I wrote this as part of my Masters in Educational Leadership, through San Jose State University School of Education.
Here’s SJSU Prof Gary Stebbins when she came to Santa Clara University and spoke; he’s holding my copy of Ravitch’s book, which he got signed for me. (I would have attended myself but had a schedule conflict.)
Check out Diane Ravitch’s blog at EdWeek, “Bridging Differences,” which she co-writes with Deborah Meier. Buy her book at Amazon or elsewhere.
Edward “Ted” Altenberg
May 2, 2011
EdAd 203–204
Reflecting Upon The Death and Life of the Great American School System
© 2010 by Diane Ravitch. NY, NY: Basic Books
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education, and has authored or co-authored nine books and innumerable articles on various topics in the history of education, as well as edited or co-edited more than a dozen other books. Her first piece on educational history was published in 1968, and she has continued to publish since then. The Death and Life of the Great American School System is Ravitch’s latest book, though she has written numerous articles since. She also maintains a blog with Deborah Meier called “Bridging Differences,” which is hosted by Ed Week, at blogs.edweek.org/edweek/ Bridging-Differences/. In this book, Diane Ravitch convincingly argues that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is wreaking havoc on public education, on our schools and teachers and students, and that it is misguided and will never succeed in improving student achievement or improving public schools.
Ravitch lays it all out so compellingly, so convincingly, and so consistently supported by data (every fact and claim in every chapter—every paragraph just about—is supported by citations). Diane Ravitch shows how the “testing and choice” movements in education reform are actually destroying our public education system, school by school, district to district, state by state… and most sadly, child by child, family by family, dream by dream. The more I read this (and related books/articles, discussions by Ravitch, Deborah Meier, Linda Darling-Hammond, and others), the sadder I become. I think of the NCLB acronym jokes I and others make: “No Child Left Breathing,” “No Child (or teacher) Left Thinking,” “No Teacher Left Standing”… I become saddened and enraged. “No Child Left Behind” my ass—this is all about “No School Left Public,” “No teacher union left organizing” … “No poor child of color using up our federal dollars when schools should all be…”
Despite here lifelong status as a liberal and a Democrat, she accepted Lamar Alexander’s invitation in 1991 to serve as Assistant Secretary of Education in charge of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and as Secretary Alexander’s counselor. (Alexander was George H. W. Bush’s newly appointed Secretary of Education.) At the time, there was a growing chorus of education policy makers calling for increased “school choice” and market-based models of education reform. Ravitch “began to sympathize with the argument for letting federal dollars follow poor students to the school of their choice. If kids were not succeeding in their regular public school, why not let them take their federal funds to another public school or to a private—even religious—school? Since affluent families could choose their schools by moving to a better neighborhood or enrolling their children in private schools, why shouldn’t poor families have similar choices?” (p 8 )
Ravitch was Assistant Secretary of Education for only 18 months, left the federal government when Clinton took office, and was not in the government when George W. Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind in 2001; she was nonetheless a supporter of NCLB at first. She continued to work in the world of education reform policy during the rest of the ’90s and into the 2000s. She continued to be an advocate for accountability and choice, and worked with many scholars and policy-makers who shared these goals. Over time, however, she grew more doubtful about this approach; she began to understand just how detrimental NCLB is to public education. She writes,
I grew increasingly disaffected from both the choice movement and the accountability movement. I was beginning to see the downside of both and to understand that they were not solutions to our educational dilemmas. As I watched both movements gain momentum across the nation, I concluded that curriculum and instruction were far more important than choice and accountability. I feared … [that they] would not strengthen American education [and] might even harm the public schools by removing the best students from schools in the poorest neighborhoods. I was also concerned that accountability… had become mechanistic and even antithetical to good education. Testing, I realized with dismay, had become a central preoccupation in the schools and was not just a measure but an end in itself… that accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools as states and districts strived to meet unrealistic targets. (pp 12–13)
Ravitch concluded that she “could not countenance any reform that might have the effect—intended or otherwise—of undermining public education… [and] returned to my roots as a partisan of American public education.” (p 13)
Ravitch convincingly argues that “we cannot address our problems unless we are willing to examine the evidence about proposed solutions, without fear, favor or preconceptions.” (p 13) She lays out the primary thrust of her argument thusly:
Those who want to improve our schools must focus on the essentials of education. We must make sure that our schools have a strong, coherent, explicit curriculum that is grounded in the liberal arts and sciences, with plenty of opportunity for children to engage in activities and projects that make learning lively. We must ensure that students gain the knowledge they need to understand political debates, scientific phenomena, and the world they live in. We must be sure they are prepared for the responsibilities of democratic citizenship in a complex society. We must take care that our teachers are well educated, not just well trained. We must be sure that schools have the authority to maintain both standards of learning and standards of behavior. (pp 13–14)
The rest of the book is her attempt to explain why “most of the reform strategies that school districts, state officials, the Congress, and federal officials are pursuing, that mega-rich foundations are supporting, and that editorial boards are applauding are mistaken… [and] how these mistaken policies are corrupting educational values. … [and she explains] the policies that I believe are necessary ingredients in a good system of public education.” (p 14) Her argument throughout the book is emphatic: “we must preserve American public education, because it is so intimately connected to our concepts of citizenship and democracy and to the promise of American life.” (p 14) She then shares her worry, that “in view of the money and power now arrayed on behalf of the ideas and programs that I will criticize, I hope it is not too late.” (p 14)
Diane Ravitch lays the foundation for understanding NCLB and the charter movement by presenting detailed histories of several key chapters in the last forty years of education reform efforts. She addresses the seminal 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, and how the standards movement was “hijacked” and turned into the accountability movement; how the focus of federal education reform efforts (and by federal edict, state efforts) shifted away from issues of high quality curriculum & instruction, to issues of testing and accountability—and punitive consequences.
Ravitch shows that students in charter schools do not on average outperform their counterparts in public schools. Less than 20% of charter schools appear to be outperforming public schools; around half are on par; and over 30% are performing more poorly than their local public school counterparts. are by accepting few English language learners, students with special education needs, or those with disciplinary problems.
In her scathing critique of NCLB, Ravitch demonstrates that accountability based solely on test scores has been a disaster. By measuring success only in relation to exams in reading and mathematics, and stigmatizing and punishing schools that do not make “adequate yearly progress,” NCLB provides perverse incentives to “teach to the test” and devote less time to science, social studies, history, geography, foreign languages, art and music.
“Ravitch concludes her book with a plea that the best way to enhance education is to rescue the curriculum from the culture wars, set rigorous statewide or national standards for content, and improve the conditions in which teachers work and students learn, rather than ‘squabbling over how school systems should be organized, managed, and controlled.’ Millions of minds, after all, are terrible things to waste.” (NPR, 4/28/2011, retrieved from www.npr.org/2011/04/28/135142895/ravitch-standardized-testing-undermines-teaching).
Major Themes of the Book Include:
- The arc of school reform over the last half century
- Choice and the use of business models in education
- Missing the mark: “testing and accountability” vs. improving curriculum & instruction
- The role and power of private money in shaping the education reform movement
- Why we need to fight against the current trend in school reform.
Chapter-by-Chapter Notes on the Book
Table of Contents of the Book:
- What I learned About School Reform
- Hijacked! How the Standards Movement Turned Into the Testing Movement
- The Transformation of District 2
- Lessons from San Diego
- The Business Model in New York City
- NCLB: Measure and Punish
- Choice: The Story of an Idea
- The Trouble with Accountability
- What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do?
- The Billionaire Boys’ Club
- Lessons Learned
A note about quotations from the book: This thorough summary contains a lot of excerpts from the book. I have taken a few minor liberties with my quotation style, for the sake of readability, as follows:
- Where a phrase of just a few words is quoted, I have not used quotation marks.
- Longer quotations are in quotation marks or quote blocks, following regular convention, and page citations are given.
- Within these quotes, I have at times changed tense (usually from past to present) or person (usually from first to third). Rather than bracket every minor change as would be proper, I have decided to present the quotes more cleanly without numerous bracketed edits.
With this editorial “rule bending” hereby disclosed, I trust that the reader, Ms. Ravitch, and the plagiarism police, will allow me to proceed. Thank you.
1. What I learned About School Reform (pages 1–14)
Ravitch opens her text with the story of how, in 2007, she looked through all her 40+ years of writing and began to seem certain themes and patterns emerge. One was her “skepticism about pedagogical fads, enthusiasms and movements” and her warnings “against the lure of ‘the royal road to learning,’ the notion that some savant or organization has found an easy solution to the problems of American education.” (p 2) Another was her “deep belief in the value of a rich, coherent school curriculum, especially in history and literature, both of which are so frequently ignored, trivialized or politicized.” (p 2)
In 1985, California State Superintendent Bill Honig asked Ravitch to help write a new history curriculum for the state. Over a 2-year period she worked with teachers and scholars to draft the History-Social Science Framework. California became the first state in the nation to require all students to study 3 years of world history and 3 years of U.S. history.
