Marion Brady: Education Reform: Wrong Diagnosis, So Wrong Cure
[Marion Brady began a career in education in 1952 teaching in a semi-rural high school in northeastern Ohio. Since then he has taught at every level from 6th grade through the university, been a county-level school administrator, publisher consultant, teacher educator, textbook author, contributor to professional journals, author of professional books, writer of instructional materials, visitor to schools across America and abroad, and long-time education columnist for Knight-Ridder/Tribune.]
Sooner or later, a reluctant Congress is going to have to do something about replacing No Child Left Behind. If senators and representatives will listen, they'll learn why Education Secretary Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" initiative is a really bad idea, and why thoughtful educators think politicians, business leaders and wealthy philanthropists are bulls in the education china shop.
Back in the 1980's, corporate America, listening to privatizer Milton Friedman, came storming into the shop, not to buy, not to examine or talk about the stock, but to evict educators and take over. With the help of state governors, Congress and the mainstream media, this they did. Professional educators weren't just fired. Convinced that experienced teachers were tainted by "the soft bigotry of low expectations," the self-styled "New Progressives" barred them from the premises.
Non-educators have now been in near-total control of US education policy for more than a full kindergarten-through-12th grade cycle, and things aren't going well. Lou Gerstner, ex-CEO of IBM, RJR Nabisco and The Carlyle Group, a leader in the takeover of education by corporate interests, admitted in a December 1, 2008, op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, "We must start with the recognition that, despite decade after decade of reform efforts, our public schools have not improved."
Those who follow educational issues carefully enough to see past the public relations hype, the test-score manipulations and the statistical game playing, will agree...
... Before Congress opens the national standards and testing can of worms, it might want to examine more closely the assumptions about public education to which the New Progressives cling. Those assumptions are at odds with research and the facts on the ground, but are held with such conviction that behind-the-scenes strategies (including the use of industry-sponsored front groups) have been set in furious motion to convince politicians and the public that the assumptions aren't just valid, but that basing education policy on them assures the success of America's "Race to the Top."
* False Assumption 1: America's teachers deserve most of the blame for decades of flat school performance. Other factors affecting learning - language problems, hunger, stress, mass media exposure, transience, cultural differences, a sense of hopelessness and so on and on - are minor and can be overcome by well-qualified teachers. To teacher protests that they're scapegoats taking the blame for broader social ills, the proper response is, "No excuses!" While it's true teachers can't choose their students, textbooks, working conditions, curricula, tests or the bureaucracies that circumscribe and limit their autonomy, they should be held fully accountable for poor student test scores.
* False Assumption 2: Professional educators are responsible for bringing education to crisis, so they can't be trusted. School systems should instead be headed by business CEOs, mayors, ex-military officers and others accustomed to running a "tight ship." Their managerial expertise more than compensates for how little they know about educating. ..
... These are the major assumptions driving the last two decades of education reform. Any one of them is destructive enough to push the institution over a cliff, and all ten are operative. What's now all but complete is an educational house of cards. Education policy is "data driven," the data comes from scores on corporately produced standardized tests, those tests are keyed to subject-matter "standards," the standards are keyed to the familiar math-science-language arts-social studies curriculum, and that curriculum is a primitive, backward-looking product of the late 19th century when standardization of parts, division of labor and mass production were the "new, big things."
"The Race to the Top" is reactionary in the fullest sense of the word. That 1893 curriculum was poor when it was adopted, and it becomes more dysfunctional with each passing year. Imagine a car being driven at high speed down a winding rural road, with all the occupants, including the driver, peering intently out the back window.
Consider: The familiar curriculum upon which America is betting its future has no agreed-upon overarching aim. It's so inefficient its use takes up most of the school day, leaving little or no time for apprenticeships, internships, co-op programs, individual and group projects, or for exploring the real world two-dimensionalized by textbooks. It has no criteria establishing what new knowledge is important, or what old knowledge to discard to make room for the new. It ignores the fundamental, integrated nature of knowledge, denying learners the benefits of seeing the whole of which random, specialized school subjects are parts. Its sheer volume assures that what's taught will rarely make it past learner short-term memory. It's keyed not to kids' aptitudes, abilities and interests, but to their ages. And it costs a great deal to administer.
That just begins a list of problems with the 1893 curriculum. Its over-the-top emphasis on reading short-changes other ways of learning. It doesn't progress smoothly through ever-increasing levels of intellectual complexity. It's so at odds with the natural desire to learn that laws, threats and other extrinsic motivators are necessary to keep kids in their seats and on task. It has no built-in mechanisms forcing it to adapt to change. Ignoring mountains of research about their importance in intellectual development, it treats art, music, dance and play as "frills." It isolates educators in specialized fields, discouraging their interest in and professional dialog about the state of the institution as a whole and their collaboration in its improvement. It fails to explore questions essential to ethical and moral development. It neglects important fields of study, inhibiting the phenomena-relating process central to the creation of new knowledge. Its failure to model the integrated nature of reality makes it difficult to apply what's being taught to real-world experience. And its requirement that all kids jump through the same "minimum standards" hoops snubs major sources of America's past strength and success - individual initiative, imagination and creativity.
