I entered public education as a high school teacher in Texas
school year 1973-74. I know; I am a
fossil. It is tempting to think of those
days as the “good ole days,” and in many ways they were. I designed my own curriculum. I developed each test. I determined student grades and student
success. I was evaluated by a check list
based mostly on notions that if I showed up and turned in required reports on
time and did not send too many kids to the office I must be an excellent
teacher. Life as a teacher was fairly
simple. I was the classroom
entrepreneur, mostly unchallenged and mostly supported by administration,
parents and kids. I began teaching by
progressing from chapter to chapter in the district selected textbook. My major classroom issues were enforcing the
dress code (boy hair length and girl undergarments and skirt length), making
sure there was no smoking of cigarettes in the bathroom, and ensuring that all
textbooks were covered with the heavy paper covers provided by vendors. I wore slacks, a dress shirt and tie every day. Female teachers wore dresses as they were not
allowed to wear pants. There was little
or no discernible difference in high school in the early 1970’s and the high
school of the 1950’s.
But there was a dark underbelly to public education back
then. Dropping out of high school was a
solution to problems, not a problem in and of itself. Kids who would not behave and not perform
were simply encouraged to leave.
Students with disabilities were discouraged from coming to school at
all, or were placed in holding tanks where little instruction took place. Pregnant students were sent home until they
delivered. Non-English speaking students
were allowed to fail if they did not learn English. There was no way to determine if what I
taught was similar to what the other teachers of my subject taught, or if it
was similar to other high schools in the district. A kid could fail a core subject and still be
the star quarterback. Each year I tended
to confirm that beige kids of wealth were somehow smarter than kids of browner
complexions. (I did teach an albino
student once, and he remains the only white kid I ever taught.) We really had no data to indicate how we were
doing as teachers or how our kids were doing compared to some external standard
or other kids. I did not even know my
failure rate unless I calculated it myself.
The bedrock of the reform movement was formed by a report
issued in 1966 by James Coleman. Coleman
was a sociologist based at the University of Chicago. He was commissioned by the US Department of
Education to assess educational equality in our country. Unlike previous studies and standards
conducted by educators, Coleman looked at outcomes. Before Coleman a school was good based on the
number of books in the library, the number and degrees of teaching staff, etc.,
etc. Coleman reviewed outcomes of
650,000 students and concluded that family income and race were largely determinants
of the quality of education. Wow. Conclusions based on outcomes, not a check
list. He further determined that
minority students perform better when in heterogeneous classrooms including wealthy
Anglos. His report supported busing to
achieve equal educational outcomes.
The actual reform began simply enough. PL 94-142 passed in 1975 required schools to
identify and serve students with disabilities.
This legislation re-structured schools by the addition of an entirely
new department: Special Education. We all learned new terms and acronyms, ARD,
LD, IEP, etc., and for the first time we made a concerted effort to teach
students with disabilities rather than simply send them home or house them
somewhere out of the mainstream. Despite
the expense and the regulations and the due process hearings and the new
legions of professionals in this area, I perceive that this law accomplished a
moral act that helped us serve all kids.
The reform movement really gathered momentum in 1983 when a
panel appointed by President Reagan produced “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative
for Educational Reform” and we learned that all was not well, especially in
secondary schools. A proposed outline of
required core subjects was produced and fear of falling behind the rest of the
world in terms of economic productivity began to drive efforts to improve
schools. What had been hallowed halls
now became a source of fear and shame.
Schools and educators were now under the microscope, spotlight and ax. The private sector was determined to fix us
and began a major effort to do so.
Parents who had always loved and supported their local schools became
skeptical, critical and even hostile.
Teachers began to feel a new pressure that had never existed
before. Administrators felt the same
pressure and in many cases passed it on to the teachers. Our public education system has not been the
same since.
All this was happening on a national stage while I was
teaching in Texas. After "Nation at Risk,"
Texas Democratic Governor Mark White commissioned a blue ribbon panel to
recommend ways to improve education in Texas.
(As an aside, every state office holder in Texas was a Democrat in those
days. The very first Republican elected
to Congress since the Civil War happened in 1974 in Congressional District 7 in
Houston. How quickly we forget.) Ross Perot, the software millionaire, was
appointed chair of this committee. He
and his panel toured the state seeking input on ways to improve our educational
system. (As another aside, in the summer
of 1983 I had the good fortune of testifying before Mr. Perot and his committee
as a classroom teacher. I made
recommendations that found their way into law, but were bastardized by the
legislative process. That is a tale for another
post.) In 1985 the Texas Legislature
adopted HB 72, a sweeping reform package for public education in Texas. That law dramatically changed education in the
state. It included the following
requirements: no pass no play regarding
athletics, a required state developed curriculum, a required state developed
assessment to determine if the curriculum were taught, a required state teacher
evaluation system based on teacher performance and student learning, and required
test for all teacher to determine if they were learned enough to teach. And, a state assigned label applied to
schools and school districts based on an array of collected data, but mostly
based on student performance on the state standardized test. A poor label resulted in public humiliation
and other sanctions. These components,
and many others, formed the bedrock of reform efforts in Texas and elsewhere.