In the spring of 1991, Diane Ravitch was invited by Lamar Alexander (President George H. W. Bush’s newly appointed Secretary of Education) to join the Department of Education (ED) as Assistant Secretary in charge of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, and as Secretary Alexander’s counselor. She had to think about it; she “was a registered Democrat, always had been, and had never dreamed of working in a government job, let alone a Republican administration. … Yet I was intrigued by the thought of working in the federal government. Surely education was a non-partisan issue, or so I then imagined.” (p 7). She said yes, was confirmed by the Senate, and spent the next 18 months working in the ED. She “took the lead on issues having to do with curriculum and standards. The federal government is prohibited by law from imposing any curriculum on states or school districts; but the ED used a small amount ($10M) of discretionary funds to make grants to consortia of educators to develop “voluntary national standards” in every academic subject.
Within the republican administration and ED, school choice was higher on the agenda than were national standards. (In fact, Republicans generally opposed national standards as “federal meddling.”) Ravitch sat in on “meetings of top staff in the department, … [and in] discussions of school choice… the question was not whether to support school choice, but how to do so.” (p 8 ) Ravitch had never focused on issues of choice, but she reasoned that standards would be even more necessary in a society that used public dollars to promote school choice. The more varied the schools, the more important it would be to have common standards to judge whether students were learning. She began to sympathize with the argument for letting federal dollars follow poor students to the school of their choice. If kids were not succeeding in their regular public school, why not let them take their federal funds to another public school or to a private—even religious—school? Since affluent families could choose their schools by moving to a better neighborhood or enrolling their children in private schools, why shouldn’t poor families have similar choices?” (p 8 )
During this time, Ravitch wrote many articles advocating structural innovations in public education, and both the Bush (41) and Clinton administrations advocated market reforms for the public sector, including deregulation and privatization. Clinton and the “New Democrats” championed a “third way” between traditional “left” and “right” policies. Clinton charged VP Al Gore to find ways to “reinvent” the federal bureaucracy. The National Partnership for Reinventing Government adapted private sector management strategies to the public sector, and many of its recommendations involved privatizing public agencies (or parts thereof), cutting jobs, and performance agreements in which agencies would be less regulated—if they could meet certain performance targets.
Similar ideas began percolating into public education policies. The “new thinking” now being championed by both parties saw public education as an obsolete bureaucracy saddled with undue regulation. Seen as a “monopoly” with no competition and therefore no incentive to improve, public education needed to be “reinvented.” This explains the appeal of charter schools: why shouldn’t schools be managed by anyone who can create good schools, using federal funds? Free of government regulation—and teacher unions—schools could be innovative, hire the best teachers, fire the bad ones, compete for students, and be judged solely by results (test scores and graduation rates). With the collapse of Communism and market reforms generating new economic growth around the world, it did not seem too large a stretch to imagine market models being equally successful in reforming and improving schools. “There is something comforting about the belief that the invisible hand of the market, as Adam Smith called it, will bring improvements through some unknown force. In education, this belief in market forces lets us… off the hook, especially those who have not figured out hwo to improve low-performing schools or break through the lassitude of unmotivated teens.” (p 11) However, “the new corporate reformers betray their weak comprehension of education by drawing false analogies between education and business. They think they can fix education by applying the principles of business, organization, management, law and marketing and by developing a good data-collection system that provides the information necessary to incentivize the workforce—principals, teachers, and students—with appropriate rewards and sanctions.” (p 11)
2. Hijacked! How the Standards Movement Turned Into the Testing Movement (15–30)
In the last decade, accountability and choice have been the leading reform ideas in American education. They are at the heart of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, passed by Congress and signed into law in January 2002. NCLB changed the nature of public education by making standardized testing the primary measure of school quality. Missing from NCLB was any reference to what students should learn; this was left to each state to delineate.
The problem with NCLB is that it sidestepped curriculum and standards. It demands that schools produce higher test scores in basic skills, but it requires no curriculum at all, nor has it raised standards. NCLB and the reforms it dictates have “everything to do with structural changes and accountability and nothing to at all to do with the substance of learning. Accountability makes no sense when it undermines the larger goals of education.” (p 16)
What was, in the 1980s and into the ’90s, the standards movement, has been co-opted and replaced by the accountability movement. “What was once an effort to improve the quality of education [has] turned into an accounting strategy: Measure, then punish or reward. … The measure [has] produced fear and obedience among educators; it often produced higher test scores. But it has nothing to do with education.” (p 16)
In the early ’90s, the standards movement was growing, and it was focused on curriculum not testing. The agency that Ravitch headed in the Department of Education (ED) awarded grants to professional groups of teachers and scholars to develop voluntary national curriculum standards. The effort to develop national standards imploded in 1994, when Lynne Chaney (Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, that funded these standards grants along with ED) attacked the not-yet published history standards for their “left-wing” political bias. “Cheney’s scathing critique in the Wall Street Journal opened up a bitter national argument about what history, or rather, whose history, should be taught.” (p 17) The historians at UCLA who supervised the writing of the history standards had not anticipated the firestorm of debate that their “commitment to teaching social history through the lens of race, class and gender would encounter” (p 17). The ideological conflict was played out in every major newspaper, on radio and TV, with liberals and conservatives arguing about “the role of minority groups and women in American history, which was placed in opposition to the role of great white men.” (p 17)
Unfortunately, with the change of administration from Bush 41 to Clinton, no policies or procedures for continuity of the standards development process were established, “no process by which they might be revised, again and again, to remove any hint of political bias.” (pp 17–18) And after the political firestorm and the “vitriolic front-page battle” that erupted over the history standards, elected officials in Washington, DC wanted to have nothing to do with them. Ravitch wrote several editorials and articles, arguing that the history standards could be fixed by editing, that they could be de-politicized. She asked, “Will we learn from our mistakes and keep trying? Or will we give up?” We gave up. Politicians—even Clinton, who campaigned on a promise to establish national standards—decided it was “too hot” and “political suicide” to try to push for national standards. Clinton’s end-run was to give the task to individual states. His Goals 2000 program gave states federal money to write their own standards, pick their own tests, and be accountable for achievement. Unfortunately, most state standards that were developed were vague when it came to actual content. “[S]tates had learned from the battle over the history standards that it was better to say nothing than to provoke controversy by setting out any real curriculum standards.” (p 19) Most states (with Massachusetts being a notable exception) wrote vague documents full of “windy rhetoric, devoid of concrete descriptions of what students should know and be able to do.” (p 19) So states published vague content-free documents and called them content standards—even though they really weren’t any such things.
When Texas governor George W. Bush (Bush 43) was elected president in 2000, he decided that education reform would be his first priority. He brought with him “the Texas plan: testing and accountability.” (p 20) Bush’s NCLB program had a nice fit with Clinton’s Goals 2000 program, because it left it to the states to set their own standards and pick their own tests. Under NCLB, all students are supposed to be at or above grade-level standards (“proficient” or “advanced”) by the year 2014, and schools that do not show adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward that goal are subject to increasingly onerous sanctions. So the states, that had already written vague “standards,’ were now allowed to decide what children should learn, how well they need to learn it, and how they will be tested to determine whether they have learned it.
NCLB was all sticks and no carrots. Test-based accountability—not standards—became our national educational policy. There was no underlying vision of what education should be or how one might improve schools. … [S]chool reform was characterized as accountability, high-stakes testing, data-driven decision making, choice, charter schools, privatization, deregulation, merit pay, and competition among schools. Whatever could not be measured did not count. It was ironic that a conservative Republican president was responsible for the largest expansion of federal control in the history of American education. It was likewise ironic that Democrats embraced market reforms and other initiatives that traditionally had been favored by Republicans. (p 21)
One can see how far we have moved down this path when one looks at Obama’s campaign and subsequent choice for Secretary of Education. Rather than choosing Linda Darling-Hammond, an advocate of teacher professionalism and high quality curriculum, Obama chose a “real” reformer, someone who supports testing, accountability and choice, who opposes tenure and strong teacher unions, preferring instead merit pay based on student test scores, firing teachers and principals who don’t “produce” high test scores, and even closing low-performing schools. He chose his Chicago buddy, Arne Duncan.
Where did education reform go wrong? The story of the last three decades of education reform goes back to the seminal 1983 report, A Nation at Risk (ANAR).[1] ANAR was a response to the radical and freewheeling reforms of the ’60s and ’70s, and to the realization that despite all these reforms, SAT scores had declined significantly during this same time—more than could be explained by demographic shifts in the U.S. population. “The report was an immediate sensation. Its conclusions were alarming, and its language was blunt to the point of being incendiary. It opened with the claim that ‘the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.’” (p 24) ANAR addressed real problems “intrinsic to education, such as curriculum, graduation requirements, teacher preparation, and the quality of textbooks; it said nothing about the governance or organization of school districts, because these were not seen as causes of low performance.” (p 25) It also said nothing about “market-based competition, privatization, state takeover of schools or districts, or other heavy-handed forms of accountability.” (p 24)
ANAR identified as the primary cause of declining and inadequate performance the erosion of the content of the curriculum, and concomitant decline in academic expectations for our students on the part of schools and school systems. It listed many recommendations, including:
- Increased high school graduation requirements, described succinctly and in detail as “The Five New Basics” (4 years English, 3 years mathematics, 3 years science, 3 years social studies, ½ year computer science).
