Category Archives: Education
Disaster Capitalism and Charter Schools: Revisiting New Orleans Post-Katrina
The Doable We Refuse to Do: End Poverty, Confront Privilege
Since I have recently challenged the word magic behind claims that education is the one true path out of poverty and that the free market can ever address poverty and inequity, I want to highlight that the unwillingness of political leaders and the public to acknowledge the importance and potential of the Commons results in a refusal to end directly poverty and confront privilege.
Austin Nichols offers a powerful argument that We can end child poverty. Or, at least, do more:
We could effectively end child poverty now, at least in the short run. The question is whether we’re willing to do that.
If the United States offered cash benefits to children in poor families, we could cut child poverty by more than half. According to calculations using the 2012 Current Population Survey, poor children need $4,800 each, on average, to escape poverty. That’s $400 a month for each child.
If we issued a $400 monthly payment to each child, and cut tax subsidies for children in higher-income families, we would cut child poverty from 22 percent to below 10 percent. If we further guaranteed one worker per family a job paying $15,000 a year, and each family participated, child poverty would drop to under 1 percent.
A child benefit is now common across developed countries, with amounts of about $140 a month in the UK, $190 in Ireland, $130 in Japan, $160 in Sweden, and $250 in Germany. A smaller child benefit of $150 per month would chop child poverty from 22 percent to below 17 percent. Adding the job guarantee would lower child poverty to 8 percent.
As important as the need and ability to end poverty directly is the need to face the power of privilege, as detailed by Richard Fry’s The growing economic clout of the college educated. Note specifically the following data displays:
Fry explains the growing disparity:
For the first time on record, households headed by someone with at least a bachelor’s degree received nearly a majority (49.7%) of aggregate U.S. household income; nearly one out of every two dollars went to the college educated. In 2012 one-in-three households was college educated, so, put another way, half of the aggregate U.S. income goes to one third of the households.
Buried in the strong correlation between level of education attained and household income is the very real causational relationship between privilege and access to that education (both the quality and attainment). While it remains statistically true that higher earning is associated with higher educational attainment, it is also likely that higher educational attainment is simply a marker for the privilege that led to that attainment.
In other words, identifying any person’s educational attainment may be more about that person’s relative privilege or poverty and not that person’s effort, ability, or genuine achievement. (Please note Bruenig’s recognition that birth-wealth without college still has higher income potential than birth-poverty and college attainment.)
The evidence is overwhelming that poverty and affluence are destiny, that inequity is growing in the U.S., and that the best and most effective methods for ending poverty and closing the equity gap is through direct action by our publicly funded institutions (and not waiting on the magic of the Invisible Hand).
Cash Cow $tate $tandards
Cash Cow $tate $tandards
Disaster Capitalism and Charter Schools: Revisiting New Orleans Post-Katrina
Andrea Gabor examines the rise of charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans, raising an important question in the subhead: “Are New Orleans’s schools a model for the nation—or a cautionary tale?”
Gabor ends the piece suggesting caution:
But even for students who don’t fall through the cracks or get expelled, it bears asking: have the pressures and incentive systems surrounding charter schools taken public education in the direction we want it to go? Anthony Recasner, a partner in founding New Orleans Charter Middle School and FirstLine, is visibly torn between his hopes for the New Orleans charter experiment and his disappointment in the distance that remains between today’s no-excuses charter-school culture and the movement’s progressive roots. “Education should be a higher-order exploration,” says Recasner, a child psychologist who left FirstLine in 2011 to become CEO of Agenda for Children, a children’s advocacy organization. The typical charter school in New Orleans “is not sustainable for the adults, not fun for kids,” says Recasner, who is one of the few African-American charter leaders in New Orleans; his own experience as a poor child raised by a single parent mirrors that of most students in the charter schools. “Is that really,” he asks, “what we want for the nation’s poor children?”
In my review of Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope for The Wilson Quarterly, I found Carr’s work to suggest, also, that New Orleans was yet more evidence of the failures of charter schools, “no excuses” ideology, and Teach for America. Below is my expanded review:
Sarah Carr’s Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children is a story of place.
Readers see first a map of eastern New Orleans, the 9th and 7th Wards, Treme, French Quarter, and Algiers—situating the three schools at the center of the story, Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) Renaissance, SciAcademy, and O. Perry Walker.
As a Southerner, I thought of Yoknapatawpha County maps in William Faulkner’s novels. That connection predicted accurately the narrative Carr shapes about the intersection of place, race, class, education, and America’s pervasive market ideology. New Orleans public schools have a long history of failure connected to the city’s high poverty rates and racial diversity, but post-Katrina New Orleans has experienced a second flood, a school reform surge characterized by charter schools, Teach for America (TFA), and education reformers from outside the city and the South:
But in 2007…Paul Vallas, the new superintendent of the state-run Recovery School District [RSD], helped bring hundreds of young educators to the region. Vallas arrived in New Orleans in 2007 after a decade spent leading the Chicago and Philadelphia schools….Vallas brought the mind-set of a frenetic businessman to the New Orleans superintendency.
An education journalist for over a decade (The Chronicle of Higher Education, New Orleans Times-Picayune), Carr weaves a vivid story of twenty-first century education reform, examining the influx of charter schools in New Orleans as options designed to address high-poverty and minority students. The stories are drawn from principal Mary Laurie, student Geraldlynn Stewart, and TFA recruit and Harvard graduate Aidan Kelly in the wake of Katrina recovery efforts from 2010 through 2012.
