Absurd definitions of achievement : Deborah Meier

September 17, 2009
We're Relying on an Absurd Definition of Achievement
Dear Diane,

Yes, the ways in which standardized bubble-in tests are open to abuse are rampant—and gaming of test scores has increasingly important repercussions. In the long run it leads to an increasingly toxic education in the name of “standards.” I urge you to read the two chapters in "In Schools We Trust" on my own experience and subsequent investigation of standardized testing for 7-year-olds. I discovered, in my effort to “prep” them, that while reading tests may in part test the ability to read—comprehend (vs. re-code into sounds)—they are even better at detecting one’s class and cultural sub-group. Of course, there were exceptions. There are ways to raise scores via prepping, but it can only diminish the “gap” if those at the top get less effective prepping. I published the recorded interviews I conducted with students—in 1972, and Jay Rosner has shown how it works for the SATs, and many have followed. Between 1980 and 1990, it seemed we had won the battle. By 2000, they had returned with a vengeance. Thus many friends and allies suggested I give up on this particular line of reasoning.

Meanwhile, we’ve witnessed a massive redistribution of wealth. Everyone has their culprit. Too often, "lazy" children, parents, or educators/teachers? In a nation that ranks near the bottom in services for the young, not to mention a bigger gap between rich and poor than we’ve seen since the 1920s, maybe this is myopic? “Forget it,” friends suggest. You’ll just be accused of making excuses for bad schools.

What you have documented, Diane, is eerily close to the kind of data abuse that helped create our current financial crisis. We go blindly ahead. There seem equally few lessons learned from either crisis. It’s apparently easier to hold children and teachers’ “feet to the fire” than the creators of the greatest economic crisis of our lives—especially Harvard grads. Note: The latter did fine on their SATs.

Many reputable studies have also demonstrated that, based on such tests, no evidence exists for most of the Race to the Top-NCLB-like reforms. Just rhetoric. Just more shifting of power away from the public sector. The CREDO study you mention suggests that only 17 percent of the charter schools do better on tests than their comparable noncharters, and more do worse. Try that with a drug test, and how long would it remain on the shelf? (Even though, in fact, low scores is not one of my complaints against charters.)

What’s the alternative, critics argue! Is a bad drug better than none at all, I respond?

In fact, we have alternatives—some pioneered in the good old USA and others in those much-vaunted international comparisons. For example, there is no competitor that relies as much as much as we do on testing of our sort. None. None. None. (A light bulb should go on.)

Alas, there are no simple magic bullets even among the reforms I like. Partly because we don’t all have the same agenda when it comes to outcomes—our priorities differ, what we’re willing to trade off or risk differs. Also, any reform package depends on its implementation and few recipes are foolproof. Trying to copy the KIPP model or the Deborah Meier “model” won’t produce the same thing.

And, then there’s the ornery fact that when today’s reformers refer to proof of “achievement” they mean something different than you and I do, Diane. Achievement equals standardized test scores in reading and math; others add test scores in other subjects, including aptitude/IQ tests. Everything else gets called “soft skills.” It’s as absurd as calling the written driving test the real achievement and the road test a measure of “soft” skills.

I’d argue that this applies to most intellectual knowledge and skills. We’re relying on an absurd definition of achievement—at best. It’s not lack of alternatives, but a lack of interest in having real standards that take into account that we are all not the same and that we actually don’t want to be all the same. Our interests, passions, talents, and even our priorities differ. High standards can be met in honest and serious ways if we are prepared to take the harder route—starting with each child. If we care enough about both means and ends consistent with democracy it will not be easy and will not be based on the need to rank order individuals, schools, or nations. There are plenty of good alternatives.

Any publicly funded school must serve, for better or worse, the public good—the complex demands of a modern democracy. But the public good is also met best when each individual's private good (his/her passions and interests) are also met. But how we sort out what best serves both will always be an art, not a hard or exact science.

There is no single “best” model—but there are bad ones. Neither the common good nor personal good can come out of schools that do not treat all members of their community with respect. (Respect, of course, is no easier to define than achievement.) Perhaps the reason I love "Tales of Priut Almus*" by Robert Belenky—which describes the time he spent in a Russian shelter for homeless youth—is the unmeasurable respectfulness with which they responded to the young people in their care. Belenky says “offering a short-term, flexible, familial, community-based home may be the most useful gift (offered) these young people.” But he actually describes far more than that. So, too, in any respectful school there is more than that—but nothing without that.

