facilities and high standards are just as important, if not more so.

Could the threat to the charter school movement come from the non-profits, not the profit-seekers?  It’s possible.  The non-profit Charter Management Organizations (CMO) are the fastest growing component of the charter movement. They represented just 11.5% of charter schools in 2008, but jumped to 20.2% in 2011.

In his new book, Ted Kolderie bemoans the division between these ‘franchise’ operations and the stand-alone charter schools, which detractors dismiss as “Mom and Pop” operations. In turning its back on individual charter schools,the charter movement is losing its way, Kolderie believes.  It’s in those individual schools that innovation is more likely to occur, he told me, because the franchises stress sameness, just like Burger King and McDonalds.

Greg Richmond sees the same divide as a threat. He wrote, in part,

The people who run these (stand alone) schools are interested in running their one school, not growing a network. Many of them came out of their local districts. They don’t like how the district was run, but they don’t inherently hate the district. They want the district to succeed too. These folks have real philosophical differences with the pro-growth, charter network people, while the network people believe that the stand-alone people are naïve.

Governmental and foundation policies support the CMO’s, whether it’s funding from the U.S. Department of Education or the newly established Broad Prize for Charter Schools, a cash award of $250,000 that goes to a CMO.{{7}}  There is no equivalent award for a stand-alone charter school.

How painfully ironic would it be if the dominance of networks stifled the innovation that the founders of the charter school movement saw as the fundamental advantage of chartering in the first place?

If the clash of philosophies between charter networks and the stand-alone schools is real, relevant and threatening to the stand-alone schools, whose responsibility is it to make sure that the playing field is level?

Nina Rees, the executive director of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, suggested that the responsibility for keeping the movement on course rests with authorizers and, should they fail, politicians. Perhaps, but shouldn’t the Alliance itself support even-handed treatment of networks and stand-alone charter schools? Shouldn’t the Alliance be speaking out against too-easy authorization of would-be charter operators?  Shouldn’t the Alliance stand firmly in favor of more effective and transparent ways of holding failing charter schools accountable?  Shouldn’t it be praising effective state charter school laws, and criticizing those laws that hurt the charter movement by opening the door to unscrupulous people?

I believe the charter movement is off course for another reason: Like the rest of public education, it is hostage to our obsession with test scores as the bottom line measure of school quality.  Charter schools could be leading the conversation about multiple measures of school and teacher effectiveness, but it seems to me that many of them have bought into the bubble test mania.

Charter schools were conceived of as pockets of innovation and cooperation.  We finally found {{8}} a school district that has welcomed charter schools and is striving to learn from them. Sometime in the next week or two the PBS NewsHour will carry our report about Spring Branch, Texas, where Superintendent Duncan Klussman has invited KIPP and Yes Prep to open schools inside two of his middle schools.  As you will see, the relationship is, so far at least, mutually beneficial, although it appeared to us that the charter schools are having a stronger impact on the traditional schools, not vice-versa.  But that’s as it should be, if charter schools are pushing the inside of the envelope.

The term “Charter School” has to stand for something; right now its meaning is in doubt, and that’s not good. I cannot be in Las Vegas for the annual meeting of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, but I hope some of the ideas above will be part of the conversations there.

—-

[[1]]1. Ted Kolderie and others call them ‘chartered schools.’[[1]]

[[2]]2. “The Split Screen Strategy: Improvement and Innovation,” Beaver’s Pond Press, 2014. Joe Nathan, who was at the 1988 meeting, sent me a note with the following information: The authorizer function was included in part because of research I had done on the GI Bill and some of the scandals at that time.  It was clear that just offering choice was not enough.  There needed to be an organization that would review proposals and determine which represented coherent, good ideas presented by people who had the skills & experience needed to carry them out.  We knew from the beginning that the authorizer role was vital.  Joe’s 1996 book, Charter Schools: Creating Hope and Opportunity, has more on this point.[[2]]

[[3]]3. In Saint Paul. Some charter opponents doubted that advocates would support closing ineffective schools, or those where there was corruption.  It’s widely known that the first charter to open was in Minnesota.  What’s not so widely known is that the first charter to close was also in Minnesota.  Joe Nathan testified (against the wishes of some people) in favor of closing. The Minnesota State Board of Education closed the school.
[[3]]

[[4]]In recent years numbers of Catholic parochial schools have converted to charter schools. http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/06/11/35catholic_ep.h33.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1 [[4]]

[[5]]5. Our film, “Rebirth: New Orleans,” is available on Netflix. It’s the result of six years of filming there.[[5]]

[[6]]6.  For evidence ot that in other places: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/from-portfolios-to-parasites-the-unfortunate-path-of-u-s-charter-school-policy/ [[6]]

[[7]]7. This year it will go to KIPP, IDEA Public Schools or Achievement First.  The award will be presented in Las Vegas. Joe Nathan and I are among those who have voiced the opinion that there should be a significant monetary award for outstanding independent charter schools.[[7]]

[[8]]8. I learned about the experiment from Richard Whitmire’s new book about charter schools, On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools are Pushing the Envelope (Wiley, 2014) After I published the blog, Joe Nathan offered other examples of district/charter collaboration, including his own city of St. Paul, where, he reports, the two have been working together to increase the number of low income students taking dual (High school/college credits), and Massachusetts, where the charter law has helped encourage creation of Pilot Schools within the district.  He added, “The existence of chartering in Minnesota helped encourage the Forest Lake district to open a Montessori district school; it helped encourage the Rochester district to open a Core Knowledge option, and it has encouraged the Minneapolis teachers union to propose (and the legislature to adopt) a “site governed” district school option.”[[8]]

Why did thousands and thousands of students opt out of standardized testing this spring? Which tests did they choose to skip? And how did school leaders react? Did they punish, ignore, or–horrors–reward the protesting students?