The place, New Orleans, is Carr’s touchstone for six parts, each divided among The Family (Geraldlyn’s family), The Teacher (Kelly), and The Principal (Laurie). Geraldlyn expresses ambivalent attitudes about her KIPP education as it contrasts with her mother’s efforts to provide Geraldlyn a better life. Kelly personifies the “missionary zeal” of TFA recruits, but also offers insight into those ideals as they clash with the reality of day-to-day schooling. Dedicated to her city, Laurie was a successful public school educator before Katrina, but after the hurricane, the RSD laid off public school teachers and dissolved the teachers unions; charter schools gave Laurie a new start, but not without complications.
Carr crafts some of the best education reform journalism to date, presenting a critical eye on charter schools (specifically KIPP), TFA, and a market-based model supported by both Republicans and Democrats. Charter schools and TFA represent reform policies that view public school traditions, teacher certification and teachers unions, as root causes of poor academic outcomes. To eradicate those in-school problems, choice and competition are embraced as the primary tools for reform. Carr’s examination, however, calls these claims and solutions into question.
Education journalism often offers slogans such as “miracle schools” and “grit” (Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed and Whatever It Takes, David Kirp’s Improbable Scholars, and Jay Matthews’s Work Hard. Be Nice.). But Carr allows KIPP and TFA advocates to speak for themselves. For example, Kelly reveals his unwavering idealism as it intersects the no-excuses ideology of TFA and KIPP, organizations that attract and encourage privileged young people who believe they can change the world through their own determination.
Instead of silver bullets, Carr presents a nuanced analysis: “A trap confronted schools: If they took the students with the most intense needs, their numbers might suffer. But the state would shut them down if their numbers suffered too much and for too long. Then who would take the neediest?” That analysis is driven by stories. At the end of Part II, Rebirth, Carr quotes Laurie, principal of O. Perry Walker High School:
There are so many stories, she said one afternoon, sitting on a bench under Walker’s breezeway. “I worry that they will get lost, that there’s no one to tell them. My big fear is that all folks will remember is that when Katrina hit, people had to ride in on their white horses and save the children of New Orleans.” She shuddered at the thought.
Yet, stories are often ignored in twenty-first century education after the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Since NCLB, school and teacher accountability has increased, based primarily on high-stakes tests and judged against data such as the achievement gap. Later, a comment from Laurie stands at the center of the education reform movement that Carr’s narrative confronts, unmasks, and exposes powerfully:
“I think we’ve done good work, but I don’t know that the numbers (test scores, attendance and graduation rates) will always reflect our good work because of the kids we take on,” said Laurie, referring to the fact that the school accepts some of the city’s most challenged and challenging students….“Walker’s a twenty-four-seven school. We believe we’ve got to find a way to give kids a safe place to be,” Laurie said. “And that’s not spoken for in these numbers.”
To this, we might add that Laurie’s concern about her charter school in the crucible of New Orleans education reform parallels the often-ignored problem at the center of universal public education in the U.S., a system designed to serve any and all students with equity regardless of background.
While Carr challenges education reform and the limits of good intentions among KIPP and TFA advocates, she also grounds her confrontations in a larger commitment: “At times, both KIPP’s staunchest supporters and its fiercest critics insult and demean the very families they purpose to protect by assuming they, and they alone, know what is best for other people’s children.”
Furthermore, by echoing educator Lisa Delpit’s recognition that many reforms ask less of “other people’s children” by narrowing their learning to worksheets and test-prep, Carr forces critics of KIPP and TFA to examine why many low-income minority parents not only choose no-excuses schools but also enthusiastically encourage no-excuses practices. No-excuses ideologies place an emphasis on authoritarian discipline and a culture of intense personal responsibility that includes teachers and students being held accountable for outcomes that critics warn are beyond the control of either. No-excuses advocates, including parents, embrace the exact paternalism critics challenge.
Carr offers a skeptical voice against education reform mirroring “disaster capitalism” in New Orleans, when markets generate profit from the “blank slate” of disasters (see The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalismby Naomi Klein). Yet, she offers nuanced praise when reformers succeed. For example, students are told at KIPP orientation a Cherokee legend about everyone embodying a good and bad wolf. That lesson gains a life of its own among students: “The fable’s power over their actions seemed to suggest that appealing to a person’s high self, no matter whether they are young teenagers or adults, carries more influence than rules or demerits ever could.”
In the middle of the book, Carr discusses Woodson Middle School, supplanted by a KIPP campus after FEMA declared the building irreparable because of Katrina. Woodson Middle had been named for Carter G. Woodson, author of The Mis-Education of the Negro in the 1930s. Woodson “represented an evolution, and radicalization, of W.E.B. Du Bois’s philosophy, which emphasized black empowerment through political rights and educational attainment”—a “philosophy…[that] stood in stark contrast to the view of contemporary school reformers” such as Michelle Rhee (TFA recruit, former chancellor of education in Washington DC, and founder of Students First), KIPP advocates, and TFA supporters.
Hope Against Hope is a cautionary tale about ideology—reformers honoring market forces over democratic values by stressing indirect reform through choice and competition instead of reforming directly public institutions when they fail to achieve equity—and the muted and ignored agency of people in their own lives.
As Carr acknowledges in the Prologue, her narrative details “competing visions for how to combat racial inequality in America,” but anyone seeking silver bullets, trite slogans, or popular assumptions will find “inside the schools, the war over education no longer seems so stark and clearly defined. Edges blur, shades of gray abound, and simple solutions prove elusive.” Like Kathleen Nolan confronting zero-tolerance policies in Police in the Hallways (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Carr shows that simple solutions cannot remedy complex problems.