Any one of those problems is serious enough to warrant an emergency national education conference, and all are being ignored. And if Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" is implemented as currently envisioned, this problem-plagued, 19th century, reactionary curriculum won't just be imposed on today's young, but on their children and their children's children, locked in place by national standards...
Read entire article at Truthout
Sooner or later, a reluctant Congress is going to have to do something about replacing No Child Left Behind. If senators and representatives will listen, they'll learn why Education Secretary Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" initiative is a really bad idea, and why thoughtful educators think politicians, business leaders and wealthy philanthropists are bulls in the education china shop.
Back in the 1980's, corporate America, listening to privatizer Milton Friedman, came storming into the shop, not to buy, not to examine or talk about the stock, but to evict educators and take over. With the help of state governors, Congress and the mainstream media, this they did. Professional educators weren't just fired. Convinced that experienced teachers were tainted by "the soft bigotry of low expectations," the self-styled "New Progressives" barred them from the premises.
Non-educators have now been in near-total control of US education policy for more than a full kindergarten-through-12th grade cycle, and things aren't going well. Lou Gerstner, ex-CEO of IBM, RJR Nabisco and The Carlyle Group, a leader in the takeover of education by corporate interests, admitted in a December 1, 2008, op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, "We must start with the recognition that, despite decade after decade of reform efforts, our public schools have not improved."
Those who follow educational issues carefully enough to see past the public relations hype, the test-score manipulations and the statistical game playing, will agree...
... Before Congress opens the national standards and testing can of worms, it might want to examine more closely the assumptions about public education to which the New Progressives cling. Those assumptions are at odds with research and the facts on the ground, but are held with such conviction that behind-the-scenes strategies (including the use of industry-sponsored front groups) have been set in furious motion to convince politicians and the public that the assumptions aren't just valid, but that basing education policy on them assures the success of America's "Race to the Top."
* False Assumption 1: America's teachers deserve most of the blame for decades of flat school performance. Other factors affecting learning - language problems, hunger, stress, mass media exposure, transience, cultural differences, a sense of hopelessness and so on and on - are minor and can be overcome by well-qualified teachers. To teacher protests that they're scapegoats taking the blame for broader social ills, the proper response is, "No excuses!" While it's true teachers can't choose their students, textbooks, working conditions, curricula, tests or the bureaucracies that circumscribe and limit their autonomy, they should be held fully accountable for poor student test scores.
* False Assumption 2: Professional educators are responsible for bringing education to crisis, so they can't be trusted. School systems should instead be headed by business CEOs, mayors, ex-military officers and others accustomed to running a "tight ship." Their managerial expertise more than compensates for how little they know about educating. ..
... These are the major assumptions driving the last two decades of education reform. Any one of them is destructive enough to push the institution over a cliff, and all ten are operative. What's now all but complete is an educational house of cards. Education policy is "data driven," the data comes from scores on corporately produced standardized tests, those tests are keyed to subject-matter "standards," the standards are keyed to the familiar math-science-language arts-social studies curriculum, and that curriculum is a primitive, backward-looking product of the late 19th century when standardization of parts, division of labor and mass production were the "new, big things."
"The Race to the Top" is reactionary in the fullest sense of the word. That 1893 curriculum was poor when it was adopted, and it becomes more dysfunctional with each passing year. Imagine a car being driven at high speed down a winding rural road, with all the occupants, including the driver, peering intently out the back window.
Consider: The familiar curriculum upon which America is betting its future has no agreed-upon overarching aim. It's so inefficient its use takes up most of the school day, leaving little or no time for apprenticeships, internships, co-op programs, individual and group projects, or for exploring the real world two-dimensionalized by textbooks. It has no criteria establishing what new knowledge is important, or what old knowledge to discard to make room for the new. It ignores the fundamental, integrated nature of knowledge, denying learners the benefits of seeing the whole of which random, specialized school subjects are parts. Its sheer volume assures that what's taught will rarely make it past learner short-term memory. It's keyed not to kids' aptitudes, abilities and interests, but to their ages. And it costs a great deal to administer.
That just begins a list of problems with the 1893 curriculum. Its over-the-top emphasis on reading short-changes other ways of learning. It doesn't progress smoothly through ever-increasing levels of intellectual complexity. It's so at odds with the natural desire to learn that laws, threats and other extrinsic motivators are necessary to keep kids in their seats and on task. It has no built-in mechanisms forcing it to adapt to change. Ignoring mountains of research about their importance in intellectual development, it treats art, music, dance and play as "frills." It isolates educators in specialized fields, discouraging their interest in and professional dialog about the state of the institution as a whole and their collaboration in its improvement. It fails to explore questions essential to ethical and moral development. It neglects important fields of study, inhibiting the phenomena-relating process central to the creation of new knowledge. Its failure to model the integrated nature of reality makes it difficult to apply what's being taught to real-world experience. And its requirement that all kids jump through the same "minimum standards" hoops snubs major sources of America's past strength and success - individual initiative, imagination and creativity.
Any one of those problems is serious enough to warrant an emergency national education conference, and all are being ignored. And if Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" is implemented as currently envisioned, this problem-plagued, 19th century, reactionary curriculum won't just be imposed on today's young, but on their children and their children's children, locked in place by national standards...