Opt out numbers are hard to come by. I have seen estimates ranging from 30,000 to 300,000 in just one state, New York. Even though the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data,’ it’s pretty clear that the opt-out phenomenon is tangible, real and growing.

Identifying the adult players in this battle is an interesting challenge. Some are Tea Party types who are opposed to anything–not just in education–that smacks of ‘big government.’ Here’s one website. This faction of “opt out” is way out on the right politically.

The left has an “opt out” faction as well, albeit less organized. For them, opting out is a way of protesting what they see as the excessive influence of large corporations in our schools, with the testing company Pearson often being singled out for criticism and scorn.{{1}}

With the blessing of the New York State Department of Education, Pearson has been “field testing” questions at about 4,100 schools. For those students it’s another day of testing, in addition to the six days of state-mandated, high-stakes tests. Some parents have refused to let their children take these additional tests, as Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News has reported.

Gonzalez believes that the extra tests won’t produce any reliable data because the kids know these extra tests don’t count and therefore don’t take them seriously.

When New York State signed with Pearson to let that company try out its tests on certain students, it reminded some critics of an earlier time in America’s history when landowners could assign their workers as they saw fit. Back then, they could rent their workers out to other landowners or to mills and factories when those industries needed workers. That infamous practice–slavery–became illegal with the passage of the 14th Amendment after the Civil War. {{2}}

Since these tests are being given to help Pearson, it seems to me that the student workers ought to be rewarded for their efforts or offered the option of alternate activities. They are not chattel.

Many “opt out” supporters believe that excessive standardized testing is hurting genuine learning.{{3}} These parents, teachers, principals and school board members support opting out as a way of slowing down or limiting testing. The parents tell grim stories about their kids vomiting, not sleeping and crying all the time. Some school boards (including hundreds in Texas alone), teachers, principals and other educators want to limit standardized testing, and a few publicly support opting out. In Rochester, NY, school board member Willa Powell informed her child’s school that she would not be taking the new state test, for example.

When veteran teacher Gerry Conti of Westhill, NY, publicly disclosed his reasons for opting out of teaching by retiring early, it caused something of a sensation. Too much testing and an overemphasis on data collection–to the exclusion of creativity–were his chief complaints. In his resignation letter, which he posted on Facebook, he spread the blame around to include legislators, his union, and local school administrators. Here’s an excerpt:

In their pursuit of Federal tax dollars, our legislators have failed us by selling children out to private industries such as Pearson Education. The New York State United Teachers union has let down its membership by failing to mount a much more effective and vigorous campaign against this same costly and dangerous debacle. Finally, it is with sad reluctance that I say our own administration has been both uncommunicative and unresponsive to the concerns and needs of our staff and students by establishing testing and evaluation systems that are Byzantine at best and at worst, draconian.

What I find intriguing are the targeted “opt out” protests aimed at the new Common Core exams, which are being rolled out around the country in trial runs.

Protests against these computer-based tests are creating problems for local administrators. The question some administrators seem to ask themselves is, “Should I punish or reward these non-participating students?” When they pose it that way, it strikes me that they are taking the protest personally, making it about THEM, not the kids. Bad idea…

The education establishment, which does not want “opt out” to spread, has been straightforward in its response: If you let (or make) your kids opt out, you are hurting them. You may think you are helping, but you actually are doing them a disservice. Testing, they explain, is in your children’s best interests because it tells you where they stand academically.

Among those campaigning against opting out is former DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who mocked those who have chosen to keep their kids from taking the tests:

Opt out of measuring how well our schools are serving students? What’s next: Shut down the county health department because we don’t care whether restaurants are clean? Defund the water-quality office because we don’t want to know if what’s streaming out of our kitchen faucets is safe to drink? {{4}}

Some school districts have adopted a punitive “Sit and Stare” policy meaning that the opting out kids have to sit at their desks while other students take the tests.{{5}} The protesters are not allowed to read books, thus ‘sit and stare’ for 60-90 minutes. This is apparently designed to humiliate the protesters. In some cases, the test booklets and pencils are put on the protesting students’ desks, probably with the hope that they will cave in to the pressure.

A poster child for what NOT to do might be Dr. Stacey Gross, principal of Ridgefield (CT) High School, where only 35 juniors–out of more than 400–took the new Common Core tests. That’s right: more than 90% of the high school juniors in this wealthy Connecticut town opted out of the test, which was given over several days.

Why did so many juniors opt out? One explained to a reporter: “I find this time of the year to be just as stressful as before APs,” Kristin Li said. “Now that APs are over, I’ve simply shifted my focus to SATs and ACTs. On top of that, I’m studying for my national registry exams to become a certified EMT, I’m becoming increasingly involved in my school clubs, and I dance four to five days a week. I can’t speak for everyone, but my life is just as busy as it was earlier in the year.”

In response to the opting out, Principal Gross decided to punish the protestors by prohibiting learning! She wrote an email to the parents of the juniors–protestors and test-takers alike– to ‘reassure’ them that (her words) “NO NEW LEARNING” can occur in a class where a Junior is absent for testing.” {{6}}

Teachers, she added, would not be covering any new material for the 365 students, at the expense of the 35 who toed the line and took the Common Core tests. The 365 students would have to go to their scheduled classrooms, she announced. She wouldn’t mess up the school’s patterns just to accommodate the 90%!

It seems to me that educators like Dr. Gross should be helping to identify useful alternative behaviors that would benefit the students who weren’t taking the tests. What might she have said? How about: “To ensure that students who are taking the test do not fall behind, their teachers will not be covering new material during the testing periods. And I’ve asked those who are opting out to come up with some alternative activities that are educational in nature or somehow contribute to our HS community.”

Michelle Goodman, who pulled her daughter out of the testing, told reporter Dani Blum of the Ridgefield Press that the administration’s insistence on “no new learning” was “absolutely ludicrous.” “Where are the priorities here, with the students who want to succeed or with the school system who is forcing their policies to the detriment of our children’s education?” she asked.