Where claims of “miracle” schools and no-excuses mantras stumble, Hope against Hope soars in its bittersweet humanity, the rich and uncomfortable tapestry of living and learning in poverty in twenty-first century America.
Carr’s Epilogue offers advice for reforming education reform: “If the schools want to succeed in the long run, the education they offer must become an extension of the will of the community—not as a result of its submission.”
To understand U.S. education and education reform, then, Carr’s story of New Orleans is an essential place to start.
When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot: Lessons for Teachers in Misguided Accountability
If we imagined a pictorial representation of the evolution of education accountability, similar to the standard image we associate with human evolution—
—then we’d have to confront that the accountability era begun in the early 1980s focused first on students, requiring them to pass exit exams (regardless of their having taken and passed all of the required courses for graduation) in order to receive their diplomas.
Next, schools were the target of accountability with the advent and distribution of school report cards.
By the end of the first and beginning of the second decades of the twenty-first century, teachers have found their place at the accountability table, with some suggesting that teachers are now being fed their just desserts. Merit pay linked to student test scores and the more recent flurry of implementing value-added methods (VAM) of teacher evaluation and retention in many ways bring teachers into decades-long predicaments faced by students and schools: the misguided and unfair weight of standardized testing used in dysfunctional and invalid ways.
When I posted about how absurd teacher accountability has become, I expected most on my Twitter feed to recognize the situation in New York as unfair and a harsh warning of the mounting weight of failed accountability:
A Bronx performing arts school’s dance instructor will be judged on students’ English exam scores. Physical education teachers at a transfer school in Brooklyn are going to teach Olympic history lessons to prepare students for the history tests that will help determine their ratings. And teachers in Queens are putting the fate of their evaluations into a final exam that they don’t teach, but yields high pass rates.
The scenarios are not unusual — across [New York City] this year, thousands of teachers will be rated in large part based on test scores of subjects and students that they do not teach.
Rather, the scenarios are examples of how schools have tried to comply with a new teacher evaluation system that must factor student performance into final ratings. They also represent how the original purpose of the evaluations, to differentiate teachers’ effectiveness, has been squeezed by restrictive state laws, limited resources, and a tight timeline for implementation.
“It’s insane to me that 40 percent of my evaluation is going to be based on someone else’s work,” said Jason Zanitsch, a high school drama teacher who will share the same “student growth” score with colleagues in his school this year.
However, the first response I received raised a much different point:
@plthomasEdD if teachers don’t like this then way assign all the group work which is just as bad for the kids? hmmm….
My first response was to note that holding teachers accountable for the work of other teachers and the test scores of students they do not even teach is not truly analogous to having students do group work, and then be graded for that group work.
As @Tim_10_ber and I exchanged tweets, I came to recognize that I was arguing from my idealized position on how best to implement group work (group work must require collaboration—or it is simply students sitting close to each other doing individual work—and any grades assigned to group work must be articulated to reflect participation) and @Tim_10_ber was confronting a position with which I agree—that group work is often implemented and graded carelessly and thus unfairly to students.
It is from that recognition, then, that I want to make an argument about the only potential positive outcome related to the unjustifiable use of merit pay and VAM in teacher evaluation, pay, and retention: teachers need to learn how to teach better now that the shoe is on the other foot. Some ironic lessons teachers should learn from invalid teacher accountability include the following:
- Testing and grades often do far more educational harm than good; the time has come to consider de-testing and de-grading our teaching. Teacher feedback, student self-assessment, student-created rubrics, and re-imagined assessment situations (such as group assessments) and formats are all better alternatives to tests and grades, if our goal is equitable and effective learning opportunities for students.
- The central flaw with teacher accountability being linked to student test scores and the standards movement is that teachers have experienced declining autonomy in both their content and pedagogy as well as the high-stakes tests themselves. Accountability without autonomy is tyranny. This lesson translates into how often student learning is reduced to mere compliance. Students being held accountable also must have their autonomy honored; thus, students deserve far more choice in their learning than they have been traditionally allowed.
- As noted by @Tim_10_ber, teachers must be far more vigilant about designing, assigning, and assessing group work, with a keen eye on autonomy, engagement, and causation/correlation (what are fair associations between each student and the outcomes of the group).
The accountability era has nearly destroyed public education. Little about accountability based on standards and high-stakes testing can be embraced or endorsed.
But oppressive and even capricious mandates tend to be leveled at the least among us first; once those policies trickle up to those in power—in other words, when the shoe is on the other foot—living with inequity, unfair accountability, and unworkable conditions can open our eyes to our own flaws as teachers.
As we continue to fight for our professional autonomy and dignity, taking moral stands of non-cooperation, let’s be sure to bring that fight to our classrooms and honor the autonomy and dignity of all our students as a model for those in power who have yet to see the flaws of their ways through the distorting lens of privilege they wear.
In the words of Henry David Thoreau in “Civil Disobedience”:
If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too….
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go; perchance it will wear smooth — certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn [emphasis added].
Achievement Gap Misnomer for Equity Gap, pt. 2
[NOTE: I am reposting two pieces from Daily Kos (June 26, 2011, and April 29, 2012) to address the issue of achievement gaps, which I consider a misnomer for the equity gap.]
Bi-partisan Failure: Misreading Education “Gaps”
It took about twenty years, and then another secondary ten years, but the hysterical and misleading A Nation at Risk under the Reagan administration successfully kicked off three decades of public school accountability.
