What Tom Friedman got wrong about schools

What Tom Friedman got wrong [in the NY Times] about schools and why it matters

By Valerie Strauss

November 29, 2010

 

The great New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote in a recent piece that if he were a cub reporter today, he’d want to be “covering the epicenter of national security -- but that would be the Education Department.”

Then he goes on to quote liberally from Education Secretary Arne Duncan, taking no account of what veteran teacher Anthony Cody, in a recent piece on his blog, described as a serious mismatch between the secretary's words and actions.

If Friedman the cub reporter had turned this piece in, a veteran education editor would have sent it back, asking him to back up his contentions with research. He’d have a hard time.

Look at just a few things Friedman got wrong. He wrote:

“Duncan, with bipartisan support, has begun several initiatives to energize reform — particularly his Race to the Top competition with federal dollars going to states with the most innovative reforms to achieve the highest standards. Maybe his biggest push, though, is to raise the status of the teaching profession. Why?

“Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.

Arne Duncan; the Chicago story on school reform

Arne Duncan's own 'pay for performance' program in has been a fiasco, according to a new study described by Valerie Strauss below (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/research/analysis-of-chicagos-teacher-p.html#more).

It turns out that bribing teachers doesn't even work on its own terms -- i.e., in producing significant gains in test scores. Nevertheless, the Obama administration heavily cites the Teacher Advancement Program, the same outfit that Duncan relied on in Chicago, in "research" documents supporting its Blueprint for ESEA:http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/great-teachers-great-leaders.pdf

Apparently, the Mathematica report doesn't go into all the negative side-effects of test-based teacher pay. For an excellent summary of research in that area, see:http://www.fairtest.org/paying-for-student-test-scores-damages-schools

Jim Crawford

Chicago's teacher performance-based pay didn't work -- new analysis

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and all of his acolytes who are rushing to implement performance-based compensation for teachers might want to take a close look at thepreliminary results from a Chicago program with this focus that was initially started when Duncan ran the city school system.

Educational Wrecking Crew

Tom Frank's book, *The Wrecking Crew*
<http://tcfrank.com/books/the-wrecking-crew/>explains how the
Bush administration destroyed effective government and
damaged our social fabric and our economy. The Obama administration has
chosen to reward two of the worst leaders of Bush's crew -- Geithner and
Bernanke -- with promotion and reappointment. Embracing the Wrecking Crew's
most destructive members has further damaged the economy and caused
increasing political and moral injury to the administration. . . .

The same could be said for Obama's education plan, which picked up right
where BushCo. left off, just before the final assault on public schools and
teaching, one of few remaining career choices with benefits, retirement
plans, and the potential to leave the planet's people a bit better off. In
fact, the corporatization of education has accelerated with the installation
of Obama and Duncan as the Oligarchs' choice to continue the pillaging of
America's educational institutions by corporate interests.

The Race to the Cliff provides almost $5 billion in taxpayer money for
bribes that have been set aside to "incent" the crushing of collective
bargaining laws, create charter laws where are none, install permanent data
surveillance systems in every state, mandate pay-per-score teacher pay
plans, and turn over urban schooling to corporate franchises that are
modeled after the KIPP chain gang cults that so effectively segregate and
brainwash the poor and dark-skinned.

No improvement from NCLB

Re: “Impact of NCLB position,” Letters, March 18

There is one embarrassing fact left out of Christopher
Wright’s defense of No Child Left Behind (NCLB): There
is no evidence that it has worked. The President and
the Secretary of Education continue to insist that
reading scores have gone up, but research says
otherwise: Reports from Harvard and Berkeley both
conclude that there has been no improvement on
national tests of reading since NCLB was passed, and,
also contrary to pronouncements from the government,
the achievement gap between high- and low-income
students remains the same as it was before NCLB.

Mr. Wright claims that the impact of NCLB has been a
positive one, but the only ones who appear to have
profited are the companies that develop and sell the
tests.

Stephen Krashen

Class and Schools

“If as a society we choose to preserve big social class differences, we must necessarily also accept substantial gaps between the achievement of lower-class and middle class children. Closing the gap requires not only better schools, although those are certainly needed, but also reform in the social and economic institutions that presently prepare children to learn in radically different ways. It will not be cheap.”
(Rothstein, 2004) Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap. Teachers College Press.

Currently, our schools work for some students and do not work for others. As Berliner and Biddle well demonstrated in The Manufactured Crisis, (1995) schools for middle class Black, Latino and European American children fundamentally fulfill their purposes. But the schools for poor African American, Latino and European American children fail. And while this failure effects all children, it disproportionately impacts the children of African Americans and Latinos. Fully half of all their children are in failing schools.
In 2005 on the NAEP assessment, nationally over 58% of Black and 54% Latino children score below basic in Reading levels in 4th. Grade. (Reading Report Card of the National Center for Educational Statistics.(2005) Differences in math scores are similarly stark.
That is to say, we do not have a general education crisis in the nation, we have a crisis for Black, Latino, Asian and poor white kids. We are not providing these children of the new majorities with what W.E. B. du Boise called ," a fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be."

Duane Campbell

Meddling, pandering and muddling in California Teacher preparation

The recent history of “school reform” efforts clearly reveals that legislatures at both the state and federal level can be a tool for change or as a tool for meddling, pandering, and muddling. (http://nochildleft.com/2006/aug06pandering.html) A small , united group of people can advance their personal careers by pushing an over simplified reform strategies but the problems which they create may extend far beyond the original intentions or understandings. Moving the legislature is particularly easy since legislators and their staff seek headlines and are so busy with other tasks. Selling a “reform” to the legislature is easy if your package your “reform” as a scientific process. Legislators seldom scrutinize the claim that a proposed “reform” is backed by scientific research. The abuse of claims of scientific research has been well documented in California described in Cornbleth and Waugh, “The Great Speckled Bird: Multicultural Politics and Education Policymaking. “ (1995) and in Taylor, “Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science; The Political Campaign to Change America’s Mind about How Children Learn to Read. (1998).

School achievement has –at best-been stagnant for the last twenty five years. The achievement gap between mostly middle class and white students and the growing working class Latino and Black student populations, whether measured by test scores, drop out rates, or college attendance narrowed slightly in the early 1980’s, and has begun to widen to pre ESEA levels.
School improvement is important to parents and other voters. As a consequence legislators often look for education bills as a mechanism for “ making a difference.”
One choice would be to provide adequate funding for public schools, particularly those serving low income areas. However the adequate funding approach would cost money and perhaps raise taxes.

When politicians don’t know what to do, or when the obvious solutions cost money, they often blame teachers for the problems of the society. As teacher unions mobilized to defend their members, a focus shifted to criticism of teacher preparation programs
The blame the teacher preparation program approach was organized and mobilized by advocacy groups working with and within the Commission on Teacher Preparation. They offered a (false) solution to the problem of stagnate achievement by seeking to redesign teacher preparation.
In 1998 the California Legislature passed SB 2042, which restructured and re designed the teacher credentialing process. In September of 2001, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC) adopted Standards of Quality and Effectiveness for Professional Teacher Education Programs. The law and the standards changed the requirements for earning a Preliminary teaching credential, adding passage of a teaching performance assessment to measure the teacher candidate’s knowledge and skill with respect to the Commission’s adopted Teaching Performance Expectations (TPE). The California legislature passed SB 1209, an omnibus bill of several measures, in July 2006 that among other provisions mandated implementation of the teacher performance assessment system in all credential programs as of July 1,2008.
The legislature comes back to work next week. Lets see what they do this year.
Duane Campbell