- Increased admissions requirements to 4-year colleges and universities.
- Upgrades in textbook quality and rigor.
- Significantly more time for schooling, such as increasing the 180 day school year to 200 or 220 days.
- Increased teacher training—both pre-service and in-service—and increased requirements for teachers’ levels of academic expertise
- Increased teacher salaries, that are “professionally competitive, market-sensitive, and performance-based.” (ANAR p 30; Ravitch p 27)
Ravitch argues that “Every one of its recommendations was within the scope of the schools as they existed then and as they exist now, and none had the potential to harm public education. The report treated public education as a professional, purposeful enterprise that ought to have clear, attainable goals. (p 28) She also states, “It was right to point to the curriculum as the heart of the matter, the definition of what students are expected to learn.” (p 27) “ANAR called for sensible, mainstream reforms to renew and repair our school system… strengthening the curriculum for all students. … These recommendations were sound in 1983. They are sound today.” (p 30)
It is easy to see how ANAR launched strident work toward improving the curriculum and instruction in our public schools; the movement that became the standards movement of the’80s and early ’90s. Unfortunately perhaps, ANAR was a report, not a legal mandate. Jump ahead 25 years and we see how the standards movement has been co-opted, “hijacked” and turned into the testing and accountability movement. NCLB on the other hand, is a legal mandate. ANAR envisioned—and described in some detail—schools with well-balanced and rigorous curricula. NCLB is bereft of any educational ideas. It is not about curriculum or instruction; it is about testing and accountability! NCLB takes a technocratic approach to measuring school success only in terms of standardized test scores in two skill-based subjects (reading and math). NCLB is “producing mountains of data, not educated citizens… promoting a cramped, mechanistic, profoundly anti-intellectual definition of education. In the age of NCLB, knowledge is irrelevant.” (p 29)
ANAR emphasized the importance of a coherent curriculum, and thus was a precursor to the standards movement. When the debacle over the national history standards led to the demise of the standards movement, the overall education reform movement was left without a strategy or focus. The “great hijacking” of education reform occurred in the mid 1990s when the standards movement fell apart. NCLB codified testing and accountability as our national education strategy—despite a near total lack of focus on curriculum or instruction! “The goal of testing [is] higher scores, without regard to whether students acquire any knowledge of history, science, literature, geography, the arts and other subjects that [are] not important for accountability purposes.” (p 30)
“ANAR called for sensible, mainstream reforms to renew and repair our school system: … strengthening the curriculum for all students; setting clear and reasonable high graduation … [and] college entrance requirements; improving the quality of textbooks and tests; expecting students to spend more time on schoolwork; establishing higher requirements for new recruits into the teaching profession; and increasing teacher compensation. These recommendations were sound in 1983. They are sound today.” (p 30)
3. The Transformation of District 2 (31–46)
In the years following the release of ANAR, almost every state established a task force or a commission to look at school reform. For a time in the 1990s, “systemic school reform” was a predominant model for school reform, in which many or all aspects of a school system might well be changed at once: curriculum, instruction, testing, structuring of time and students and classes, and so on.[2] Education scholars and leaders recognized that “school reform begins with determining what students should know and be able to do (the curriculum) and then proceeds to adjust other parts of the education system to support the goals of learning. This… is what top-performing nations do.” (p 32) So the curriculum is the starting point. The challenge in school reform has always been “scaling up” isolated successes to include all students within a school, or all schools within a district… let alone all schools in all districts in all states in the nation! One urban district was said to have solved the puzzle of raising achievement across the board with a diverse enrollment and a substantial number of poor students. That district—Community School District 2 in New York City—became a national symbol of education reform success in the late 1990s. However, only years later did it become clear that District 2—and the nationwide reform efforts its example helped to launch—was not the success that it initially appeared to be.
The story of District 2 began in 1987, when Anthony Alvarado became district superintendent. Alvarado had previously served as superintendent of District 4 in Harlem, where he introduced small schools and a school choice program, and where test scores rose during his tenure. In District 2 Alvarado again introduced small schools and school choice, as well as “intensive district-wide professional development in Balanced Literacy, which soon became the district’s lingua franca.” (p 34) Balanced Literacy (BL) became the centerpiece of Alvarado’s school reform efforts; it was an attempt to bridge the differences between the “phonics” vs. “whole language” camps, a battle that had been raging in District 2 as it had around the country during the 1980s and ’90s. While BL did integrate elements of both phonics and whole language, it focused mainly on prescribed techniques for specific reading strategies, and required a very scripted approach to teaching literacy. Large blocks of time were devoted each day to literacy instruction, and direct whole-class instruction was limited. Alvarado insisted that all teachers implement BL strictly according to the prescribed protocols, and that all principals be actively engaged as instructional leaders, providing guidance and professional development so that every teacher was successfully implementing BL.
By the mid-1990s, District 2 rose from a middle performance to second place among NYC’s 32 districts, on state tests of reading and math. The impressive gains got the attention of eminent researchers Lauren Resnick (a cognitive scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, with an interest in education standards and assessment) and Richard Elmore (a scholar of organizational behavior, in the Harvard University Graduate School of Education); “Resnick and Elmore are among the most respected scholars in education.” (p 37) They (Resnick, Elmore and Alvarado together) received a multi-million dollar grant in 1995 from the U.S. Department of Education to document “The District 2 Story” and present it as a national model. Over the next several years they produced two dozen research studies and reports. The studies were “almost uniformly celebratory” and they argued that the “dramatic improvements in student achievement were due to the district’s heavy investment in professional development and its determination to make every teacher and principal responsible for improving instruction.” (p 37) The district put most of its discretionary funding into teacher and principal training: from 3–12% of its budget, far more than any other district in NYC and more than most in the nation.
When the final report of the Resnick-Elmore-Alvarado report was published in 2001, it lauded the huge successes of the program. However, critics also emerged to challenge this narrative. They challenged the way the published reports trivialized the impact of the demographics (both socio-economic and racial/ethnic) affected the results. The demographics of District 2 were not like most of the rest of NYC: more than half the schools had enrollments that were majority white and/or Asian. District 2 is also one of the wealthiest districts in NYC: the average family income in 1990 was over $150,000, with 39% of families earning more than $75,000, while the city averages were $62,818 and 23%, respectively. Furthermore, the data show that improvements in student achievement were not ubiquitous or equal throughout the district: the highest performing schools were those with white and/or Asian majorities, and the lowest performing schools were highly segregated, with more than 75% African American and/or Hispanic students. The achievement gaps between white/Asian and Black/ Hispanic students ranged from 30–40% in both reading and math, on state tests in grades 4 and 8.
Much of the data in the preceding paragraph was not available or clearly evident until after the 2000 census data were available. But in 1998 Anthony Alvarado left District 2 and joined Alan Bersin in San Diego to radically restructure their schools, largely based on the District 2 model.
4. Lessons from San Diego (47–68)
What happened in San Diego from 1998 to 2005 was unprecedented in the history of school reform. The school board hired a non-educator as superintendent and gave him carte blanche to overhaul the district’s schools from top to bottom. Major foundations awarded millions to the district to support its reforms. … The district’s new leaders set out to demonstrate that bold measures could radically transform an entire urban district and close the achievement gap between students of different racial and ethnic groups. The San Diego reforms were based on New York City’s District 2 model. (p 47)
Alan Bersin had been a federal prosecutor and had no real education experience when he was hired as superintendent in 1998. He immersed himself in education issues, though, and consulted with experts at Harvard, and quickly learned about District 2 and Anthony Alvarado. Bersin hired Alvarado as chancellor of instruction, and together they launched a radical venture in school reform. They “introduced changes in every classroom, disciplined resistant teachers, and fired reluctant principals. And they did so to national acclaim, while alienating significant numbers of teachers and principals and creating a national exemplar of the ‘get tough’ superintendent.” (p 47)
San Diego had around 140,000 students, the eighth largest district in the U.S. (second only to LA in California). In 1998, its students were quite diverse: 36.2% Hispanic/Latino, 28.2% white, 18.3% Asian/Filipino/ Pacific Islander, and 16.7% African American. San Diego itself is known as a conservative city; it hosted the Republican National Convention in 1996.