Giving young people choices while they are still in school? Allowing or even encouraging them to take responsibility for their own lives? These are dangerous concepts that threaten the established order of things in schools. Stuff like that may be fine for adults in a democratic society, but choices and personal responsibility are out of place in our schools.

—-

[[1]]1. The New York State Department of Education’s $32M contract with giant testing company Pearson did not include sufficient funds for field testing, so, with the State Department’s approval, Pearson embedded items for future tests in its regular testing, sparking more protest from parents, who felt their children were being used as guinea pigs.[[1]]

[[2]]2. In the deep South, the shameful practice continued up to the beginning of World War Two, as Douglas A. Blackmon shows so powerfully in “Slavery by Another Name.” [[2]]

[[3]]I count myself as a member of that group. My own take on excessive testing is a play on Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” which I call “Mending School.” It includes these lines:
“Before I gave more bubble tests,
I’d ask to know
What I was testing for, and why
And to whom I was like to do harm.”[[3]]

[[4]]4. This is a rhetorical straw man, because the tests are not designed to measure school effectiveness.  If that were our goal, we would use a more complex (and expensive) test but give it to only a carefully drawn sample of students–just as your doctor draws only a few drops of your blood, not all of it, to evaluate your body, and just as political pollsters survey only a carefully drawn random sample of likely voters to make predictions about elections.[[4]]

[[5]]5. Here’s one story: http://www.13wham.com/template/cgi-bin/archived.pl?type=basic&file=/news/features/top-stories/stories/archive/2014/03/ovbProS5.xml#.U6Fv241dVeM [[5]]

[[6]]6. Does anyone, let alone an educator, really believe that learning can be prohibited? Aren’t young people going to figure out the foolishness of that prohibition? Aren’t they going to learn something pretty basic about a person who feels she can prohibit learning? Prohibiting learning seems to me to be akin to telling someone not to think about a pink elephant–the opposite happens.

Growing up, we learned about King Canute, who famously stood on the beach and commanded the tide not to rise.  The sea disobeyed him, as he knew it would, because the wise King was trying to teach his subjects of the futility of some human laws.  Alas, Dr. Gross does not seem to possess the wisdom of Canute.[[6]]

“Sh*t, Sh*t, Sh*t!!!”

I wasn’t present when AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis van Roekel heard about “Vergara vs California,” but it’s easy to imagine them uttering an expletive (or two or three).

Understand, I’m not talking about their reaction to the judge’s decision earlier this week. I’m imagining how they might have reacted when the lawsuit challenging California’s tenure and seniority rules was filed in May 2012, more than two years ago.

Why might they have cursed when the lawsuit was filed? Because, I suspect, they knew that the three California rules were indefensible. These rules are not based on anything remotely connected to pedagogy or the needs of students but were political decisions made by the state legislature, heavily influenced by the powerful California Teachers Association, the CTA{{1}}.

Consider the three provisions:

1) Tenure after TWO years? How can any organization, let alone something as complex as a school function that way? And by the way, the ‘two year’ rule actually means that a school principal has to make that ‘lifetime’ decision about halfway through the teacher’s second year on the job, after he or she has been in charge of a classroom for perhaps 14-15 months at most.
2) Slavish devotion to “Last Hired, First Fired,” as if the profession of teaching were labor’s equivalent of sanitation workers or pipefitters. 100% seniority! Nothing else matters, not a principal’s judgement, not student performance, not the teacher’s contributions to the school, and not student evaluation. Just years on the job!
3) A convoluted and complex process to remove inadequate teachers that reportedly involves about 70 discrete steps, takes years and can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The case against those three provisions, “Vergara{{2}} vs. California,” was decided this week: “A California judge ruled {{3}} Tuesday that teacher tenure laws deprived students of their right to an education under the State Constitution and violated their civil rights. The decision hands teachers’ unions a major defeat in a landmark case, one that could radically alter how California teachers are hired and fired and prompt challenges to tenure laws in other states.”

Editorial pages of both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal praised the decision. How often do those two papers agree on something?

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan applauded the ruling: “For students in California and every other state, equal opportunities for learning must include the equal opportunity to be taught by a great teacher. The students who brought this lawsuit are, unfortunately, just nine out of millions of young people in America who are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students. Today’s court decision is a mandate to fix these problems.”{{4}}

Teacher union foes like Whitney Tilson and RiShawn Biddle could hardly restrain themselves, while union leaders Weingarten, van Roekel and New York City’s United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew complained that the decision diverted attention from social unfairness{{5}} and then attacked the man behind the lawsuit. Here’s part of Mulgrew’s statement: “What shocks the conscience is the way the judge misread the evidence and the law, and sided with a Silicon Valley millionaire who never taught a day in his life.”{{6}}

Judge Treu stayed the decision pending appeal and urged the legislature to fix the problems, but how likely is it that the California legislature will act to make earning tenure a more reasonable process, perhaps after three or even four years of teaching, instead of two?

That’s probably not going to happen because the CTA still wields great power. But if California needs a model, New York City’s approach to granting tenure seems to work well, as Chalkbeat explains here.

“Last hired, first fired”–using seniority as the sole factor in layoffs–is as indefensible as 2-year tenure, but it is also counter-productive because it alienates young teachers, some of whom are showing their displeasure by declining to support their national and state unions. That’s happened in Modesto, California and Wicomico, Maryland, where local chapters want to disaffiliate with their state association and the NEA itself. In neither case has it been pretty.

Tenure and due process are essential, in my view, but excessive protectionism (70+ steps to remove a teacher?) alienates the general public and the majority of effective teachers, particularly young teachers who are still full of idealism and resent seeing their union spend so much money defending teachers who probably should have been counseled out of the profession years ago.

