English Journal, a flagship publication from NCTE, is currently under the outstanding editorship of Julie and David Gorlewski—who have followed the stellar work of the previous editor, Ken Lindblom.
Abstract: Frustrated with the restrictive nature of the Common Core Standards, the author calls on teachers to resist a system that denies them and their students access to what teaching and learning should be about.
Abstract: The author argues that access to books and time to read play a vital role in literacy development and explains why standardized tests are detrimental to students’ literacy development.
Abstract: The authors compare a memoir intended for adults with another on the same subject meant for a teen readership and argue that didactic YA literature grounded in a developmental stage model of adolescence is undemocratic.
I remain adamant about my concluding point concerning the racial components of Duncan’s comment and the responses to it: If white outrage is the only outrage that counts in the U.S., any victory won from that outrage is no victory at all.
But there is another component of the response that deserves the “conversation” Duncan claims he would like to see us embrace: Duncan is simultaneously the embodiment and the victim of a toxic combination of privilege, bureaucracy, and arrogance.
First, Duncan’s incompetence is no different than the incompetence exhibited by previous Secretaries, such as Margaret Spellings. Where has the outrage been about the national leaders of education having essentially no grasp of data or statistics? Or the likelihood that they feel compelled to protect their partisan politics regardless of the truth?
Next, Duncan’s most recent embarrassment must be placed in the larger context of the entire education agenda under Obama—an agenda characterized by Civil Rights discourse used with Orwellian aims of masking classist and racist policies impacting negatively and disproportionately black, brown, and poor children (“other people’s children”) as well as English language learners. Where has the outrage been about maintaining and expanding two separate education systems—one for the privileged children of our leaders and another for the impoverished and marginalized?
Duncan, then, is not an isolated failure as Secretary of Education, and his recent “clumsy phrasing” isn’t an aberration in his public discourse.
Since Duncan has called for a return to a conversation, I want to repost here a simple request I made during the summer of 2013: A request that Duncan confront the wealth of evidence that refutes his Common Core advocacy.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appears now to be assuming the mantle of self-righteous indignation—a tenuous perch for someone who is leading a field in which he has no experience or expertise.
As Valerie Strauss has reported, Duncan this summer lambasted news editors, berating them for failing to demand evidence for claims against Common Core.
Duncan, first, is striking an insincere pose that manufactures a false universe in which only evidence-based support for CC and Tea Party railings against CC exist. This conveniently ignores the growing legions of educators, academics, and scholars who reject CC, and actually have the evidence.
Since Duncan is demanding evidence, it is high time he practices what he preaches (let’s all pause here because that strikes me as a bit of lunacy, in fact, to expect a political appointee to live by the rules he imposes on others).
Secretary Duncan, please either confirm or discredit the following body of evidence that refutes any credibility for needing CC or that CC will work as education reform:
Loveless (2012), How Well Are American Students Learning?: “Despite all the money and effort devoted to developing the Common Core State Standards—not to mention the simmering controversy over their adoption in several states—the study foresees little to no impact on student learning” (p. 3).
Mathis (2012): Existence and/or quality of standards not positively correlated with NAEP or international benchmark test data; “Further, the wave of high-stakes testing associated with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has resulted in the ‘dumbing down’ and narrowing of the curriculum” (2 of 5).
Whitehurst (2009), Don’t Forget Curriculum: “The lack of evidence that better content standards enhance student achievement is remarkable given the level of investment in this policy and high hopes attached to it. There is a rational argument to be made for good content standards being a precondition for other desirable reforms, but it is currently just that – an argument.”
Horn (2013): “The 2012 NAEP Long-Term Trends are out, and there is a good deal that we may learn from forty years of choking children and teachers with more tests with higher stakes: IT DOESN’T WORK!”
Evidence? Secretary Duncan, you can’t handle the evidence.
Evidence and Rigor: Scrutinizing the Rhetorical Embrace of Evidence-Based Decision Making Educational Researcher April 2012 41: 98-101, doi:10.3102/0013189X12440306
[1] The original blog posting has been identified by the National Council of Teachers of English in recognizing my work for the 2013 George Orwell Award.
Social media and even mainstream media appear poised to leap on Secretary Arne Duncan with both feet due to his swipe at white suburban moms.
The nearly universal sweeping outrage—some with a level of glee that must not be ignored—calls for close consideration itself.