In the beginning, the hysteria revolved around several points that were factually inaccurate, but publicly effective: (1) U.S. public schools were failing, (2) U.S. students were weak, and possibly lazy, but their schools didn’t do much to challenge them, and (3) because of this cycle of lazy students in failing schools, U.S. international competitiveness was in dire straits.
These claims and the discourse grew from the White House and became recurrent and unquestioned talking points in the media, among the public, and by politicians. At first, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. public education built state-based standards and testing cycles that targeted primarily students (best typified by the exit exams designed to hold students accountable and insure the value of the high school diploma) and then gradually the schools themselves with the rise of school report cards.
The initial twenty-year cycle of state-based school accountability also spawned governors as education reformers—most notably the fraudulent Texas Miracle during George W. Bush’s tenure in Texas that helped bolster his run for the White House. Bush as education governor became education president and brought Rod Paige along as Secretary of Education to convert the Texas Miracle into a federal version of the state-based accountability movement, now popularly known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
In 2012, two important aspects of NCLB are worth considering: (1) NCLB has been repeatedly praised as a bi-partisan effort, but we rarely consider that bi-partisanship by itself doesn’t insure quality (and in education, we have ample evidence bi-partisanship is evidence of failure), and (2) NCLB has also been credited for raising national awareness of the achievement gap, but this second point is evidence of why the bi-partisanship is proof of political failure about education reform.
Misreading Education “Gaps”
The single greatest bi-partisan success of NCLB, the argument has been, is that the federal government began forcing all schools to address the achievement gaps among subgroups of students, impacting significantly how schools identified, tested, and displayed test data related to English language learners, African American students, and special needs students.
Here, though, the use of the term “achievement gap” has never been challenged or examined for what agenda it fulfills or how it positions our entire national view of students, teachers, and schools.
Like the “no excuses” mantra “poverty is not destiny,” the use of “achievement gap” redirects the focus on the tests themselves, the students as agents of the test data, and the teachers as agents of the students as test takers. Again, just as the “no excuses” mantras accomplish, “achievement gap” creates a myopic view of agency—the rugged individual—that decontextualizes children from their lives outside of schools and students, teachers, and schools from the society and communities in which they exist.
The dynamic created by NCLB’s focus on the achievement gap (including federal funding to support addressing that gap) revealed to the public that such gaps exist—although anyone working in education or examining test data throughout the twentieth century knows that standardized scores have always been and remain most strongly correlated to the exact characteristics used to identify subgroups of students (language proficiency, parental income, parental education level, race, gender). By situating the accountability movement within schools and focusing the process on test scores, the public and political conclusions drawn from the identified achievement gap included that, once again, schools were failing, but resulted in a new claim that teachers were the primary cause of that failure.
The achievement gap, then, serves the interests of the “no excuses” reform movement that is determined to discount the influence of poverty on the lives of children and their learning—not the interests of these children or families trapped in the growing plight of poverty in the U.S., and not universal public education as a mechanism of democracy and human empowerment.
Instead of referring to and addressing the achievement gap, I have recommended focusing on the “equity gap”—a terminology that contextualizes where “achievement gap” decontextualizes.
Acknowledging and addressing the equity gap recognizes that student test data are markers for a complex matrix of conditions—not simply the effort or aptitude of students, not the quality or effort of their teachers.
Equally viable as an alternative to “achievement gap” is Charlotte Carter-Wall’s examination of the attainment gap in a new study from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)—The Role of aspirations, attitudes and behaviour in closing the educational attainment gap.
This report, building on previous studies by JRF (see the references provided by Carter-Wall), provides a key finding that challenges arguments that children and the families living in poverty embody attitudes, expectations, and behaviors that cause the poor test scores of those students. This is powerful since it runs counter to the rugged individualism assumptions underlying “no excuses” reforms.
The JRF study helps clarify Berliner’s research showing that out-of-school factors overwhelm in-school factors in terms of student outcomes. As well, Barton and Coley (2007, 2009) have established similar evidence that couches the “achievement gap” in the broader social, community, and home characteristics that “no excuses” reformers and politicans tend to ignore or discount.
Linda Darling-Hammond has also challenged the validity of “no excuses” reform perpetuated by addressing the “achievement gap”:
There is another story we rarely hear: Our children who attend schools in low-poverty contexts are doing quite well. In fact, U.S. students in schools in which less than 10 percent of children live in poverty score first in the world in reading, out-performing even the famously excellent Finns….
These issues were vividly illustrated in last week’s Capitol Hill briefing on the impact of poverty on education and what we can do about it. Sponsored jointly by the Broader Bolder Approach to Education and the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, the panel got beyond the increasingly implausible “no excuses” rhetoric, using new evidence to examine the relationship between income and educational outcomes — as well as about strategies that have succeeded in reducing this relationship.
NCLB must not be praised as a bi-partisan watershed moment when the U.S. exposed and confronted the achievement gap. Instead we must acknowledge that the term “achievement gap” works to mask and even ignore the corrosive influence of poverty on the lives and learning of children.
Our political and public discourse must turn to confronting and changing the equity gap, the attainment gap, and the income gap, since these all recognize the full context of both living and learning in either poverty or affluence.
But what of the most recent claims of teacher quality even if we move to these new terms and understandings?