With the modal ‘years of experience’ of teachers dropping dramatically, from 15 years in 1987 to 1 or 2 years today, young teachers are a force to be reckoned with. If a significant number of them abandon the familiar NEA/AFT model, or if they develop and adopt a new form of teacher unionism, public education and the teaching profession will be forever changed.

These are difficult times for teacher unions: declining membership and revenue, harsh criticism from traditional allies (like the leadership of the Democratic party), and now a court decision that will undoubtedly lead to similar challenges in other states.

The effort to blame poor education results on teachers and unions is misguided and malicious. It’s scapegoating, pure and simple, but–it must be said–protectionist policies like those in California play into the stereotype.

—-
[[1]]1. I lived in California from 2000-2010 and made a film, “First to Worst,” about the decline of the state’s public school system. Just to cite one case of the CTA’s power, the union wielded its influence to get Reed Hastings bounced from the State Board of Education in 2005. The Netflix founder had been appointed by Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, in 2000 and reappointed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. Hastings was serving as Chair of the Board, but his advocacy of bilingual education and charter schools angered the CTA and–in lockstep–many statehouse Democrats (Hastings’ own party).[[1]]
[[2]]2. The Vergara in the case is Beatriz Vergara, one of nine minors, all students, who were plaintiffs in the case. The effort, however, was funded by a wealthy Silicon Valley technology magnate named David Welch and his organization, Students Matter. A great deal of material about the case is on its website: http://studentsmatter.org/our-case/vergara-v-california-case-status/ [[2]]
[[3]]3. Here’s Judge Rolf Treu’s ruling: http://studentsmatter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Tenative-Decision.pdf [[3]]
[[4]]4. He continued: “Together, we must work to increase public confidence in public education. This decision presents an opportunity for a progressive state with a tradition of innovation to build a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect and rewarding careers they deserve. My hope is that today’s decision moves from the courtroom toward a collaborative process in California that is fair, thoughtful, practical and swift. Every state, every school district needs to have that kind of conversation. At the federal level, we are committed to encouraging and supporting that dialogue in partnership with states. At the same time, we all need to continue to address other inequities in education–including school funding, access to quality early childhood programs and school discipline.”[[4]]
[[5]]5. They have a point, it must be noted. California ranks at the bottom of all states in per-pupil spending ($8,342), which is about 30% below the national average of $11,864. [[5]]
[[6]]6. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/california-ruling-teacher-tenure-reformers-action-n-y-article-1.1826618#ixzz34S3muJC8 [[6]]

When do complaints about ‘too much’ standardized bubble testing become strong enough to bring about change?  Now that some students are spending more than 10% of their school ‘instructional’ time on test-prep and testing, have we reached the tipping point?  Now that some students are reported to be taking 20 different bubble tests during a school year, are we there?  With some students taking bubble tests in art, music and physical education, have we gone over the cliff?

Our kids are already the most tested in the world, and now the Common Core tests are on the doorstep. Is anyone in power demanding that schools swap out tests–eliminate one for every one they add?  Or eliminate two when adding one?  Or sampling a la NAEP?  Those voices are out there, but they are hard-to-hear and hardly heard.

Robert Frost is one of my favorite poets, and his “Mending Wall” inspired this effort, which I call “Mending School.”

Something there is that doesn’t love more bubble tests
And students bubbling and learning how to bubble
When they might be making robots or reading Frost.
They take test upon test in arid classrooms,
Mixing memory and guesswork, stirring
Dull anger and gnawing fear of failure.
The work of test-makers is another thing:
Teachers come after them and make repair
Where they have ground down creativity.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill,
And on a day we meet to walk and talk
Of learning, testing and hopes for children
But we keep a wall between us as we go.
To him, this is just another kind of mental game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
Now is when we do not need more tests, I tell him.
He only says, ‘More testing makes good education.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good education? Isn’t it
Where they are timely and used to help?
But here the tests punish takers and givers alike.
Before I gave more bubble tests, I’d ask to know
What I was I testing for, and why,
And to whom I was like to do harm.
Something there is that doesn’t love bubble tests,
That wants them stopped.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘More testing makes good education.’

If you would like the 24” x 36” full-color poster, please make a donation to Learning Matters.  Every dollar you donate–except the $10 for shipping and handling–will go to production of our coverage of public education.  You will be a proud supporter of independent reporting.

All of your gift–except $10–is fully tax-deductible, because Learning Matters is a 501(c)3 organization.

(And if you donate $100 or more, your poster will be personally autographed by either Robert Frost or yours truly, depending on which one happens to be in the office the day your poster is mailed to you.)

Have you ever wondered what happened to the men and women who sued to end school segregation in the 1950’s? Or stopped to think about the courage it must have taken to challenge a practice that had been blessed by the United States Supreme Court, written into state laws and zealously adhered to by local traditions? Here’s one story:

Harry Briggs was a garage attendant, and they fired him. And they fired another man whose name was Stookes after–he was working at a filling station also. After they fired him, he attempted to try to work in his backyard, and so he was working on a car and, not having the proper things to use for the car, he had jacked the car up on a homemade shift, and the car fell on him and killed him. And James Brown was working for a trucking company. I don’t recall the trucking company. They fired him.
And they fired teachers who they thought had signed it. My husband had two sisters working in the district. They were fired. He was fired. And I was fired. And even the parents who signed the petition, they wouldn’t let them have loans to–for their crops the following year. And of course the (white) people stopped buying groceries, some of them, and they’d even go to Sumpter and Columbia and other places to buy groceries, and they would cut off everything that they thought was helping the petitioners.

That’s what Mattie de Laine, the widow of the Reverend Joseph De Laine{{1}} (who helped bring the lawsuit in Clarendon County, South Carolina), told me when I interviewed her in 1979, 25 years after the historic Brown v Board Supreme Court decision of 1954.