San Diego was also “a surprising place to launch a major reform effort, because the city was widely perceived in the 1990s as one of the nation’s most successful urban school systems, [with] a ‘national reputation as an innovative urban district’.” (p 48, quote from Education Week, 2/7/1996) The city’s schools’ “stellar reputation had been due in large part to Tom Payzant, a talented educator who had led the district from 1982 to 1993. …[H]e was succeeded by Bertha Pendleton, a 35-year veteran of the San Diego schools, who was the system’s first female and first African American superintendent.” (p 48) Then, in 1996, the teacher’s union launched a strike seeking higher wages and a larger role in decision-making, and won a 14% salary increase and a commitment to school-based decision making. The teachers did not see this as extravagant, as the highest teacher salary would still be only $55,000, and most teachers could still not afford to buy a home within the district. But the business community was outraged, believing that Pendleton had capitulated to the union, and decided it was time for a “tough leader.” “The business community… considered the union to be a self-serving adult interest group that cared more about money and power than about children.” (p 49) The San Diego Chamber of Commerce backed three candidates for the School Board. Their slate prevailed in November 1996, and this board hired Bersin in 1998.
Bersin was educated at Harvard (undergrad) and Yale (Law School), was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, served as U.S. attorney in southern California from 1993–1998, and was Clinton’s “border czar.” A friend of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, he was well connected to business and political elites in the city, state and nation. Bersin and Alvarado formed a partnership in which Bersin handled the politics and public relations and Alvarado was in charge of the instructional agenda. They mandated a uniform way of teaching reading: the Balanced Literacy method. Every elementary teacher was required to teach reading for 3 hours every morning, using only BL methods. Principals were also given strict requirements regarding their job duties—including ensuring that teachers were adhering to the BL methods. The two leaders reorganized the district leadership, eliminating 5 area superintendents and downsizing the DO by 104 people; they used the savings to put BL into every school. These and other changes were presented to the Board in 2000 in Bersin’s “Blueprint for Student Success” and the cost was substantial: PD costs rose from around $1M to around $70M. In addition to more than $50M that Bersin raised from foundations (including the Gates, Hewlett, Carnegie and Broad Foundations), Beresin also shifted control over Title I funds from the schools to the central office—i.e. to himself. When the Board approved the “Blueprint” on a 3–2 vote, the divide was clear: the 3 business-supported Board members who had been elected in’96, who supported the Bersin-Alvarado leadership and their Blueprint, and the other 2 who were supported by the teachers, and who consistently opposed Bersin’s initiatives. “Bersin disdained school-based decision-making, site-based management and other means of involving teachers in matters of curriculum and instruction. He disparaged the research on school reform that spoke of cultivating teacher ‘buy-in’ … He was insistent, passionate, and impatient, sincerely believing, as did Alvarado, that their program was in the best interests of children.” (p 53)
Many teachers and principals did not like the changes, or agree with the pedagogical soundness of the curriculum or instructional strategies. During Bersin’s years as superintendent, 90% of the principals were replaced. More than 1/3 of the district’s teachers left between 1998 and 2005. This bore only a slight resemblance to NYC’s District 2. During Alvarado’s 11-year tenure there, about half the teachers and 2/3 of the principals left, but mostly through retirement or transfers to other NYC districts. Alvarado cultivated a close working relationship with the teacher union (UFT); in San Diego, the Bersin-Alvarado team was “continually at war with the SDEA.” (p 54) As leader of District 2, Alvarado stressed “collegiality, caring and respect: … We care about and value each other, even when we disagree.” (p 54) But this philosophy did not accompany Anthony Alvarado on his move to San Diego. Bersin expected Alvarado to fully implement his “formula for success… professional development sessions were… a time for teachers to be told what to do and how to do it. Unquestioning compliance was expected.” (p 55)
The School Board elections of 2002, 2002 and 2004 all saw fierce—and hugely funded—battles between the pro- and anti-Bersin camps. Bersin kept his 3–2 majority in 200 and 2002, but lost it in 2004, and resigned in January 2005.
Researchers had begun analyzing the results of the Blueprint even before bersin’s departure, and the results were mixed. The Board had hired the American Institutes of Research (AIR) to evaluate the Blueprint. Their 202 report praised the Blueprint, but also reported that teaachers were unhappy about the fast pace and top-down nature of its implementation, did not feel respected, and were enjoying teaching less. Many complained of “a climate of fear and suspicion,” and of being “exhausted, stressed out, and fearful of losing their jobs…” (p 57) A 2003 AIR report concluded that the Blueprint’s academic results were mixed and that further gains were jeopardized by continuing teacher opposition, and impending budget cuts. The biggest academic gains were in elementary reading, where 3-hour BL literacy sessions were required. But the same students showed no gains in math, and high school math and reading scores declined relative to the rest of the state. AIR concluded that teacher resistance to the Blueprint was a large obstacle. “Teacher buy-in is critical for the success of school reform.” (p 57) By contrast, some researchers waxed eloquent about the Blueprint, and still others offered cautious praise. One concluded that the leaders’ “top-down, non-incremental approach to change was necessary.” Another expressed hope over “the beginnings of a genuine district culture of professional norms” but noted that Bersin and Alvarado’s style was leading to teacher discontent. A UCSD study found that students were “helped moderately” by the Blueprint, but that the rate of increase of student achievement “lagged slightly behind the rate of change statewide.” Another UCSD study found that the gains were largest in elementary schools, moderate in middle schools, but nonexistent in high schools. Elementary students were showing progress, but less than that of other urban districts across the state, and the district’s dropout rate increased almost every year starting in 1999, and grew by 23% during Bersin’s tenure.
Diane Ravitch was able to deduce everything in the narrative up to this point from published reports: books, articles, essays, and research studies. But the picture was unclear, so she began her own inquiries. She found very little written about the curriculum itself, so she contacted Frederick Hess (of the American Enterprise Institute), who had overseen the research and writing of Urban School Reform: Lessons from San Diego, one of the most positive reports on the Blueprint. Many of the reports in Urban School Reform referred to the district’s curriculum, but none described it. Ravitch was directed to Sheila Byrd, a well-known curriculum expert who had been hired to write about the curriculum, but whose paper was subsequently not published. In her unpublished paper (which she sent to Ravitch), she wrote that San Diego never implemented the state’s curriculum frameworks, had decided to focus instead on “intensive professional development” for teachers and principals. San Diego emphasized how to teach and the expense of conveying what students should be learning. In an email to Ravitch, Byrd said that, “five years after the reforms started, San Diego ‘didn’t have a curriculum. They had just started to create one,’ but what was emerging was only about literacy and ‘was not promising.’ District officials had not been able to explain what the curriculum was, nor was there documentation of a systematic plan to develop one.” (pp 60–61)
In interviews with teachers and principals, Ravitch heard again and again about the sadly demoralized and stressed out environment that existed during the Bersin-Alvarado-Blueprint years. “They uniformly were bitter about the high-handed way in which the reforms were imposed on them.”
Teachers spoke of “being harassed… mandates and directives that narrowed what they were permitted to teach… a reign of terror… [being] bullied… punished by grade switching… culture shock, keeping everyone on edge, afraid, insecure… people complied because of fear, all up and down the system, there was fear. …” (pp 61–62) Principals were also disappointed: “The introduction of 5 hours daily of literacy and math in high school was a disaster. That meant eliminating all electives, other courses. The kids hated it. … Putting coaches in every school was ‘a great idea, badly implemented.’ The coaches sowed animosity, especially among experienced teachers. The coaches made teachers feel less competent, less respected. Teachers saw them as police men and did not trust them. … He described the reforms as a regime of thought control. … A principal who was promoted during the Blueprint era complained about the minute-to-minute schedule. … Another who was hired during the Blueprint days said, ‘It was great pedagogy, but they got the people stuff all wrong. Their sense of urgency sometimes … provoked agency… anxiety… hostility… they came to ‘kick ass’… they never listened… it undermined trust… Everyone was demoralized…’ A National Board-Certified teacher and former Teacher of the Year for the district spoke of a ‘totalitarian atmosphere’ … [Another teacher] said the system turned principals into ‘Stepford Wives’… Two kindergarten teachers described the reading test… as ‘the monster to which we fed our kids.’ “ (p 62–63)
Ravitch interviewed a psychiatric social worker at Kaiser Permanente who spoke of San Diego teachers coming to the clinic “in doves” with “work-related depression and anxiety due to a hostile work environment,” but that the phenomenon ended after Bersin left. From 2005 to 2007, “not a single teacher appeared [at the clinic] with a similar problem.” (pp 64–65)
Ravitch asks, “In the end, were the gains in the elementary years worth the rancor created by Bersin’s ‘take no prisoners’ style? … I have no doubt that the bitterness I encountered was genuine… Almost every study—including the AIR studies—documented that a majority of teachers were angry and disaffected. You can’t lead the troops if your troops do not trust you.” (p 65) Carl Cohn followed Bersin as San Diego’s superintendent. In an essay she published ostensibly criticizing NCLB, he criticized San Diego’s “driving philosophy… to attack the credibility of any educator who spoke out against a top-down education reform model. … [Any genuine school reform, he argued,] is dependent upon empowering those at the bottom, not punishing them from the top. [School reform will continue to fail… until we recognize that] there are no quick fixes or perfect educational theories. School reform is a slow, steady labor-intensive process [that depends n] harnessing talent of individuals instead of punishing them for noncompliance with bureaucratic mandates and destroying their initiative. … ground-level solutions, such as high-quality leadership, staff collaboration, committed teachers, and clean and safe environments, have the best chance of success. These solutions are not easily quantified. They cannot be experimented on by researchers or mandated by the federal government.” (p 66) Cohn cited sociologists Anthony Bryk and Barbara Scneider, who argued in their study Trust in Schools that “successful school reform depends on an atmosphere of trust. Trust ‘foments a moral imperative to take on the hard work of school improvement.’ Trust, not coercion, is a necessary precondition for school reform.” (p 66) Ravitch concludes this chapter by asking rhetorically, “Did the get-tough policy produce results? Did it lead to higher student test scores? These may not be the right questions. It makes more sense to ask whether a policy of coercion can create good schools. Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves? Can principals be inspiring leaders if they must follow orders about the most minute of details of daily life in classrooms?” (pp 66–67)
5. The Business Model in New York City (69–92)
In the first decade of this new century, New York City became the national testing ground for applying business model “market-based” reforms to public education. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his chancellor of education Joel Klein applied business principals to the nation’s largest school system, which enrolled 1.1 million students. Bloomberg, a media mogul and one of the wealthiest men in the world, was elected mayor of NYC in the fall of 2001, having run on a campaign platform that included reforming NYC’s struggling schools.