Teacher Quality and the Attainment Gap
A Nation at Risk created and fueled a series of inaccurate claims about students and schools in the U.S., but one of the most powerful and misleading recent additions to those claims has been the assault on the “bad” teacher. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and Michelle Rhee—among many others—have stated and repeated that teachers are the most important factor in the learning of children. Again similar to responses to the achievement gap, claims about teachers have been primarily allowed without full or critical challenges in the media or the public. Briefly, then, consider these inaccurate and conflicting claims currently being posed about teacher quality as it impacts student learning:
• “No excuses” reformers make two conflicting claims: Teachers are the most important element in student learning, but bad teachers are the sole reason our schools have historically and currently failed students. These bizarre claims are compounded by another misunderstanding common in the public—that teachers can be to blame for school failure. Few political or public discussions of the role of teachers in school quality acknowledge that teachers have never and do not now run schools.
• “No excuses” reformers also call for the need to recruit the best and brightest into education while simultaneously dismantling academic freedom and due process for teachers as well as endorsing Common Core State Standards to prescribe what teachers will teacher, how they will teach that content, and that those teachers will be evaluated and fired based on tests and standards not designed or endorsed by those teachers. [Note that “no excuses” reformers depend on the achievement gap discourse decontextualizing test data from social causes in order to shift the burden of learning to the teachers.]
Reframing the achievement gap as the equity or attainment gap will be of little value unless we also reframe the discussion of teacher quality by placing that debate within the equity/attainment gap discussion. That shift must include the following:
• Teacher quality matters, but it (and school characteristics) correlates with only about 33% to as little as 14% of student outcomes. As Jim Horn explains:
So what can we do? We can continue to improve our teaching in every way we can, even as we must begin to alter the ravaging effects of poverty and to advocate for policies that help to limit the effects the poverty. Health care, nutrition, housing, transportation, jobs, and integrated and diverse schools that can take take advantage of the power of shared social capital.
• The “no excuses” reformers also make repeatedly another conflicting set of claims: schools are historical and current failures, but they are the mechanism by which we can change society (and that of course must be done by firing the “bad” teachers and hiring the best and brightest into what is increasing a service industry). Thus, the teacher quality debate must be framed in how it often perpetuates inequity of attainment for children since children of color, English language learners, and special needs students tend to be assigned disproportionately to new/inexperienced teachers as well as un-/under-qualified teachers—a dynamic increased by the rise of commitments to Teach for America.
If the achievement gap is a metric exposing problems the U.S. must confront, and it is, and if teacher quality matters, and it does, and if our schools are a mechanism for reforming society’s persistent scar of inequity, and they could be, the ways in which we talk about “gaps” must first be reformed so that we come to understand that living and learning in poverty is a reality of inequity for far too many children in the U.S., 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 52 weeks of each year.
Recommended Further Reading
Diane Ravitch on Texas Miracle: The Texas Miracle Revisited and 20 years later, debunking the ‘Texas Miracle’
A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City, a report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education
Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools, a report from Brookings
References
Barton, P. E., & Coley, R. J. (2007, September). The family: America’s smallest school. Educational Testing Service. Policy Information Center. Princeton, NJ. Retrieved 27 December 2007, from http://www.ets.org/…

Barton, P. E., & Coley, R. J. (2009). Parsing the achievement gap II. Educational Testing Service. Policy Information Center. Princeton, NJ. Retrieved 8 May 2009, fromhttp://www.ets.org/…
Berliner, David C. (2009). Poverty and potential: Out-of-school factors and school success. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved 25 August 2009 from http://epicpolicy.org/…
Hirsch, D. (2007, September). Experiences of poverty and educational disadvantage. Joseph Rowntree Foundation. York, North Yorkshire, UK. Retrieved 27 December 2007 fromhttp://www.jrf.org.uk/…
Klein, S. P., Hamilton, L. S., McCaffrey, D. F., & Stecher, B. M. (2000) What do test scores in Texas tell us? Issue Paper, Rand Education. Santa Monica CA: Rand Corporation. Retrieved 20 August 2009 from http://www.rand.org/…
Peske, H. G., & Haycock, K. (2006, June). Teaching inequality: How poor and minority students are shortchanged on teacher quality. Washington DC: The Education Trust, Inc. Retrieved September 7, 2009, from http://www.edtrust.org/…
Achievement Gap Misnomer for Equity Gap, pt. 1
[NOTE: I am reposting two pieces from Daily Kos (June 26, 2011, and April 29, 2012) to address the issue of achievement gaps, which I consider a misnomer for the equity gap.]
Why the Achievement Gap Matters and Will Remain
EdWeek features a story that is a typical crisis report on education in the U.S. that has been repeated for decades, although the current crisis has expanded beyond African American students to include Hispanic students: “Study Finds Gaps Remain Large for Hispanic Students”:
While growing numbers of Hispanic students have changed the face of American education over the past two decades, the gap between them and their white classmates in math and reading remains as wide as it was in the 1990s, according to a new federal study.
The hand wringing over the White/Hispanic achievement gap, however, exposes more about the failure of political, media, and public discourse as well as current and historic patterns of education reform than about our education system.
With a little care, we can unravel the inherent flaws in both our assumptions about the achievement gap and the misguided approaches to addressing it in our schools.
First, and this is the most important aspect of the topic, the achievement gap is primarily a reflection of the equity gap that exists in the lives of children, and only secondarily a reflection of school quality and practices.
This is central to any effective commitments to addressing inequity for children, but this fact exposes why the EdWeek headline is unlikely ever to be any different as long as we persist in addressing only in-school dynamics and focus on the narrowest forms of student outcomes, test scores.