The negative reaction was not confined to the white community. All Sarah Bulah of Wilmington, Delaware wanted was to have the bus that took white children to school pick up her daughter, Shirley, and drop her at the Negro school. She recalled the neighborhood’s reaction:

They thought I was breaking up the community. One morning I went to see a sick lady. She say, ‘Mrs. Bulah, I’m surprised at you.’ Surprised at me, about what? ‘You saying that you wanted wanted Shirley to to go the white school because you didn’t want her going to the Negro school.’ I say, I didn’t say no such thing, just like that. She say, ‘You know, I’ve been living her 30 years, and we ain’t never had no stink until you come.’

Back then Sarah Bulah made her living selling fresh eggs. Before she joined the lawsuit, she told us she was selling about 100 dozen eggs a week at 75 cents per dozen to white families. She lost all her customers except one.

The celebrations of the 60th Anniversary of the historic Supreme Court decision that declared school segregation to be unconstitutional will be muted, overshadowed by the today’s harsh reality. Although it’s no longer constitutionally permissible to segregate students by race, our public schools are more segregated today than ever in our history. As Richard Rothstein pointed out last year in “For Public Schools, Segregation Then, Segregation Since,” school segregation is a consequence of residential segregation, which means that housing policies become education policy.

But in addition to bemoaning our collective failures, let’s pause to remember the brave men and women who had the courage to challenge legal school segregation, a struggle that began with a case involving the Law School at the University of Maryland in 1935 and culminated in the Court’s unanimous decision announced on May 17, 1954.

Many of the early cases attacking ‘Separate but Equal’ focused on proving that the facilities were in fact not equal. Winning these cases forced the power structure to spend more on the Negro schools, but a victory did not directly challenge the concept of segregation. Directly challenging the constitutionality of segregation meant asking the Supreme Court to overrule itself–to admit that it had been wrong in Plessy v. Ferguson. It meant asking the Court to declare that the concepts of ‘separation’ and ‘equality’ were contradictory by definition and contrary to the US Constitution.

The attorneys were undecided on this vital point right up to the last possible moment. James Nabrit, a young attorney working on the Washington, DC, case with lead attorney Thurgood Marshall and others, recalled the day the case was argued before the Court.

You know when they settled that question? The morning when Thurgood got up to argue and stood up and started talking all this stuff, and Justice Frankfurter stopped him and said, ‘Mr. Marshall, I want to ask you a question,’ and Thurgood said, ‘Yes, sir?’, and he said, ‘Are you arguing this case on the separate but equal doctrine, or are you arguing that segregation, per se, is unconstitutional? Now I want to know.’
And Thurgood turned as pale as a ghost, and the courtroom was just as quiet as the moon. And finally he said, ‘Mr. Justice Frankfurter, we are going to argue this case on the basis that segregation per se is unconstitutional.’ (1979 interview)

Richard Kluger’s “Simple Justice” remains a must-read for anyone interested in the long struggle against school segregation. Henry Hampton’s monumental documentary series, “Eyes on the Prize,” will always be the gold standard for television reportage about the Civil Rights Movement.

The U.S. Library of Congress has a permanent exhibit of documents and photographs about the Brown cases online.

Growing up, I associated the Brown decision with Topeka, Kansas, and 7-year-old Linda Brown. From Mr. Kluger’s book I learned that “Brown” included lawsuits from four other communities: Wilmington, Delaware; Washington, DC; Prince Edward County, Virginia; and Clarendon County, South Carolina.

Reading that book inspired us to revisit all five communities in 1979, the 25th Anniversary of the decision, for my NPR radio series, “Options in Education.” We met many of the plaintiffs, the ordinary men and women who were persuaded by Thurgood Marshall, Charles Huston, James Nabrit, Jack Greenberg and others to file suits.{{2}}

You can listen to the five 30-minute profiles of the communities and its citizens here.{{3}} This material is part of the Learning Matters archive, which I wrote about in this space recently.

Here, from the Library of Congress page, are quick descriptions of the cases, along with a few anecdotes from our 1979 NPR series.

CLARENDON COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA: “In 1949, the state NAACP in South Carolina sought twenty local residents in Clarendon County to sign a petition for equal education. The petition turned into a lawsuit and first name on the list was Harry Briggs. In preparation for the Briggs case, attorney Robert Carter returned to Columbia University to confer with Psychologist Otto Klineberg, who was known for his research on black students’ IQ scores. He sought Klineberg’s advice on the use of social science testimony in the pending trial to show the psychological damage segregation caused in black children. Klineberg recommended Kenneth Clark. Clark became the Legal Defense Fund’s principal expert witness.”

Dr. Clark, a sociologist, used dolls to measure children’s attitudes. Attorney Harold Boulware told me about it.

He had in his bag two dolls, both dressed just alike. Both with the same kind of clothes on. The only difference in the two dolls was one was white, the other was black. So he would take one or two students into his examining room, and he would ask one of the students, “I will show you two dolls. Which is the good doll, and which is the bad doll?’ The black students would point to the black doll as the bad doll.
He would ask, ‘Which is the dirty doll, and which is the clean doll?’ and the black student would point at the black doll as the dirty one.
He would ask, ‘Which is the smelly doll?’ The black doll.
‘Which is the smart doll, and which is the dumb doll?’ And the black student would point at the black doll as the dumb doll. And all the way down the line. Every time there was something bad, it was black. Everything that was a smart doll, a clean doll, a sweet smelling doll, a brilliant doll, that was white.

TOPEKA, KANSAS: “Brown v. Board of Education was filed in the U.S. District Court in Topeka, Kansas, in February 1951 and litigated concurrently with Briggs v. Elliot in South Carolina. Oliver Brown, one of thirteen plaintiffs, had agreed to participate on behalf of his seven-year-old daughter Linda, who had to walk six blocks to board a school bus that drove her to the all-black Monroe School a mile away.”