When Bloomberg ran and was elected mayor, the 7-member School Board was appointed by 6 different elected officials: one each by the 5 borough presidents, and 2 by the mayor. Once appointed, though, the Board was an independent agency that had the power to hire the superintendent and oversee school policies and budgets. But Bloomberg did not want an independent board; he wanted full, direct control of the schools, and in 2002, the state legislature turned control of the schools over to Bloomberg, who promptly created the NYC Department of Education (DOE) to manage the schools. He then offered the top job to Joel Klein, “a lawyer who had served as attorney general in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration. … [and who] won national attention for his efforts to break up the software giant Microsoft. Abrilliant and accomplished lawyer, he had little experience in education.” (p 71) Klein visited Alan Bersin in San Diego, and adopted a similar “ ‘left-right’ strategy: he selected instructional programs that pleased the pedagogical left, awarded large contracts to vendors of these programs, and created large numbers of jobs for consultants and coaches who were knowledgeable about progressive approaches. And he satisfied the business community by vigorously promoting choice and accountability.” (p 71) He utilized the talents of management consultants, investment bankers, and business leaders–including Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of GE—to spearhead the effort to apply business principles to public education. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January 2003, the mayor announced his school reform program, which he called Children First. The program included uniform reading and mathematics programs in most schools (235 of the city’s 1,200 schools were exempt because they were relatively high-performing schools). The mandates included BL, as was used in District 2 and San Diego. The math programs selected were two McGraw Hill products, both non-traditional constructivist programs (Everyday Math and Impact Mathematics). Each school was assigned literacy and mathematics coaches to monitor and enforce strict implementation guidelines. They also “mandated citywide use of the Teachers College ‘workshop model’ and imposed it in a highly prescriptive manner, with group work required in all lessons and each day’s activities defined in precise order and detail.” (p 72)
The other major parts of the plan included:
- Eliminating the 32 community districts and replace them with 10 large regions.
- The creation of a privately funded “Leadership Academy” to mentor new principals. (Bloomberg raised $75M in private philanthropic funds for a 3-year program to train 90 principles a year.)
- Despite the mayor’s promise of greater parental involvement, the new structure actually reduced parental involvement. “With the elimination of local school boards [each community district used to have its own board] and the central board, parents found it difficult to contact anyone in authority about issues that affected their children. … Many parents became frustrated by their inability to influence decisions that affected their children or their school. Klein directed principals to hire a parent coordinator, but the coordinators worked for the principal, not for parents.” (pp 72–73)
“The reorganization was a corporate model of tightly centralized, hierarchical, top-down control, with all decisions made at [the central office] and strict supervision of every classroom to make sure the orders flowing from headquarters were precisely implemented. … Klein surrounded himself with noneducators, most of whom were lawyers, management consultants, and business school graduates.” (p 73) The mandated pedagogy was soon immersed in controversy. Teachers complained of micromanagement, and “there was no uniform curriculum, except in mathematics. Minimal attention was paid to science, history, literature, geography, civics, the arts, or other subjects.” The mandated citywide pedagogy “imposed a rigid orthodoxy about how to teach,” with far less attention to what students should learn. In response to complaints from parents and civic groups, the DOE developed a curriculum in science and in the arts, but the schools were held accountable only for tests scores in reading and math.
Major controversies continued to arise, and by 2007 Klein had initiated three major reorgani-zations of the entire school system in four years. He created then later abandoned regional “autonomy zones,” as well as other structural changes. In all these changes, “there was no public discussion or review of the sweeping changes in school governance. It was announced and done.” (p 74) Again and again, Klein tried to orchestrate changes that would save money and raise test scores; neither goal was attained. The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) survey of science found that 2/3 of NYC’s 8th graders were “below basic,” the lowest possible rating. Arts education suffered too; an official 2008 DOE survey found that only 4% of city elementary schools met the state’s requirements for art education; by 2009, nearly a third of all schools had no arts teachers.
The Bloomberg-Klein reforms matched the “national zeitgeist” and embodied the same ideals of NCLB; “the principles behind them—test-based accountability and choice—were exactly the same. … The basic idea shared by Mayor Bloomberg in NYC and the George W. Bush administration and Congress was that a relentless focus on testing and accountability would improve the schools. Schools that failed to produce higher scores would suffer increasingly sever sanctions, their principals might be fired, and the schools might be closed.” (p 77) Especially disturbing was the lack of any public forum and the elimination of all checks and balances on executive power. “Under this new system, the public had been left out of public education. … School reform without public oversight or review is contrary to basic democratic principles. In a democracy, every public agency is subject to scrutiny. Removing all checks and balances… undermines the credibility and legitimacy of decisions, and… while Bloomberg and Klein are men of integrity, unchecked power in the wrong hands can facilitate corruption and malfeasance.” (p 77)
The original announcement of the Children First agenda made only passing reference to charter schools, but they emerged as a key element in the strategy. New York City had only a few charters when Klein took office, but he authorized many of them, and in a few years the DOE reached the state-legislated cap of 50 charter schools. In 2007 Bloomberg convinced the legislature and newly elected governor Eliot Spitzer to permit NYC to add another 50 charter schools. Klein frequently celebrated the successes of charter schools, and hailed them as superior to the regular public schools over which he presided. Yet the comparison was not a fair one; many charter schools had smaller classes and more resources, especially if they had philanthropic sponsors (as so many in NYC did, including Gates, Broad and other pro-charter school foundations). Critics complained that they were “enrolling only the best students and ignoring disadvantaged populations, since only the most motivated students were likely to apply for admission… Of 51,316 public school students in the city who were homeless, only 111 [0.2%] were enrolled in charter schools. In one impoverished neighborhood, where there were nine homeless shelters, the [local] charter school did not enroll a single homeless student.” (p 81)
As the DOE promoted the concept of school choice, and replaced large comprehensive high schools with scores of small high schools, it destroyed the concept of neighborhood schools. Choosing which small high school to attend became very stressful for students and families, and some students spent up to 90 minutes to get to school each day. As a high school of 3,000 students was closed, it would be replaced with 4 or 5 schools of 500 students. “What happened to the missing students? They were invariably the lowest-performing, least motivated students… these troublesome students were relegated to another large high school, where their enrollment instigated a spiral of failure, dissolution, and closing. The DOE set in motion a process that acted like a computer virus in the large high schools. As each one closed, its least desirable students were shunted off into yet another large high school, starting a death watch for the receiving school.” (p 84)
As the DOE turned to school autonomy and choice, it lost interest in the instructional reforms of 2003. “The unifying idea of the new reform agenda was accountability. The DOE introduced a program of rating and evaluating every school. … [and] the bottom line of accountability was rewards (for higher scores) and sanctions (for not getting higher scores). The DOE offered incentives to improve test scores: … bonuses for principals and teachers… even a pilot program to pay students to raise their test scores. … the mayor negotiated an agreement with the [teachers union] to award schoolwide bonuses to teachers… he called it ‘merit pay’ but the union insisted it was not. … The schoolwide bonus plan was not quite merit pay, but it was a significant step in that direction.” (p 85)
Then, in 2007, the city DOE implemented “progress reports” for its schools, an A–F grading system that was deeply flawed, and yet was used to award merit pay to teachers. “Some excellent schools, known for their sense of community and consistently high scores, received an F because their scores dipped a few points. Some low performing school… received an A because they showed some improvement… The next year, 89 percent of the F schools were in good standing according to NCLB standards… In 2009, the city’s accountability system produced bizarre results. An amazing 84% of 1,058 elementary and middle schools received an A (compared to 23% in 2007)… even four schools the state said were ‘persistently dangerous’ received an A. … The debacle of the… city’s flawed grading system produced results that few found credible, while the DOE was obliged to pay teachers nearly $30 million in bonuses—based on dumbed-down state tests—as part of its ‘merit pay’ system.” (pp 85–86)
While NYC students and schools showed some growth on the state tests, students made no significant progress on the NAEP in reading or mathematics from 2003–2007. The DOE also publicized its increasing high school graduation rates, yet this too was a ruse, “inflated in various ways, such as excluding students who left city high schools without a diploma and were counted as ‘discharges’ rather than dropouts… by a dubious practice called ‘credit recovery,’ a covert form of social promotion… [in which] students who failed a course or never even showed up could get credit by turning in an independent project… or by attending a few extra sessions.” (pp 88–89) And those who did graduate were often poorly educated: ¾ of city HS graduates who enrolled in the city 2-year community colleges needed to take remedial courses in reading, writing or mathematics, before they could take college-level courses.