First, rejecting Duncan’s comments about white suburban moms and Common Core critics is completely valid. I join hands with the education community in rejecting Duncan’s claims, his discourse, and his efforts to discredit a significant, credible, and growing resistance to CC that should not be trivialized and marginalized as Duncan does.
However, I find the magnitude and swiftness of the responses to this “white suburban moms” incident disappointing in the larger context of Duncan’s entire tenure as Secretary of Education.
In the first moments of Obama’s administration, Duncan has personified and voiced an education agenda that disproportionately impacts black, brown, and poor children in powerfully negative ways. And the entire agenda has been consistently cloaked in discourse characterizing these policies as the Civil Rights issue of the day.
As well, Duncan has perpetuated and embraced “no excuses” narratives while directly and indirectly endorsing education reform and policies that target and mis-serve high-poverty students, African American and Latina/o students, and English Language learners—charter schools, Teach for America, accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing.
Public commentary that highlights that education reform under Obama and Duncan fails the pursuit of equity in the context of race and class in the U.S. tends to fall on deaf ears. The same urgency witnessed in the responses to Duncan’s “white suburban moms” contrasts significantly from the silence surrounding challenges to Duncan’s discourse and policies that are classist and racist, policy designed for “other people’s children.”
The problem is not that educators and scholars have failed to identify that education reform under Obama and Duncan have continued and increased federal and state education policy creating two inequitable education systems—one for the white and affluent, another for minorities and the impoverished—because these important messages have been raised.
The problem is that rejecting education reform discourse and policy based on race and class concerns doesn’t resonate in the U.S.
As I have asked numerous times, what would the political and public support for TFA be if the organization was providing recent college graduates with no degrees in education and only five weeks of training to teach Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes filled with affluent white students? (A similar question about KIPP raises the same issue.)
Indirectly, from the response to Duncan’s “white suburban moms” comments, now we know.
The measure of a people must not come from how we flinch when the privileged suffer; the measure of a people must come from how we tolerate (or ignore) the conditions that impact the impoverished and the powerless.
If white outrage is the only outrage that counts in the U.S., any victory won from that outrage is no victory at all.
This post is now a decade old, and I wrote it in the context of the Barack Obama administration intensifying the federal-based education reform initiated under George W. Bush with bi-partisan support. Public education now has been reformed for forty years, mostly based on manufactured crises and fueled by political agendas that are essentially conservative even as both major parties support the narratives and the policies.
Many have examined the federal over-reach of education reform (see HERE and HERE); reforms fail over and over, but we persist in reform cycles of crisis/miracle none the less.
Recently, a new wave of education reform has occurred, represented by Florida but common across the US in mostly conservative states. This wave is grounded in censorship and bans with the primary agenda centered on fundamentalist and conservative Christian ideology.
In short, this wave is paradoxical since it is mostly Republican leaders using government over-reach to control public education. However, the goal of this wave is dismantling public education as much as controlling it.
Therefore, I stand with the four education reform camps I identify below with the caveat that this new religious-based wave is a subset or complication of Libertarian reform (which also seeks to dismantle public education, although with much different ideological intent).
Regardless of how we identify education reform, we must constantly recognize the ideology behind and goals sought by that reform. Not all reform is equal and not all reform has democracy and individual freedom as goals.
In her “Diving into the Wreck,” the speaker of Adrienne Rich’s poem explains, “the sea is another story/the sea is not a question of power.” Critical response to this poem often includes some ambiguity about just what the wreck constitutes in the poem, but the speaker is clear about her purpose:
I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done
The education reform debate, however, should be classified as a question of power, and that debate is not ambiguous about the wreck—U.S. public education. To understand the education reform debate in the twenty-first century, a guide appears necessary in order to provide foundational differences among competing narratives about the failures of public education and the policies recommended for overcoming those failures.
First, all reformers are driven by ideology, and thus, those ideologies color what evidence is highlighted, how that evidence is interpreted, and what role evidence plays in claims public education has failed and arguments about which policies are needed for reform.
Second, essentially no camp exists calling for no reform. If the history of education shows us anything, it is that education is a field characterized by both debate and the perpetual tension created by calls for reform (see Kliebard for a really fine examination of this perpetual tension).
Education reform camps fall into two broad categories—Mainstream and Radical—with two divisions within each broad category: Mainstream Reform includes bureaucratic reformers and technocratic reformers; Radical Reform includes libertarian reformers and critical reformers.