Pre-Brown, public schools were supposed to be ‘Separate but Equal.’ A parent from Topeka, Kansas, remembered what ‘Equality’ was like. “I remember they had what they called a black bell, for assemblies. The bell would ring for the children to assemble in the auditorium. So they’d ring a bell, and the white children would go to assembly. Then they’d ring the second bell, which was called the nigger bell, and our children went upstairs to a separate room.”

She said the superintendent had an assistant, a Black man, whose job it was to keep the races separate. “At the high school at lunchtime, he’d go to the cafeteria, and if the Negro children were not sitting at this table, a certain table for the colored children, then he’d yank them up. “Get on down there where you belong!’” (Lucinda Todd, from a 1979 interview)

WASHINGTON, DC: “Spottswood Thomas Bolling v. C. Melvin Sharpe, was one of the five school desegregation cases that comprised Brown. Because the District of Columbia was not a state but federal territory, the Fourteenth Amendment arguments used in the other cases did not apply. Therefore, the lawyers argued for “Due Process Clause” of the Fifth Amendment, which guaranteed equal protection of the law. The Consolidated Parents Group initiated a boycott of the all-black Browne Junior High School in Washington. D.C., which was overcrowded and dilapidated. In 1948, Charles H. Houston was hired {{4}} to represent them in a lawsuit to make black schools more equal to white schools when Houston’s health began to fail. He recommended James Nabrit as his replacement.”

PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY, VIRGINIA: “Spurred by a student strike, blacks in Prince Edward County, Virginia, called a lower federal court’s attention to the demonstrably unequal facilities in the county’s segregated high schools. … They convinced the U.S. District Court that facilities for blacks were “not substantially equal” to those for whites. The Court ordered the two systems to be made equal. However, it did not abolish segregation. Therefore, the plaintiffs appealed, and the Supreme Court heard their case along with Brown v. Board.”

In response to the Brown Decision and a court order to enforce it, Virginia passed a law in 1956 outlawing school integration. Governor Lindsay Almond, who as the state’s Attorney General had argued Virginia’s case before the Supreme Court, ordered public schools across the state to close rather than integrate, in a policy known as “Massive Resistance.”

When he closed the schools, Governor Almond made a stirring speech warning of ‘false prophets,’ ‘token integration,’ and ‘the livid stench of sadism, sex, immorality and juvenile delinquency.’ He closed with these lines: ‘We have just begun to fight. No price is too high to pay, no burden to heavy to bear.’

In 1979 I asked him about that speech. “I made a terrible mistake in making that speech, and if I’d listened to my wife I wouldn’t have made that speech. I made a mistake in making that speech.” But he added, “That’s the way I felt then.”

Defending segregation before the US Supreme Court had catapulted Mr. Almond to the State House, where, as Governor, he closed the schools across the state, but in 1959—after losing in several courts–he concluded that the state’s policy of ‘Massive Resistance” was futile and ordered schools reopened.  His defiance of the state’s political machine led by US Senator Harry Byrd effectively ended Almond’s political career.{{5}} Most schools reopened, but Prince Edward County kept its schools closed for five more years, until 1964!

WILMINGTON, DELAWARE: “In 1950 Louis Redding filed a lawsuit on behalf of Sarah Bulah to admit her daughter, Shirley, to a nearby white elementary school, after the Delaware Board of Education refused to allow her to board an all-white school bus that drove past their home.

In 1979, Harold Boulware, then a family court judge in Clarendon County, SC, looked back optimistically on what the Brown decision had achieved.

The Brown decision is just a drop in the bucket with regard to touching the principles of education. It touched every facet of segregation. You can get better jobs. You’ve got more money. You’ve got better facilities in every respect, not only in school facilities, but facilities we’ve got for housing, jobs. So that effort that was made back there beginning in 1938, ‘39, ‘40, was the thing that started to change the whole transition of a better day for Blacks in South Carolina and in the nation.

The last word belongs to Mattie De Laine, widow of one of the plaintiffs in South Carolina and a teacher who was fired after the lawsuit was filed:

At first I felt a little bitter when they ran us away, but when I was going on the train to New York City one morning, everybody was asleep but me. I looked out the window and it was in October and the leaves were falling and all, and it just seemed like the leaves or something were saying to me, ‘Don’t be angry with anybody, because they don’t know any better’… And believe it or not, from that time on I have had no bitterness toward anybody, not even toward those people who were shooting and who burned the house and whatnot. I don’t have any bitterness toward those people now.

—-
[[1]]1. This photograph of Reverend and Mrs. De Laine is in the collection of his papers: http://digital.tcl.sc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/jad/id/893[[1]]
[[2]]2. It turned out that we had bitten off more than our 4-person operation could chew when we decided to visit the five original communities AND the nation’s most segregated school system (Chicago) AND a community that had successfully integrated its schools (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina) AND the burgeoning (largely white-only) private school industry. Our 8-part series, which we called “Race against Time,” aired in 1980, 26 years after Brown.[[2]]
[[3]]3. Education Week has some memories here: http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/brown-anniversary-voices.html?cmp=ENL-EU-NEWS1 [[3]]

[[4]]4. Gardner Bishop, a Washington barber who was one of the plaintiffs, said in 1979 that Mr. Houston did not bill for his legal work.  He donated his services, Mr. Bishop said. Mr. Bishop’s reverence for Charles Houston remains one of my strongest memories of the series, and spending time with him was a genuine privilege.[[4]]

[[5]]5. A grateful President John Kennedy later appointed him to the Federal Bench, where he served until his death in 1986.[[5]]

When the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released the 12th grade reading scores last week, the supporters of the status quo were hard pressed to come up with anything positive to say. Because reading scores have flat-lined, the best that the defenders of our ‘evolutionary’ approach to school reform could do was talk about how the new Common Core State Standards are poised to make a huge difference. For example, former West Virginia Governor Bob Wise, now the head of the Alliance for Excellent Education, cited the low scores as proof of the “desperate need for the aggressive implementation” of the standards. Keep on keeping on, he seemed to be saying, and don’t look back.