While politicians and the media misrepresent the achievement gap in order to demonize schools and teachers, we have ample evidence that addressing the whole life of the child is the only avenue to closing an achievement gap. Barton and Coley have crafted a plan to address reform targeting schools, children’s homes, and the complex mix of any child’s community and wider society.
But the political, corporate, and media elite—who are using the “achievement gap” refrain to mask their true commitments to maintaining the current status quo of privilege and inequity—reject all evidence-based calls for addressing social forces as using poverty for an excuse. Yet, the persistent result that in-school-only reform has achieved over the past half century is to ensure, as the newest report shows (just as all studies have shown), that the gap remains.
And this first point leads to a key failure in logic that is the second point: As Walt Gardner has succinctly explained: “Don’t forget that advantaged children are not standing still in the interim. They continue to benefit from travel and other enriching learning experiences. As a result, the gap will persist.”
This second point is a simple failure in logic. If we start with a solid premise (the lives of children outside of school contribute about 60–80+% of measurable student outcomes), and then implement inequitable in-school policies (testing, labeling, and stratifying students in order to ask less of those labeled most in need), we should expect only one outcome—a persistent achievement gap.
Historically and currently, we pretend that test scores fairly represent learning, we pretend that schools alone determine student outcomes, we implement inequitable school policies that we label as reform addressing the gap, we pretend that lives of inequity and lives of privilege somehow pause while we implement these policies, and then we express disbelief that the achievement gap persists.
And this is the cruel irony of political and bureaucratic approaches to the achievement gap—an irony that is a damning rebuttal to the intent of the rhetoric each time a political or corporate leader speaks to that gap.
A few key shifts in both how we discuss the achievement gap and address that gap would show a genuine concern for closing that gap:
• We must replace the phrase “achievement gap” with “equity gap”—clearly expressing that many aspects of children’s lives reflect the persistent facts of privilege and inequity in our culture. Since children have little autonomy and no political power, children remain the most stark mirrors of who we are as people and a culture.
• We must address inequity in the lives of children and their families—and confront our cultural habit of masking those inequities behind our myths claiming freedom and equality for all. If we indeed embrace the ideal of human agency and equity, then we must also be willing to admit that this ideal has yet to be achieved. We have historically embraced the myth to the exclusion of confronting we have work left to be done.
• We must focus all school reform on ending traditional and bureaucratic approaches to education that perpetuate the inequity and privilege students bring to school from their lives: standardized testing that is highly correlated with students’ home characteristics, stratified courses and gate-keeping policies for those courses, inequitable teacher assignments and class sizes (privileged students sit in classrooms with the most experienced and highly qualified teachers as well as the smallest student/teacher ratios), and a community-based school resources model that allows each school to reflect the coincidence of every child’s birth to determine her/his access to education.
The political and corporate elite benefit from a constant state of education crisis because that perception allows them to point at the schools and distract us from their own failure to address the conditions of inequity that insure their privilege.
People living in poverty and trapped in a cycle of social inequity—specifically children—are not the agents of that inequity. The powerful determine the conditions of our society, and our schools reflect and maintain those conditions.
A persistent achievement gap is an accurate indictment of our schools as mechanisms of perpetuating inequity and privilege, but it is a greater indictment of the power of the cultural elite to maintain their privilege while claiming to seek equity.
REVIEW: “Reign of Error,” Ravitch 3.0
When faced with the many competing narratives of the religions of the world, comparative myth/religion scholar Joseph Campbell explained to Bill Moyers that Campbell did not reject religion, as some scholars have, but instead reached this conclusion:
Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
Following the unveiling of Ravitch 2.0 in The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, Diane Ravitch now offers Ravitch 3.0 with her newly released Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
Since Ravitch is a respected historian of education, a brief history seems appropriate for context.
Ravitch 1.0 established herself as a leading scholar of the history of education. She also wrote best-selling and influential books on education beginning in the mid-1970s. During the 1970s and into the early 2000s, Ravitch was associated with conservative politics (notably because of her public service from 1991 to 1993 as Assistant Secretary of Education and Counselor to Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush) and traditional educational philosophy. Ravitch 1.0 was a strong advocate for standards, high-stakes testing, accountability, and school choice.
With the publication of Death and Life, however, Ravitch 2.0 unveiled a stunning and powerful reversal of positions for Ravitch, who detailed in this popular book how she had come to see that the mounting evidence on the accountability era revealed that standards, high-stakes testing, and market forces were doing more harm to public education than good. In the following year, Ravitch became a highly visible and controversial public face on a growing movement to resist the accountability era and champion the possibility of achieving the promises of universal public education in the U.S.
An additional significant commitment from Ravitch, along with her relentless speaking engagements, was that she began to blog at her own site, creating a public intellectual persona that gave her more latitude than her traditional commitment to scholarship allowed. Ravitch’s blog now stands as a vivid and living documentation of how Ravitch has informed the education reform debate and how Ravitch herself has been informed by the experiences and expertise of an education community that has been long ignored by political leaders, the media, and the public.
Ravitch 2.0, however, remained tempered, often withholding stances on key issues in education, such as the debate over Common Core State Standards, that frustrated some of her colleagues teaching in the classroom, blogging about education, and conducting research on education and education reform.
Now, with Reign, we have Ravitch 3.0, displayed in a comprehensive work that in many ways echoes not only her own blog, but the growing arguments among educators and scholars that much of the reform agenda lacks evidence and that alternative commitments to education reform need to address poverty, equity, and opportunity.
In her Introduction, Ravitch explains her motivation for this book:
[David Denby] said to me, “Your critics say you are long on criticism but short on answers.”