Furthermore, “the DOE centralized admissions to gifted and talented programs, presumably in the interest of equity… but the new approach halved the number of children in such porgrams and halved the proportion of African American and Hispanic children accepted from 46% to only 22%.” (p 89) The DOE also paid far less attention to science, social studies and the arts, as compared with reading and math. “When science and social studies were tested in 2008, 28 of NYC’s 32 districts placed in the bottom 10th percentile of the states districts in science, and 26 districts were in the bottom 10th percentile in social studies. 18 districts were in the bottom 5th percentile in both science and social studies. “Not a single district scored at or above the 50th percentile in science, and only 1 exceeded the 50th percentile in social studies.
Ravitch concludes that overall, applying the “business model” to NYC schools was not the panacea its supporters had expected it to be. From 2002–2009, the NYC education budget grew from $12.7 B to $21.8 B, so some of the successes seen during this period may be testament to the value of increased school spending. “Mayoral control is not a guaranteed path to school improvement. On the 2007 NAEP, the cities with the highest scores were Charlotte, NC and Austin, TX, neither of which had mayoral control. And 2 of the 3 lowest-performing cities—Chicago and Cleveland—had had mayoral control for more than a decade. Clearly many factors affect educational performance other than the governance structure.” (p 91)
Reforming a school system’s governance structure alone will not solve the student achievement (or equity) problems our schools face. A poorly constructed governance system (such as NYC’s decentralized system of 1969–2002) may fail, but “absolute control by the mayor [or anyone] is not the answer, either. It solves no problems to exclude parents and the public from important decisions about education policy or to disregard the educators who work with students daily. Public education is a vital institution in our democratic society, and its governance must be democratic, open to public discussion and public participation.” (p 91)
6. NCLB: Measure and Punish (93–112)
George W. Bush’s (Bush 43) “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) promised a new era of high standards, testing and accountability in which not a single child would be overlooked. Diane Ravitch, having been assistant secretary of education in Bush 41’s education department, was one of some 500 educators invited to the White House to discuss NCLB. Bush described his basic principles as these:
- Every child will be tested every year, in grades 3–8, using state tests not a national test;
- Decisions about how to reform schools would be made by the states, not Washington;
- Low-performing schools would get help to improve; and
- Students attending persistently “failing” schools would be able to transfer to other schools.
The NCLB legislation, the 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). “Large bipartisan majorities in Congress approved NCLB in the fall of 2001. Republicans would have opposed the bill’s broad expansion of federal power over local schools, and Democrats would have opposed its heavy emphasis on testing. But after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress wanted to show unity, and the education legislation sailed through.” (p 94) “In retrospect, NCLB seems foreordained… elected officials of both parties came to accept as secular gospel the idea that testing and accountability would lead to better schools. …At the time, few realized that the quality of the tests was crucial… elected official assumed… that a test is a test; they did not give much thought to such technical details as validity and reliability. Everyone, it seemed, wanted ‘accountability.’ … they wanted the school to measure students were learning, and they wanted rewards or punishments for those responsible.” (p 95) All through the 1980s and n’90s, various governors and presidents claimed the mantle of “Education Governor” or “Education President,” and their education reform initiatives generally consisted of new requirements for testing and accountability. The apparent large test score gains in Texas during the 1990s must have impressed Congress; not only were more students passing the state tests, but the achievement gap between white and minority students appeared to be dropping as well. “[A] plan based on what appeared to be a successful model of accountability in Texas, members of both parties were willing and ready to sign on…” (p 96) “A few scholars had warned in 2000 that the gains in Texas were a mirage… [but] in its eagerness to endorse education reform, Congress paid no attention to these red flags and passed a program that was closely aligned with the Texas model.” (pp 95–96)
NCLB was complex (what started as a concise 28-page summary ended up being an 1,100-page piece of legislation) and contained many programs, but its accountability plan can be summarized as these seven points:
- All states must choose their own tests, adopt three performance levels (e.g. basic, proficient, advanced) and decide for themselves how to define “proficiency;”
- All public schools receiving federal funds must test all students in grades 3–8 annually and once in high school in reading and mathematics, and must disaggregate their scores by race, ethnicity, SES, disability status, and limited English proficiency.
- All states must establish timelines for how 100% of students will reach proficiency by school year 2013–2014.
- All schools and districts are expected to show “annual yearly progress” (AYP) for every subgroup, toward the goal of 100% proficiency by 2014.
- Any school that did not make AYP for every subgroup would be labeled as a “school in need of improvement” (SINI), and after 2 years it would become a “program improvement” (PI) school, and these schools would face increasingly onerous sanctions, including notifying all students’ families of their right to transfer to another school, with transportation paid for by the district.
- In the third year, schools would be required to offer free tutoring support to low-income students, paid with district federal funds (now called “Supplemental Education Services,” SES).
- In the 4th year, schools must take “corrective action” which might mean curriculum changes, staff changes, and/or longer schools days or year.
- In the 5th year, schools must “restructure,” which could include: replacing principal and some or all of the staff, converting to a charter, bringing in a private management organization, having the state take over control, or “any other major restructuring of the school’s governance.”
- All states must participate in the biennial NAEP, as “an external audit to monitor the progress of the states in meeting their goals.
- Not directly a part of NCLB’s accountability program, per se, was the additional requirement that all children be taught by a “highly qualified teacher.”
Ravitch then discusses here initial support of NCLB, and her realization that it was “a failure.” Ravitch felt—originally—that NCLB was not asking of schools anything more than what they already be doing: teaching reading and math well, so there ought not be huge added costs. And she “was not sympathetic to the anti-testing movement. [She] didn’t see why anyone would object to an annual test of reading and mathematics.” (p 99) Ravitch can pinpoint the exact date she realized NCLB was a failure—November 30, 2006—because she attended a conference to hear a dozen scholars present their analyses of NCLB. “Various presentations that day demonstrated that state education departments were drowning in new bureaucratic requirements, procedures and routines, and that none of the prescribed remedies were making a difference.
“Choice was not working, they all agreed. …only a tiny percentage of eligible students asked to transfer to better schools. In California, less that 1%… in Colorado, less than 2%… [one researcher] questioned whether choice was even a successful strategy, because his own studies found that choice had little or no effect on student achievement. … many parents and students did not want to leave their neighborhood school… parents of English language learners tended to prefer their neighborhood school… Some excellent schools failed to meet AYP because only one subgroup—usually children with disabilities—did not make adequate progress. In such schools, the children in every other subgroup did make progress, were very happy with the school, did not consider it a failing school, and saw no reason to leave. Thus, while advocates of choice were certain that most families wanted only the chance to escape their neighborhood school, the first 4 yearsw of NCLB demonstrated the opposite.