Historically and currently, Mainstream Reformers have most, if not all, of the power, and Radical Reformers (although the two divisions are diametrically opposite) share being at the margins. Finally, before detailing each of the four divisions of reformers, this guide is not intended to suggest any individual reformer is solely committed to any one division. In fact, many reformers either shift between camps or simply stand with a foot in each of two camps—notably within the broad Mainstream Reform category.
Mainstream Reform includes the following overlapping and dominant divisions:
Bureaucratic Reformers: Ideologically, bureaucratic reformers tend to self-identify as progressive and support public education as a civic and economic good. Bureaucratic reformers often claim public education’s failures are related to a lack or poor quality of structure: accreditation, certification, standards, and other organizing mechanisms must be reformed in order to improve education (and likely such reforms must always be conducted as the world always changes). Evidence for claims of failure tend to be measurable, quantitative data. Bureaucratic reformers embrace a bureaucratic ideal, borrowing both from government and corporate bureaucracy models to guide reform policy. [October 2023 Update: Note that the current reading crisis and reading policy movement, the “science of reading,” fits into this category.]
Technocratic Reformers: Ideologically, technocratic reformers tend to self-identify as conservative or traditional; they support public education as one but not as the sole mechanism for achieving an educated citizenry (and workforce) that drives a vibrant economy. Skeptical of “big” government, technocratic reformers draw on business models, free market ideology, and competition as larger policy commitments reinforced by technocratic structures such as institutional hierarchies, uniform standards, and perpetual measurement. Evidence for claims of public education failure is drawn from state-to-state and international rankings of test scores—as well as ideological skepticism of government monopolies—but the overriding concern about educational quality remains with how all educational options in the U.S. insure economic competitiveness.
Radical Reform includes the following overlapping and marginalized divisions:
Libertarian Reformers: Ideologically (and obviously), libertarian reformers self-identify as libertarian, or independent; they may tolerate public education if it remains within local control, but some hardline reformers seek to replace public education with a private system. For libertarian reformers public education fails de facto as a bureaucratic institution, a government entity. Evidence of that failure is often more strongly grounded in anti-government sentiment than empirical data, but libertarian reformers do seek evidence that public education outcomes support their distrust in government. [October 2023 Update: Religious-based reforms that censor and ban texts and curriculum parallel the goal of Libertarian reform—although the outcomes are ideologically different, especially in terms of formal education as indoctrination (embraced by fundamentalists but rejected by libertarians).]
Critical Reformers*: Ideologically, critical reformers self-identify as critical, often avoiding the social stigma in the U.S. of identifying as Leftists or Marxists. Public education is cherished as a foundational commitment to democracy, community, and individual liberty. Skeptical of free market ideology and bureaucratic policy, critical reformers seek to change public education dramatically as a subset of wider social change—both driven by commitments to equity. Public education failures, then, are identified as reflecting and perpetuating inequity found in society. Evidence of those failures tend toward quantitative and qualitative data highlighting inequity among classes, races, and genders.
On an ideological/political scale, then, these four divisions run the spectrum from Left to Right as follows:
This guide, then, should serve practical purposes for navigating claims of educational failure and advocacy of reform policy. First, in order to assess the credibility of claims of public education failure and offers of educational reform, we should evaluate the internal consistency of the reformer: Does the reform address a valid claim of failure? And how is all of that shaded by the ideological grounding?
Next, recognizing in a somewhat dispassionate way that all reform comes from an ideological grounding helps distinguish how we determine the credibility of the reformer and the reform policies: Are we rejecting/embracing the ideology or the policy efficacy?
Regardless, then, of how accurate anyone believes this guide is, I would maintain that step one is to acknowledge that “educational reformer” is insufficient alone as an identifier and that ideology drives all claims of educational failure and calls for reform. As a result, for example, support or criticism of Common Core must be examined first upon the ideological basis of the support or criticism. Understanding ideological grounding helps us confront that CC criticism tends be among critical and libertarian reformers who disagree strongly with each other about the reasons for rejecting CC.
This guide seeks to raise the debate above simple claims of “reform” or even basic stances of “for” or “against” X policy.
And like the speaker in Rich’s poem, acknowledging these ideological tensions may help us all look more closely at the wreck and not as much at each other:
the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth.
* Full disclosure, while I have sought to make a fair and clear attempt at identifying these four categories, as a critical reformer myself, I concede and even embrace my ideology, which is a foundational characteristic of being critical. I am neither being objective nor able to do so. Instead, I have tried to be careful and accurate—and transparent.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 