Over time, the components of HB 72 were tweaked. State curriculum was developed, and reviewed
and modified on a regular basis. State
testing began with a test called TABS, morphed to TEAMS, then TAAS, then TAKS
and now STAAR. Data collection became
massive. Schools were now judged on how
their students did compared to state standards and other schools. The test purported to measure what students
really knew. The label of “good teacher”
changed from a check list of what the teacher did to student performance on a
standardized test. Parent and community
support dramatically changed in districts that were less than stellar according
the state rating system. Our public
became suspicious if not hostile. We
were reformed.
The reforms continued unabated. More and more tests were developed; schools
devoted more and more time to preparing kids to do well on the tests. Benchmark testing was implemented to assess
student progress as we moved closer and closer to spring test dates. As schools did better and better on the ratings
and the assessments the curriculum and the tests were re-written and we all did
worse the next year. In 1995 Texans
elected George Bush as governor and the reforms continued. In 2000 the nation elected George Bush as
President. In January of 2001 Bush
proposed the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and
re-title it “No Child Left Behind.”
Texas reform efforts now became national efforts. Standardized testing, teacher quality and
teacher preparation, large data mining, campus and district labels, possible
sanctions for schools that do not perform, etc., etc. were now the law of the
land, not just in Texas and other states.
(Remarkably, the federal requirements were in many ways from Texas’ requirements,
and in Texas schools had to comply with both an increasing state accountability
system as well as a new federal accountability system. Double jeopardy.)
As these reforms continued unabated and unchallenged new
ideas were added to the core curriculum of educational reform. Most of these ideas came from private sector
billionaires who have little or no business crafting educational policy. Charter schools, those schools funded by
public tax dollars but exempt from many public school accountability measures,
grew seeking to lure students away from public schools. The argument was to give parents “choice” if
they were unhappy with their neighborhood schools. Some states enacted voucher programs allowing
parents to take their public school tax dollars and use those dollars for
enrollment in private schools, those schools totally exempt from state and
federal requirements. Each new reform
idea made private sector companies rich.
Test developers lead by Pearson really exploded in profitability by
developing and scoring standardized tests.
Charter school chains sprung up everywhere reaping huge financial rewards
for the private sector CEO’s of such schools.
Even private efforts to train teachers and administrators exploded to
compete with historical preparation programs.
And public schools continued to be hammered by the press and elected
officials for failing to perform as measured and required while public tax
support for schools dropped and/or were diverted to private sector
entrepreneurs.
So, have the reforms worked?
In some ways I would say yes. As
a profession public educators are much more sensitized to the needs and
challenges of minority students, non-English speaking students, and special
needs students. That is good. Professional educators are much more inclined
to seek strategies that work for all kids to assure learning, however that
learning is measured. Public education
has made a monumental effort to integrate schools and improve teacher and
administrator quality in terms of preparation and evaluation. And the effort to in some way define this is
what we teach when we call a course “Algebra I” is a step in the right
direction.
I see no other benefits and an array of expensive
failures. Charter schools have not
worked. They are a sham designed to
increase the income of private sector folks with tax dollars designated for
public education. Most charters perform
worse than public schools. Those that
perform as well have a history of kicking out students that do not perform
well. High stakes standardized testing
is also a failure. To administer a test
on one day in a school year and use those data to determine the quality of the classroom,
school or school district is so ludicrous I cannot believe we ever engaged in
this in the first place. At least in
this area there is a growing backlash by parents and others who are saying enough
already. Increasing the entry standards
for teachers and holding them more accountable without a commensurate increase
in pay has done nothing more than create a terrible teacher shortage. That has not worked either. Even busing, the effort to integrate our
schools, seems to have failed as Anglo parents simply practice “choice” and
engage in “White Flight.”
The entire notion of altering public education to a private
sector type environment based on so called measurable outcomes, pressure to
perform and consequences for failure is absolutely the wrong model to develop
for teaching kids. Adults who thrive in
such an environment seek employment in the private sector. Adults more concerned with the quality of
human interaction, investing in kids for their future, and engaging in a profession
with few rewards for the sake of our own future find such a setting punitive
and non-rewarding. Do we really want
schools to perform like Toyota or Microsoft?
Would you want your family or your church to be structured the same
way? We are using the wrong model.
What is really sad is the inherent cognitive dissonant in
this model. If the “reform” model works,
why do we have to keep changing it, increasing the standards, altering the
tests, creating options for public schools, etc. etc. Using the very standards of the private
sector measuring success or failure it appears the reforms are a failure. Every pro-reformer who argues our schools are
still a low performing disaster is in fact arguing that the current reforms
have failed. We do not need more of the
failed efforts to improve. In Texas we
have implemented these efforts since 1985.
Nationally we have done so since 2001.
How long must we continue to implement improvement efforts that do not
have positive results? Would any business
in their right mind do the same?
The reformers are wrong.
The reforms have not worked.
There have been some benefits that we should not abandon. If the reformers are in fact right, then
using their own standards of measurement we should abandon their reforms.
Period.
No comments:
Post a Comment