Free after school tutoring (SES) fared only a bit better than choice. … In California, 7% of eligible students received tutoring; in New Jersey, 20%… Colorado, 10%… Kentucky, 9%… The law implicitly created a ‘voucher’ program for tutoring companies… any organization could step forward to register… to provide services… across the nation, nearly 2,000 providers registered… but no more than 20% of eligible students in any state actually received it, even though it was free and readily available.” (pp 99–100)
Ravitch says it became clear to her that day that NCLB was not working. “Adult interests were well served by NCLB… but the advantages to the nation’s students were not obvious. … Under NCLB, the federal government was dictating ineffectual remedies that had no track record of success. … I realized that incentives and sanctions were not the right levers to improve education… I started to see the danger of the culture of testing… I came to realize that the sanctions embedded in NCLB were, in fact, not only ineffective but certain to contribute to the privatization of large chunks of public education.” (101–102) Ravitch then goes on to expose and condemn “the most toxic flaw in NCLB:” its legislative command that every student in school must be proficient in reading and math by 2014. And if every student, including ELs, and special ed students, students who are homeless or poor or otherwise “lacking in any societal advantage,” and “if they are not, then their schools and teachers will suffer the consequences.” (p 102) She points out that, in the 2007 NAEP for 4th grade reading, 33% of the nation’s students were below basic, 34% basic, 25% proficient and 8% advanced. In the same year, only 28% of 8th graders scored proficient in reading, with 3% advanced. The goal of 100% proficiency, established as law by Congress, is “an aspiration; it is akin to a declaration of belief. … No one truly expects that all students will be proficient by 2014… Finn and Hess… write, ‘only politicians promise such things.’” Finn and Hess compare it to Congress declaring that “every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date.” Ravitch then points out, however, that “if pollution does not utterly vanish, or if all cities are not crime-free, no public official will be punished. No state or municipal environmental protection agencies will be shuttered, no police officers will be reprimanded or fired, no police department will be handed over to private managers. But is all students aren’t on track to be proficient by 2014, then schools will be closed, teachers will be fired, principals will lose their jobs, and some—perhaps many—public schools will be privatized. All because they were not able to achieve the impossible.” (p 103)
“The most dangerous potential effect of the 2014 goal is that it is a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States. … And indeed, scores of schools in NYC, Chicago, Washington, DC and other districts were closed… Superintendents in those districts boasted… as if it were a badge of honor rather than an admission of defeat. … in states that maintained high standards and did not lower the cut scores, even more schools fell behind. … To date, there is no substantial evidence that demonstrates that low-performing schools can be turned around by any of the remedies prescribed in the law. … [Research has shown] none of the five federal restructuring options were associated with a greater likelihood of a school making AYP overall or in reading or math alone.” (pp 104–105)
A 2008 NSF-funded study predicted that nearly 100% of California elementary schools will fail to make AYP by 2014, and that “the lowest-performing sub-group will ultimately determine the proficiency of a school, district or state.” Most states have decided to game the system. Mississippi for example, claimed that 89% of its 4th graders were proficient or above in reading, but NAEP found only 18%. Only Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, South Carolina and Wyoming maintained standards comparable to NAEP. The lowest standards are found in Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, New Jersey, Delaware, North Dakota, Illinois and Ohio. The tests and “testing infrastructure on which so many school reform efforts rest… is unreliable at best… yet the lives of students, teachers, and principals—and the fate of schools—are to be based on them.” (pp 106–107)
The sad reality is that, due to the “test and punish” mentality of NCLB, instruction has given way to test prep, test-taking skills have taken precedence over knowledge, and drill and practice (“drill and kill”) have become a significant part of students’ daily routine.
It may seem ironic that NCLB did not even bring about rapidly improving test scores, despite the obsessive focus on testing and test prep—at the expense of “real” education and learning and knowledge. But it is not ironic at all; it is what you’d expect when we ignore so much of what we know about what makes powerful effective quality education: a broad and interesting curriculum, grounded in all the liberal arts—science, history, literature, the arts—as well as reading and math; quality schools that pay attention the quality of children’s lives, the quality of daily life in the school and in the lives and families of the school community—students and their families, and teachers as well.
“Did NCLB work?” Ravitch asks, then answers: “it could never ‘work,’ in that its goal of 100% proficiency by 2014 is out of reach.” She points out that NCLB’s “simpleminded and singular focus on test scores distorts and degrades the meaning and practice of education. … Its remedies do not work. Its sanctions are ineffective. It does not bring about high standards or high accomplishment. … NCLB is a punitive law based on erroneous assumptions about how to improve schools. … It assumed that reporting test scores to the public… [and] changes in governance… [and] shaming schools… would lead to school improvements and higher scores… It assumed that low scores are caused by lazy teachers and lazy principals… Perhaps most naively, it assumed that higher test scores on standardized test of basic skills are synonymous with good education. Its assumptions are wrong. Testing is not a substitute for curriculum and instruction. Good education cannot be achieved by a strategy of testing schildren, shaming educators, and closing schools.” (pp 109–111)
7. Choice: The Story of an Idea (113–148)
Ravitch tells the interesting story of when, where and why the idea of “school choice” first arose: in the segregated south of the 1950s and ’60s, as a “dodge” to avoid school desegregation that was ordered as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. Her home state of Texas, as well as Virginia and other southern states created systems of “choice” wherein Whites could choose to stay in all-White schools and Blacks could choose to stay in all-Black schools. Virginia even gave tuition voucher grants to students to enable them to attend private schools of their choice—so-called “segregation academies.” So the term “school choice” was initially stigmatized as a racist dodge to avoid desegregation.
In 1955 Milton Friedman published his classic essay, “The Role of Government in Education,” in which he espoused his conservative libertarian argument against government regulation, arguing that government should fund education, but not run or regulate schools. He argued that “the ultimate goal of society should be to maximize the freedom of the individual or the family. Toward that end, government should provide a voucher to parents to subsidize the cost of their children’s schooling, which they could spend at any school—whether… religious,,, for-profit business, non-profit…” (p 115) A hot-button issue at this time was whether Catholic schools should be allowed to received federal aid. When Congress passed the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 (and of which NCLB is this decades’ reauthorized version), it permitted needy students in religious schools to receive federal aid for remedial services. This was a political compromise, not endorsement of Friedman’s voucher ideas—or an act of benevolence. In fact, the federal governemtn used ESEA—and the threat of withholding federal dollars—as leverage to force southern states to finally dismantle segregated schools.
Before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, however, “the issue of school choice remained far outside the mainstream, mainly because it was viewed by the media and elected officials as a means to permit white students to escape court-ordered racial desegregation.” (p 116) Reagan, however, advocated school choice, specifically vouchers. Reagan was directly influenced by Friedman’s ideas—he agreed with Friedman’s advocacy for freedom, deregulation, market-based solutions, and privatization, and Friedman became one of Reagan’s advisors. Reagan tried to make his voucher idea more “politically palatable” by calling for vouchers only for low-performing students, but still backed off the idea during his second term. Reagan’s first Secretary of Education, Terrence Bell, was not a supporter of vouchers or Reagan’s call for school prayer, or Reagan’s desire to eliminate the Department of Education (ED, which was elevated to a Cabinet-level department under President Jimmy Carter). Reagan’s second Secretary of Education, William Bennett, “enthusiastically embraced school choice and included it as one of his ‘three Cs’ of education: content, character, and choice.” (p 117)
The Democratic Party controlled the House of Representatives during Reagan’s two terms, and they rebuffed his efforts on school choice and eliminating ED. The Democrats are “closely allied” with the two national teachers’ unions: the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), both of which viewed choice and vouchers as threats to public education and as moves toward privatization. “However, the concept of school choice found a home among free-market-oriented foundations and think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Olin Foundation, and the Bradley Foundation. …[They] incubated a generation of scholars and journalists who advocated school choice long after the end of the Reagan administration. State and local think tanks devoted to free-market principles sprouted up across the nation, inspired in large measure by Friendman’s writings, to continue the battle for school choice.” (p 117)
During the 1980s and into the’90s, several states saw voucher referenda campaigns garner enough petition signatures to be placed on the ballot, but large majorities always rejected them. The choice movement gained new momentum in the 1990s, due in large part to three things:
- John Chubb and Terry Moe published Politics, Marketsw and America’s Schools, which “restarted the campaign for school choice with powerful and contemporary arguments”;
- The nation’s first school voucher program was established in Milwaukee Wisconsin in 1990;
- The charter school movement was born. (p 118)
Chubb and Moe contended that public education was incapable of reforming itself because it was “owned” by vested interests (teacher’s unions, professional organizations, textbook publishers, schools of education, and many others) that protect the status quo. Therefore, they argued, “the old institutions” should be swept away, and a system of free-market-driven school choice should be enabled. States would set minimum requirements for health and safety, and teacher certification, but little else; states would not hold schools accountable for achievement, because “When it comes to performance, schools are held accountable from below, by parents and students who directly experience their services and are free to choose.” (p 119) Chubb and Moe’s proposal set off a firestorm in the education journals, where it was denounced as a call for vouchers, but in retrospect, it is clear that Chubb and Moe forecast the rise of the charter movement.
In Milwaukee, African American activists allied themselves with the Bradley Foundation to seek vouchers for low-income children. The Republican governor, Democratic mayor and business community all supported the idea, and the state legislature approved a voucher program in 1990. Even though it initially allowed vouchers only for attending non-religious schools, there was still stiff opposition, including that from teachers’ unions, the NAACP, People for the American Way, the ACLU and the state superintendent of education. The anti-voucher forces mounted a lengthy legal battle, but in 1998 the Wisconsin Supreme Court finally upheld the legality of the voucher program—and allowed religious schools to accept vouchers. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case, thus removing the legal cloud that hung over it. “Before 1998, there were around 2,000 students in the voucher program. A decade later, 20,000 students in Milwaukee were using vouchers to attend non-public schools, nearly 80% of which were religious schools.” (p 120)
In 1995, the Ohio legislature enacted a voucher program for Cleveland, with 2,000 voucher scholarships being awarded by lottery, with preference given for low-income families. Legal battles ensued there as well, but in 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it constitutional. In 2003, Congress established a voucher program for 2,000 students in the District of Columbia.