I said, “You have heard me lecture, and you know that is not true.”
He suggested that I write a book to respond to the critics.
So I did, and this is that book. (pp. xi-xii)
Like Campbell, Ravitch confronts competing narratives about the state of education in the U.S. and the concurrent calls for reform. I have labeled these competing agendas as “No Excuses” Reform (NER), the dominant narrative driving policies at the federal and state levels, and Social Context Reform (SCR), a broad coalition of educations, academics, and scholars among whom I’d place Ravitch.
Also in her introduction, Ravitch begins by stating her purpose for the book as addressing four questions:
First, is American education in crisis?
Second, is American education failing and declining?
Third, what is the evidence for the reforms now being promoted by the federal government and adopted in many states?
Fourth, what should we do to improve our schools and the lives of children? (p. xi)
The first twenty chapters of Reign continues a tradition of other important, but too often ignored by politicians and the media, works confronting the false narratives perpetuated about U.S. public education—The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America’s Public Schools by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, from the mid-1990s, and Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in the U.S. by Gerald Bracey, which followed Berliner and Biddle about a decade later.
Ravitch carefully and meticulously discredits claims that U.S. public education is in decline and details that crisis discourse misleads the public about what problems schools do face (messages echoing the work of Berliner, Biddle, and Bracey). Further, while offering a welcomed refrain that poverty and inequity drive most educational struggles, Ravitch details that the research base on most accountability era reform commitments (since the early 1980s) fails to justify those policies—for example, merit pay and linking teacher evaluations to test scores, charter schools, dismantling tenure, Teach for America, online education, parent trigger laws, vouchers and other choice mechanisms, and school closings.
In these opening and foundational chapters, Ravitch 3.0 will not allow a discussion of education and education reform to ignore the corrosive influence of poverty and inequity of opportunity. Ravitch also maintains a compelling and accessible mix of painting a clear and detailed picture of the history of education, the people driving the new reform era, and the research base that now reveals the accountability era is failing.
Readers cannot miss that poverty matters, and should never be allowed to determine children’s destinies (as it does now), and that the driving principle behind a commitment to public education is democracy, and not simply bending to the needs of the market.
Before moving to her alternative reform plan, Ravitch makes a direct statement about school choice advocates that serves well to represent what distinguishes the two competing narratives about education reform:
Conservatives with a fervent belief in free-market solutions cling tenaciously to vouchers. They believe in choice as a matter of principle. The results of vouchers don’t matter to them. (p. 212)
And therein lies the problem between NER and SCR. As Campbell explained above, NER is “stuck” in an ideological commitment that the evidence refutes. Ravitch, however, has maintained her ideological commitment to public education but honored her scholar’s ability to place evidence over beliefs.
From Chapter 20 on, Ravitch provides a powerful opportunity for educators to move beyond reacting to the accountability movement and to begin calling for alternatives to a failed three decades of new standards and the relentless misuse of high-stakes testing. In the last third of the book, Ravitch offers the following:
- Rejecting the rise of school closures as effective policy.
- Calling for prenatal care as a foundation for education.
- Emphasizing the need for early childhood education for all children, but especially children trapped in poverty.
- Shifting the focus on “basics” education to a commitment to a broad and rich curriculum for all children:
We cannot provide equal educational opportunities if some children get access to a full and balanced curriculum while others get a heavy dose of basic skills….The fact of inequality is undeniable, self-evident, and unjustifiable. This inequality of opportunity may damage the hearts and minds of the children who are shortchanged in ways that may never be undone….The essential purpose of the public schools…is to teach young people the rights and responsibilities of citizens. (p. 237)
- Endorsing the importance of low class sizes.
- Rejecting the misguided corporate charter movement but endorsing the original purposes of charter schools envisioned by Albert Shanker as collaborative and experimental and not competition for public schools.
- Stressing the need for wraparound services to support in-school reform—medical care, summer programs, after-school enrichment, parent education.
- Eliminating high-stakes testing and embracing authentic assessment that guides instruction: “Accountability should be turned into responsibility” (p. 273).
- Rejecting demonizing teachers and the teaching profession and embracing instead teacher autonomy and professionalism.
- Protecting democratic control of public schools.
- Addressing directly racial segregation and poverty: “We should set national goals to reduce segregation and poverty” (p. 298).
- Honoring the “public” in education and rejecting the privatization of schools: “We must pause and reflect on the wisdom of sundering the ties between communities and schools” (p. 312).
Toward the end of her plan for alternative policies to reform education, while discussing the problem with privatizing schools, Ravitch sounds what I think is the most dire point confronting the U.S. and our commitment to democracy:
The issue for the future is whether a small number of very wealthy entrepreneurs, corporations, and individuals will be able to purchase educational policy in this nation, either by funding candidates for local and state school boards, for state legislatures, for governor, and for Congress or by using foundation “gifts” to advance privatization of public education. (p. 310)
And the problem is not “whether” this can occur, but that it is happening now.
Legislation across the U.S. is driven by Bill Gates and his billions as well as the celebrity of Michelle Rhee, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, and Jeb Bush while the careful messages crafted by Ravitch in Reign have been readily available through the Internet over the last several years.
The publication of Reign represents a watershed moment. Will money driving ideology continue to ruin our public education system, or will evidence win out?
Ravitch’s voice and scholarship were a needed boost to the field of education. Ravitch speaks with us now.
But until political leadership and the media have similar conversions to Ravitch’s—until evidence trumps money—we are likely to watch the self-fulfilling end to public education happen right before our eyes.