Another interpretation from establishment circles suggested the low scores are actually evidence of the success of the country’s’ “Stay in School” effort; that insight came from the acting Commissioner of the US Department of Education’s statistics office, who suggested that scores were lower because kids who before the “Stay in School” push would have dropped out were now staying in school–and apparently doing badly on tests. Our success is making us look bad, he seemed to be saying.

But while the supporters of the Common Core may see the dismal results as reason to push harder in the same direction, others say we should look carefully at what the past dozen or so years of increased high stakes testing and test-based accountability (for students and teachers) have produced.{{1}} Perhaps it’s time to rethink what we have been doing since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001? After all, it’s now 2014, so we have a lot of data.

The left–eager to scrap NCLB and its successor, Race to the Top–is using these NAEP results to support its argument. Here’s Guy Brandenburg’s analysis. In his blog, he asks, ‘Just how flat are those 12th grade NAEP scores?’ His answer, in part: “The short answer is: those scores have essentially not changed since they began giving the tests! Not for the kids at the top of the testing heap, not for those at the bottom, not for blacks, not for whites, not for hispanics.

No change, nada, zip.”

What Mr. Brandenburg has done is look for long-term patterns, something those in authority are not prone to do. I think it’s significant to consider what NAEP data can tell us about performance differences among racial groups (‘the achievement gap’) over time–but not just in 12th grade reading but in 4th and 8th grades as well.

NAEP generally tests a sample of 4th and 8th grade students in math and reading every few years. What I have done in the chart below is put the District of Columbia’s 2013 scores against the earliest available data for each category. (I used different years because in some years the District {{2}} did not have enough White kids to allow for comparisons.) What you will see is that, although the gap has grown smaller in three of the four categories, it remains the largest in the nation–by far–in all four categories:

These bad numbers may be news to you, because politicians, educators and editorial pages have not reported that DC’s scores and its achievement gaps are the worst in the nation (often by a wide margin). Instead, they report–triumphantly–that scores are going up and the gap has gotten smaller. They want to convince us, and perhaps themselves, that what they are doing (or supporting) is working.

For example, in November 2013, when it released 4th and 8th grade results, NAEP praised Washington: “The District of Columbia, Tennessee, and the Department of Defense schools were the only states/jurisdictions to score higher than in 2011 in both subjects at both grades 4 and 8.”

When Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the November 2013 results, he too praised the District’s performance. “Among states that are making progress, Tennessee, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii made noteworthy gains in eighth grade and fourth grade in reading and/or math from 2011 to 2013.”{{3}}

How Secretary Duncan addressed the achievement gap encapsulates the problem. By sticking to the here-and-now, he avoided the long-term picture: “And while students in each racial group identified in the NAEP showed improvement in some areas, it is very troubling that achievement gaps between white and black students, and white and Hispanic students, failed to narrow from 2011 to 2013.”

That hits just the right note of concern (“very troubling”)…but at the same time it obscures the harsh truth: things have not improved over time.{{4}} Take another look at that chart. Any thinking person, Republican or Democrat, looking those numbers squarely in the face would have to question the path we are on. No one in power seems to want to do that.

Somebody should…..

Instead, the Secretary of Education, Achieve, the Alliance for Excellent Education and others are presenting the Common Core State Standards as a giant leap forward. Forward? From what? “Forward” is not a convincing argument when you look at the spot we are leaping from, or when you look at the long term NAEP data that reveals the impact of the policies we’ve been following.

We need higher standards, but pushing that “Forward” line seems to me to actually threaten the Common Core, not make the case for it.

I think the Common Core State Standards would be more appealing if they could honestly be presented as a departure from test-based accountability and a narrowed curriculum. But if the Common Core represent an expansion/continuation/evolution of today’s policies, which the evidence suggests are a failure, why would any impartial person endorse that?

—-

[[1]]1. Besides all the cheating scandals, the most recent being last week in Philadelphia.[[1]]

[[2]]2. I know Washington, DC, schools better than any other district’s. My three children went to public schools there, and I have done considerable reporting about the system over the past 40 years. [[2]]

[[3]]3. He added an apparent reference to Washington’s widespread erasures on its own standardized test, the DC-CAS.  “Signs of progress on the NAEP—known as the nation’s report card—are especially compelling because they cannot be attributed to teaching to the test or testing irregularities, such as cheating.”  (For more about that: http://takingnote.learningmatters.tv/?p=6232 )[[3]]

[[4]]4. The numbers for other states are also depressing. Take Minnesota, for example. Since 1998, its achievement gaps have increased in 8th grade math and reading and shrunk ever so slightly in 4th grade math and reading.[[4]]

In early 2000 E. D. Hirsch, Jr, the developer of the “Core Knowledge” curriculum, said this about the growing importance of reading tests: “If you want students to do well on reading tests, they should read, read, read. Not spend time practicing taking reading tests.”

That interview is in the Learning Matters archive.

Some 25 years earlier I asked John Holt, the ‘deschooling’ advocate, a similar question.

Have you ever actually taken a reading achievement test and gone through it question by question and looked at the answer sheet to see what kinds of answers are declared to be right? Very instructive experience. It hasn’t got anything to do with reading. It has a lot to do with how to answer reading tests. ….
There are a number of things you can’t test on reading tests. One is how adventurously children read. Because good readers are adventurous readers. Kids who read well–you know, kids who wind up reading four and five years ahead of grade level, love books–they are the kids who are always reading books that are too hard for them. Because they don’t worry about what they don’t understand. But kids who are always being tested on their reading learn to read only what they can be sure they can answer all the questions about. So they don’t read adventurously, and so they become ‘not good’ readers.
You can’t test the adventurousness of reading. You can’t test how deeply kids respond to what they read, how real what they read is. It’s not testable. And those are the only things, the only things, that are important. If you get kids reading for the wrong reasons, you insure that they will not read for the right reasons.