But just as vouchers seemed to be achieving some victories, the voucher movement lost steam, as their proponents “found a new vehicle that was less troublesome than vouchers: charter schools. … Charters raised no constitutional issues.” (p 121)
So the 1990s saw three versions of school choice develop:
- Vouchers, which would allow families to collect public funds and spend them on any private school, religious or non-religious;
- Privately managed public schools, in which an outside private entity is contracted by a school district to run one or more schools; and
- Charter schools, which—because they are public schools—have to be non-sectarian, but were released from a great many of the rules and regulations under which ‘regular” public schools operate.
The charter school idea was first proposed in 1988, by Ray Budde, a professor of educational administration. His vision was that groups of educators would create a charter based on a “bold vision and would take risks to explore the unknown.” Also in 1988, AFT president Albert Shanker put forward a similar idea: that “groups of teachers should be able to run their own schools within regular schools and to pursue innovative ways of educating disaffected students.” (p 122) Al Shanker argued that the reform movement inspired by A Nation at Risk (ANAR) was raising standards and working well for about ¼ of students, but that the old traditional classroom model was not being successful for the majority of students. He suggested that any group of 6 or more teachers be allowed to submit a proposal to start a new “school within a school,” that would try out different ways “of reaching those kids who are not now being reached by b y what the school is doing.” (p 123) These new schools would be research programs with a 5- to 10-year guarantee, so they can try out new things, and would be schools of choice for both students and teachers. Shanker saw it as a way of “building by example,” that it would not be “shoving things down people’s throats, but enlisting them in a movement and a cause.”
Minnesota became the first state to pass legislation authorizing charter schools, in 1991. St. Paul’s City Academy High School, which opened in 1992, was “a paradigm of what Sahnker had hoped a charter school would be: it aimed to help students who had not succeeded in a regular public school.” (p 125) Support for charters grew rapidly, in both private organizations and public agencies and Congress, and by 2001, some 2,300 charter schools were in operation, serving nearly half a million students. By 2009, the number had grown to 4,600 charter schools serving 1.4 million students in 40 states and the DC. Sixty percent of all charter school students are located in 6 states: California, Arizona, Texas, Florida, Michigan and Ohio.
While charter school proponents liked to cite Shanker as one of the “founding fathers” of the charter school movement, they routinely overlook the fact that by 1993 he had withdrawn his support for charters and become a vociferous critic. He abandoned his hope that they could be dynamic experimental schools led by devoted teachers, somewhat akin to medical researchers, and instead “came to see charters as dangerous to public education, as the cutting edge of an effort to privatize public schools. … He repeatedly condemned charter schools, vouchers, and for-profit management as ‘quick fixes that won’t fix anything.’ “ (p 124)
As charter schools evolved, they became increasingly hostile to unions. A great many charter operators did not want to be bound by negotiated contracts, but instead wanted to be able to hire and fire at will, set salary schedules, working conditions and hours, and make other “management decisions” as they saw fit. The Green Dot charter organization was one fo the very few that were willing to accept teachers’ unions in their schools. The UFT NYC even opened its own charter schools. But the overwhelming majority of charter school organizations did not want a unionized teaching staff.
“The advocates of choice… predicted that choice would transform American education… [and] produce higher achievement. …They invoked the clarion call of ANAR as proof that America’s schools were caught in a downward spiral; only choice, they argued, could reverse the ‘rising tide of mediocrity,’ though the report [ANAR] itself never made that claim. They were confident that when schools compete, all students gain. Parents would surely vote with their feet for the good schools. … The basic strategy was the market model, which relied on two assumptions: belief in the power of competition and belief in the value of deregulation.” (pp 126–127)
By 2009, research evidence was building to create an emerging consensus: there were relatively small achievement gains for students who used vouchers to attend private schools; students in the regular public schools and those in the voucher schools had similar scores, most of the differences were “not statistically different from zero.” (p 129) The one notable consequence of the Milwaikee voucher program seemed to be that “it opened the door for the spread of other forms of school choice. … In 1998, the district had about 100,000 students. A decade later, enrollment in the regular public schools had dropped just below 80,000. Vouchers, charters and choice were rapidly eroding the public education system.” (pp 131–132)
Every president, from Bush 41 to Barack Obama, has lauded charter school, because they appeal to a broad spectrum of people on the left, right and center; they all seem to see charters as the antidote to the cumbersome bureaucracies of public education, and as “the decisive change that would revolutionize American education and dramatically improve educational achievement. Charter schools represented, more than anything else, a concerted effort to deregulate public education, with few restrictions on pedagogy, curriculum, class size, discipline, or other details of their operation.” (p 133) Yet, when you look carefully at the data, charter schools present a very mixed set of results. Some have shown great promise—most notably among them the KIPP schools and a few others—while others have been no better than regular public schools; some have turned out to be utter failures academically, and some have gone bankrupt or otherwise collapsed, leaving students stranded.
The “data wars” over whether or not charter school students outperform regular public school students erupted in 2004, when researchers for the AFT discovered that the federal government tested charter school students in the 2003 NAEP, but did not release the data to the public! The data showed that public school students performed as well or better than private or charter school students. Further analyses found that when “after controlling for demographic and other variables, the advantages of private and charter schools disappeared and, in some instances, demonstrated the superiority of regular public schools.” (p 140) Numerous studies from right-leaning and left-leaning scholars and institutes fanned the flames of the debate. Much of the debate became more about ideology than about pedagogy and academic achievement, indicating that many charter school advocates seemed more interested in bashing public schools than in creating effective schools of any kind. Several national studies in 2009 all found nearly the same thing: some charters were excellent; many were about the same as regular public schools; some were far worse. For example, Stanford economist Margaret E. Raymond analyzed data from 2,403 charter schools in 15 states and DC (around ½ of all charters and 70% of all charter students in the US), “and found that 37% of charters had learning gains that were significantly below those of local public schools; 46% had gains that were no different; and only 17% showed growth that was significantly better” (p 142). The study showed that “tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception” and that “we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters over good charters” (p 142).
There is also data that indicate the “charters probably promote racial segregation” and tend not to be as successful with low-income or low-performing students (p 143). Overall, charters in and of themselves appear not to be a panacea or solution to improving education; they are simply another model for organizing and governing schools. And since market-based school choice calls into question the very notion of equal access to quality public education —a cornerstone of the democratic ideals of this country— this seems to me to call into question the growing support for charters over regular public schools.
Ravitch posits that “the question for the future is whether continued growth of charter schools in urban districts will leave regular public schools with the most difficult students to educate, thus creating a two-tier system of widening inequality. … This would be an ominous development for public education and for our nation” (p 145)
While so many of us had such high hopes when Barack Obama was elected president, and “it seemed certain that federal funding for vouchers was a dead issue,” Obama quickly showed himself as pro-charter by urging states to remove any limits on the number of charter schools” (p 145).
In their current manifestation… charters compete for the most successful students in the poorest communities… disable regular public schools in those communities by leaving the lowest-performing and least motivated students to the regular public schools. … Charter schools have become in many communities a force intended to disrupt the traditional notion of public schooling. The rhetoric of many charter school advocates has come to sound uncannily similar to the rhetoric of voucher proponents and of the most rabid haters of public schooling.
If there is one consistent lesson [from] studying school reform over the last century, it is the danger of taking a good idea and expanding it rapidly, spreading it thin. … In barely twenty years, the idea of school choice rapidly advanced in the public arena and captivated elite opinion. Given the accumulating evidence of its uneven results, this was surprising. Even more surprising was how few voices were raised on behalf of the democratic vision of public education. (pp 146–147)
8. The Trouble with Accountability (149–168)
9. What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do? (169–194)
10. The Billionaire Boys’ Club (195–222)
11. Lessons Learned (223–242)
- The 2½ decades of educational reform efforts preceding ANAR were shaped by our response to the launching of Sputnik in 1957, and then the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, but the current mess we’re in which we find ourselves is a chapter that begins in 1983.
- Hoy & Miskel address this in chapter 8, “School Effectiveness, Accountability and Improvement”; see especially pages 315–319. Hoy, W. K. and Miskel, C. G. 2008, Educational Administration: Theory, Research and Practice, Boston: McGraw Hill.
Major milestone today: Son Kevin (almost 20) drove off with two friends to move out of the house, moving to Pensacola, Florida! Wow, I’m going to miss him, but it’s a good move for him: growing up, learning to take care of himself without Mom & Dad…