Deb
From: Education Week blog.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (0)

Reclaiming Education

Reclaiming Education: How to Resist the Growing Threat to Public Education
By Susan Harman and Deborah Meier (online)


AMERICANS HAVE settled on the idea that many of our nation’s problems can be blamed on our school system and that the only way to solve them is through “school reform.” It’s an old story, but it's become the bipartisan line in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk (ANAR). An odd alliance pulled this story together, led by corporate lobbyists, neoconservatives, and the media, and joined by civil rights organizations, union leaders, activists, some institutional liberals (like Ted Kennedy), and some school leaders eager for the attention that brings money. Together they have relentlessly sold a story that has wasted our time, energy, and resources, and pointed us in the wrong direction.

No matter what the question is, these alarmists have the answer. Why is the economy in bad shape? Look at the lousy math scores of U.S. students in the international competitions. Why are so many young African-Americans and Latinos in prison? They didn’t learn how to read in school. Why do poor and minority children score so much lower on tests than better-off white children (the notorious “achievement gap”)? Teachers are engaging in the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and have allowed some students to fail to meet high standards without any consequences. Why are students unprepared to accept the responsibilities of adult citizenship (voting, earning a good living, taking care of their children)? Schools help promote a bleeding heart, welfare state mentality and we need to reform our accountability measures.

Dissent plans on setting this record straight with "Reclaiming Education," a series of articles that will appear in print and online. Many researchers have carefully examined, challenged, and refuted various aspects of this radical reform agenda, and their arguments have appeared in a variety of academic journals and books, but only rarely have they been published in magazines aimed at a general public. As a result, the fact that much of this research calls into question the rationale behind No Child Left Behind remains a well-kept secret.

In these pages, we intend to connect the dots between the many pieces of research and demonstrate that the educational crisis is not what the public has been led to think it is, that there is virtually no research that supports ongoing corporate and federal policies, that the media has been irresponsible and complicit in hiding the truth, that the proposed solutions are unsupported and dangerous, and that the devastating consequences we are now seeing are not "unintended." To the contrary, these radical reforms were intended by a powerful, well-funded wing of the reform agenda to dismantle our public education system and replace it with precisely the kind of marketplace reforms that are by their nature untrustworthy and unaccountable. We hope these articles will mobilize policymakers and citizens to join us in resisting this attack on our public education system and democracy.

The 1983 assault of ANAR is the subject of Gerald Bracey’s opening critique in Dissent's forthcoming fall issue. Meanwhile, Kathy Emery will document the agenda of the corporate wing of the reform juggernaut for the Web.

The corporate agenda was implemented quite effectively under Governor George W. Bush in Texas and came to be known hyperbolically as the “Texas Miracle” because it apparently resulted in high test scores, high graduation rates, low drop-out rates, and a narrowing “achievement gap” between students of color and whites. The “miracle” turned out to be a mirage, as Linda McNeil will argue in her contribution to this series, but before we knew this, Bush exported his “miracle” to Washington, D.C. and forced it on the entire country as the 2001 authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as No Child Left Behind. False stories lead to false solutions; this is the history of NCLB. There will be other online pieces documenting the destructive impact and current disarray of the coalition that brought us NCLB.

For instance, when President Bush brags about how much money he’s given to education, he is talking about the $6 billion that has come through Reading First grants, a part of No Child Left Behind. The awarding of these grants has been the object of investigation by the Education Department’s Office of the Inspector General. Reading First’s results (or lack thereof) have been well-documented, and Congress has just cut off the project’s funding. In our first Web article, Stephen Krashen provides a critique of Reading First. Soon to follow is another article by Gerald Bracey on international comparisons of test scores and what they do and don’t mean about our schools.

We hope that each of the author’s accounts will help readers make connections between the current wave of education reform and the larger attack on public institutions and life. We believe that while schools cannot do it all there is a great deal to be learned from research about what a progressive agenda for school reform might look like. The slogan about leaving no child behind may be grandiose, but it’s surely worthwhile pursuing such an ambition.

Please check Dissent's Web pages often for this ongoing series that aims to help impact future educational policy and rescue our schools and democracy.

