Last week we ended with Bush aide Diane Ravitch’s change of heart as to the effectiveness of NCLB. Her rationale is based on something that anyone who has been in a school for more than five minutes could have and did foresee. The system would be gamed. The quality of Education would be sacrificed at the altar of a panacea of a test and school choice. In some states standards have actually been lowered rather than raised in order that their students would have appeared to achieve proficient status. Test creation and the test industries as well as the charter school industry have been given a huge financial boon and in exchange they have made huge contributions to the political campaigns of one party in particular. In fact none of the six agreed upon goals that were associated with NCLB have been accomplished. In some instances it has worsened those goal areas.
Both the current education reform movement and McCarthyism had elements of truth to them and both were wrong headed and minded in their approach to a solution. Because of that we as taxpayers were asked to foot a bill for things that could not nor would not fix the root cause of the problem.
The problem is with our current approach in that it allows politicians to ignore and distract the public from the real problems associated with our Educational Systems. It is usually for political reasons that they choose not to deal with the real problems for fear of not being re-elected or turning off the faucet of campaign donations.
It is also based on several clearly misguided facts in that it completely ignores deliberately the many salient positive aspects of our Educational system which are clearly present despite the lamentations of those seeking Political Office. The oft misguided media focuses on the 30 to 60 second sensational sound bites because they often lack the time to sufficiently cover an issue.
We in the general public share the blame for this as well in that our short attention span does not allow for in depth reporting and writing by journalists today.
As part of this series we will look at two major areas: 1.) assessment and the resultant data and 2.)public funding and taxation in order to demonstrate how the NCLB movement, while noble in purpose, cannot and will not succeed until we are willing to look at all the facts and not merely through the prism of 30 to 60 second sound bites!
As Part of our examination of assessment and its data we intended to look at historical data related to state tests, SATs, ACTs and various international assessments in a manner not normally utilized. We will look at the numbers to address commonly held myths about what the numbers do or don’t really tell us.
An example of which would be to ask the average person on the street, “Comparatively did the class of 1989 outperform the class of 2010 on the SAT exams?” The standard perception driven by misguided media and politicians would certainly suggest that the class of ‘89 did better. You would be only partially correct because the average 1989 SAT verbal score was 504 and math was 502. In 2010 the verbal average was 516 and math in 492. We can document a major increase on the verbal side of the test despite a tremendous increase in non-English speaking students taking the test.
Also the number self-reported C and D students taking the test has risen over the years. So we have students taking the test today and that in my day and age would not have considered taking the test at all.
Does anyone not understand the impact of the substantial number of students coming to our schools from dysfunctional families, single parent households, the number kids coming to school from poverty level households, kids who come from violent households, low infant birth weight mothers, and so many other negative demographic factors. Factors that our political officials repeatedly choose to ignore and duck. They usually say they we are not responsible for these conditions.
Anyone who buys that argument needs to read Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of a Revolution, Winford King’s 1915 work on Income Inequality and its Potential Negative Impacts on a Democracy, Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 Gospel of Wealth in which he lays out the social responsibility of the wealthy and how it can impact our society (His approval of death taxes might surprise modern billionaires!) , or the Census Bureau’s data on the record levels of our national income gap.
Does anyone then not understand how these factors diminish the national averages and why it is so vital that we address real Education Reform? I would submit to you that rather than being an indictment of Public Education it should be considered a minor miracle that Educators have been able to accomplish what they have been able to do!!
It is political scape-goating. As H. L. Mencken would say, “There is a simple solution to every problem and it is usually wrong”. There are real problems which the present politically driven approach to reform ignores.
We will look at the international test data not just from one isolated perspective but from a more microscopic view of the results. When you do that you get a whole different picture than the doom and gloom our political leaders and the media headlines are asking us to believe.
We will examine the investment in Charter Schools as the next panacea which is not borne out with the facts. A Stanford University study (funded by the Walton Family Foundation a staunchly pro charter organization) of Charter Schools in 16 States concluded that only 17% of those Schools actually outperformed their public school counterparts. It also concluded that Public Charters typically outperform others. Let me say here that my purpose is not to speak ill of Charter Schools; quite the contrary. I welcome and support their existence because I happen to believe that competition is a healthy and positive influence. I do not believe, however, that the education sector should be relegated to the status of for-profit! I believe they fall into the well being and public good of our nation status. By failing to see them in that light we subject the public interest to profit and leaders of those sectors, when faced with the choice of the public good will all too often be tempted to choose profit over the collective good!
Next week a Historical in-depth look at the data on Assessment.
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