His response is also in our archive.

In 1978 I asked Professor Jeanne Chall, the author of “Reading: The Great Debate,” when parents ought to begin reading to their children (I had a 3 ½-month old daughter at the time.) She had this to say:

Oh, I think you could start at 8 months of age. I’m not kidding. I’m not kidding, because I have seen 9-month-old children, 10-month-old children with little books of their own, fabric books, and I see them get up in the morning when everyone else is asleep and they play with their toys; and then they pick up one of these little books and by themselves, and to themselves they start pointing and laughing and making noises to the different pictures. You know, this, that and so on. When they can’t speak, of course, but they can do this… This is pre-reading behavior, and it’s terribly important for this child’s success later in the ‘beginning reading’ that you asked me about. Well, the point is, they start long before they start.
And by the time they are 2 ½ or 3, they will insist on reading something to you. Sometimes they’ll hold it upside down, but usually they’ll hold it straight. … All this is very important, and it only takes place if you read a great deal to the child, and the child imitates it back and goes through this process, do you see?

The archive that includes the interviews with Jeanne Chall, John Holt and Don Hirsch goes back to 1974. It now consists of approximately 10,000 hours (and counting) of broadcast quality video and audio covering 40 tumultuous years of American public education.

Here’s the question: What should we do with the archive? How can we make it accessible to scholars, students, reporters and others interested in American education?

Of course, historians, scholars, reporters and students seeking to understand the shifting winds of education reform since 1974 have other options: They might interview the participants who are still living; examine original documents; and review the day-to-day reportage.

Unfortunately, memories fade and change, people die, and yesterday’s journalism is inevitably incomplete. Those harsh realities often lead historians and scholars to surmise, to opine, fill in the gaps in other way–and to perhaps get the story wrong.

What if they could turn to the original sources, 10,000 hours of video and audio recorded by Learning Matters–which does not throw away, erase or discard recordings? The audio archive dates back to 1974, the year the “Options in Education” series began on National Public Radio. The video archive begins in 1982 with the 5-part “Your Children, Our Children” series. Our NewsHour reporting dates from 1985. The archive now includes more than 300 full-length documentaries and NewsHour pieces, about 500 NPR documentaries, and hundreds of audio and video podcasts.

Behind those produced pieces are hours and hours of uncut interviews with many of the leading lights{{1}} of American education: Albert Shanker, Deborah Meier, Jonathan Kozol, Richard Riley, Lamar Alexander, Margaret Spellings, Arne Duncan, John Holt, Jeanne Chall, Rod Paige, Bruno Bettelheim, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Dr. Berry Brazelton, Fred Rogers, Bob Keeshan, Marian Wright Edelman, James A. Nabrit, Jack Greenberg, William T. Coleman, Derrick Bell, William Taylor, Gary Orfield, Alonzo Crim, Mel and Norma Gabler, Michelle Rhee, Paul Vallas, Linda Darling-Hammond, David Hornbeck, Wendy Kopp, David Tyack, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Bernice “Bunny” Sandler, Margaret Mead, Leon Botstein, Arlene Ackerman, E.D. Hirsch, Jr, Joseph Olshevski, Joel Klein, Alan Bersin, Patricia Albjerg Graham, Fred Burke, Frank Newman, Diane Ravitch, Harold “Doc” Howe, Checker Finn, James Comer, Larry Cuban, Ken Komoski, John Porter, George Miller, Joseph Cronin, Ed Ziegler, Judah Schwartz, Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Arthur Levine, Lynn Kagan, Stanley Kaplan, Yetta and Ken Goodman, Ralph Turlington, Alfie Kohn, Randi Weingarten, Dennis Van Roekel, George Gerbner, Peggy Charren, Henry Levin, Hayes Mizell, Ted Sizer and dozens more.

Also of great value to scholars are hours of uncut, unedited interviews with teachers, administrators and students, and hours of video and audio presenting schools, from pre-k to college, as they actually were, day by day, from 1974 to the present.{{2}}

The archive is a living, growing collection, because we are still hard at work, producing new reports and adding new material.

Where should this material be located, and with what safeguards?  We have a plan for completely digitizing, transcribing and cataloguing all the material so that it is fully searchable, and the Board of Learning Matters is committed to making it available. What we need now is the financial support to make this vision a reality.

—-

[[1]]1. If you don’t recognize some names, try Googling them.[[1]]

[[2]]2. Here’s some detail of what the archive contains, by subject: 6 years in Philadelphia with David Hornbeck for “Toughest Job in America”; 4 years in Washington, DC, with Michelle Rhee—12 reports for the PBS NewsHour, plus Frontline material; 6 ½ years in New Orleans since Katrina: 15 PBS Newshour reports (plus many hours recorded well before Katrina) and material for our documentary “Rebirth” (now available on Netflix); 1 year in a Brooklyn PS following 5 1st year teachers—7 NewsHour reports and a 1-hour documentary; 1 year following the Intel science competition in two New York high schools; 3 years in a ‘Coalition of Essential Schools’ high school in Cincinnati; 2 years in New Orleans following Teach for America corps members; 2 years on multiple college campuses for “Declining by Degrees’; 1 year with ADD students/teachers for “ADD: A Dubious Diagnosis”; 1 year following a “turnaround” principal in Richmond, VA; 13 years of reporting about No Child Left Behind and its successor, the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top program; 2 years of reporting about the Common Core State Standards and their ramifications for public education; Deep exploration of education’s newest buzz words and hopes, such as ‘deeper learning’ and ‘blended learning’; Inside the college admissions process at Williams, Amherst, Dartmouth and Middlebury; 1 year’s worth of filming different ways technology is being incorporated into public schools across the country, from kindergarten to 12th grade, for our “Return of the School Sleuth” documentary, currently in production.[[2]]