Read Stephen Krashen on Reading First


Susan Harman is a semi-retired principal, teacher, psychologist, and writer, and the Coordinator of CalCARE, the California Resistance to the standards and testing madness. Deborah Meier is currently a senior scholar at New York University, and has spent the past 45 years as a public school educator, activist and writer. Homepage and Feature Photo: A classroom at Detroit Holy Redeemer High School (Wikicommmons).

Schools and democracy : Deborah Meirer

Posted by Deborah Meier at 4/17/07 6:00 AM
Tags: Education Policy

Some people wake up with great ideas. But I’m a night person. Right before I fall asleep I think I’ve finally found just the right way to say what it is I’m thinking. Often when I wake up I've either forgotten it or it seems banal.

But here are two ideas that keep reoccurring, and it is morning now so I’m going to try to capture them.

Great Idea 1:

The whole point of public education (vs job training or even some forms of private education) is to prepare a public for its responsibilities which, in a nutshell come down to exercising careful, thoughtful and reasonable judgment in the face of complex evidence. In the two tasks that confront 18 year olds--voting and serving on juries--these are the presumptions that lie behind the privilege. Our best judgment is what in the end we bring to the table. Note there are neither admissions tests, nor licensure requirements for either voting or serving on a jury. It's the unspoken and awesomely heavy presumption and also the most irrational facing governance by democratic principles and practices. It makes no sense, except (as Churchill said) it's better than any of the alternatives. But for every problem confronting this absurd idea--that everyone has a "right" to such power--there is a solution. Better education.

Not just formal K-12 schooling, surely not just or even college—which comes too late for many voters and jurors and is not open to everyone. But, as the slogans say, our aim is “lifelong” learning, on-going adult education. Newspapers are one of these educating forces, as are all the new technologies. Public access to books, libraries full of resources for getting at "the truth", public spaces for communicating one’s ideas, and for demonstrating on behalf of them, etc, etc. I’m enamored even of the idea of subsidizing adults for going back for a liberal arts education later on, when they are more likely to appreciate its usefulness. But the one and only institution we set aside for this and only this purpose--with no obligation to make a buck in return--is our K-12 system of schooling.

I challenge any of us to spend a day with a kid in an average school and try to connect the dots between what is being learned there--formally ad informally--and what a citizen of a democracy requires (in contrast to citizens perhaps of countries that don't even pretend to be democratic). The world is full of virtues. And economic necessities. But what are the explicitly democratic predispositions, skills, habits of mind and heart that we are not born with, but could learn in a setting devoted to such a purpose?

Great Idea 2:

Then, one night it occurred to me, that for all my ranting and raving against the term accountability, in fact the idea of being accountable lies at the heart of democracy. Democracy is a form of accountability--a concept intended to hold the powerful’s feet to the fire. Naturally as our schools have moved further and further away from being attached to their publics, it has become more and more important for us to invent other non-democratic, bureaucratic, “mandarin” forms of accountability. When there were 200,000 school boards serving a population less than half the size of today’s, a lot of people knew who was making judgments about their schools. Today with as few as 10,000 school boards, and with some of them having almost no realistic power over anything but floating bonds, well.... No wonder! There ought to be a half million school boards or more, if--big if--we really believe in democracy as our most special and effective form of accountability.

Given that I'm not a fan of many of the decisions reached by democratic decision making bodies--including many school boards as well as state legislatures and Presidents--this is a leap of faith. I make it because I still agree with Churchill about the alternative to holding on to this often counter-intuitive and even counter-reasonable faith. Neither various forms of benign dictatorship or market-place utopias seem more reasonable . Although if I got to choose the dictator it does some nights appear to be the solution. But by morning I have to face the fact that it’s unlikely to be someone of my choice; and if it were I’d probably be in the opposition the day after—coercion just has its limits when it comes to the important stuff—the stuff inside our hearts and minds.

These two ideas have become more than nighttime fantasies, but daytime ones too. I long for a more robust discussion. We confront the increasing daily power of BOTH my dystopias-- increased centralization of public schools in the hands of the few, and increased “selling off” of our schools to private interest groups. And yet we confront a very thin response to both.

What, Forum readers, would we have to do to make these issues part of the conversation about K-12 schooling among our friends, parents of our children’s friends, colleagues, fellow citizens?

copyright © 2007 The Forum for Education and Democracy