Addendum
Just to offer some balance and context.
Since Ravitch’s concerns about Common Core came fairly recently, Reign feels a bit incomplete on that topic. Ravitch is clear about her view that the broader accountability movement has done a great deal of harm, and CC appears clearly more of that bad policy, but many of us who strongly oppose CC would likely have preferred more here on that topic.
I also have real problems with Paul Tough and David Kirp (see HERE and HERE), both of whom I feel do work that helps perpetuate “miracle” school narratives and “no excuses” ideologies that I completely reject. Ravitch is far more gracious with Tough and Kirp than I can embrace.
Tone, pt. 3: Mirror, Mirror
[NOTE: The topic of the appropriate tone for making and debating points in education reform will not die; thus, I am reposting two pieces on tone, both originally posted at Daily Kos in 2012 (See pt. 1 HERE, and pt. 2 HERE); pt. 3 is original and intended as a prelude to the release of Diane Ravitch’s Reign of Error, which is drawing some criticism for her tone (see my review HERE). Let me be clear that it is absolutely true that tone matters, but I also have learned that the charge of inappropriate tone tends to come from those in power to put the powerless in their “place” and from those who have no substantive point to make. In the end, I call for addressing the credibility and validity of the claims being made first and then, if relevant, we can discuss tone.]
During my 18-year career teaching high school English in rural South Carolina, a foundational unit of study included a nine-week focus on non-fiction, highlighting argumentation. In that unit, we examined carefully the lineage of making arguments that depended on ethical authority—spanning from Henry David Thoreau to Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.
An important point, I believed, for young people was how these powerful and influential writers committed themselves to embodying the principles they called for in everyone. In other words, to have ethical authority, all of us must walk the talk. Otherwise, our claims are discredited by our hypocrisy.
Especially in my 30-years as a teacher of young people—many of which were also spent coaching—and in my challenging life as a father for 24 years now, I have found that young people are greatly impressed by adults who practice what they preach, but are quick to discount those of us who venture into hypocrisy.
And thus, I feel compelled to offer all the education reformers who find themselves concerned about the tone of educators, scholars, and academics who are raising a growing voice against education reform that does not hold up to the weight of evidence and increasingly offering alternatives to the failed accountability era built on standards and high-stakes testing, charter school expansion, Teach for America, VAM, merit pay, and related free-market policies a mirror to their own hypocrisy.
If you are an education reformer speaking from a position of privilege or power (Secretary of Education or USDOE official, governor, superintendent of education, billionaire, EdWeek blogger, think tank member, self-appointed leader of a reform organization, etc.) and you have made or intend to make a claim of inappropriate tone aimed at a K-12 teacher, an education researcher, or an education scholar, I must note that any of the following immediately discredits you as having ethical authority, and thus, the mirror:
- If you use “no excuses” discourse, stop it. “No excuses” language implies those of us who teach are making excuses. We aren’t. It is an ugly, ugly implication, and it fails the tone argument.
- If you wave “miracle” schools up as examples of what we all should be doing, stop it. “Miracle” schools don’t exist, and if they did, see above. To suggest some people are simply working harder but the rest of us can’t cut it, again, is an ugly, ugly claim. It too fails the tone argument.
- If you label those of us who support public education as foundational to the U.S. democracy as part of the “government school lobby,” you are being purposefully dismissive and triggering intentionally the anti-government sentiment among the libertarian streak in the U.S. This is misleading, and thus, fails the tone argument for its snark.
- If you accuse any in education of “defending the status quo,” especially after acknowledging the historical and current struggles of high-poverty, high-minority schools, you are making a vicious and malicious claim about people that is untrue. The great irony of such a claim is that it is not only an ugly charge but a foolish argument made by accountability advocates who are calling for a continuation of the ineffective accountability status quo.
- If you accuse any educator of believing that poor children, children of color, or English language learners cannot learn, you have scraped the bottom of the ugly claim barrel. The rare people who genuinely believe such bigotry do exist, but they often have stated such in ways that we can confront and expose. But the vast majority of educators in no way believe such and to imply it is the worst sort of slander.
- If you say teachers don’t want to be held accountable because we speak out against misguided accountability, once, again, stop it. This is more of the laziness and gravy-train narrative that has no place in conversations about professional educators. It is a damned lie.
- If you say experience and certification do not matter—either directly or by supporting TFA—you are discounting an entire profession and central principles of all professions. Experience and qualifications matter. Period. Apply this ridiculous claim to the medical profession and you’ll see the folly. Or airline pilots.
- If you have no experience or background as a K-12 teacher, hold your tongue until you have listened carefully to those who have taught and those who do teach. Your ill-founded arrogance is offensive.
Those who hold positions of privilege are often quick to question the tone of those they deem beneath them. That in itself calls into question the issue of tone. But in the education reform debate, it is also becoming more and more common to promote a false image of MLK as a passive voice in order to keep subordinates in our place.
That, too, is a lie.
King, especially, carried the torch lit by Gandhi that rejected framing either man as a passive leader. They called for non-violent non-cooperation—nothing passive about it.
To call a political appointee someone without qualifications or experience is not a personal attack; it is a fact. And it is something Gandhi and King did.
So let’s stop that game as well.
I end here, then, with a solemn pledge.
If any person in the education reform movement who is concerned about tone will take the first step to reject the mirror items above and to commit to never stooping to them again, I too will join you and likewise honor a similar list of concerns.
Since the reformers have all the power, however, I must ask them to go first—that is, if tone really is the issue (and I suspect it is not).
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 