Posts Tagged ‘NCLB’

Some Friendly Advice for Young Teachers in a World Poisoned by Power-Mad Bureaucrats and Clueless Billionaires

July 29, 2012

After I transferred from a junior high school to an elementary school, my former colleague Dave* asked how I liked working with my new colleague Walter*. (Both Dave and Walter were veteran teachers with decades of experience.) I reported how impressed I was by Walter’s remarkable patience and equanimity in response to a roomful of unruly kids. Dave smiled and said, “He wasn’t always that way.”

Years ago I heard former United States Secretary of Education (and raging hypocrite) Bill Bennett on CSPAN saying that the the best way to ensure quality schools in this country is to “hire good principals and allow them to do their job.” Oddly, Bennett and several other self–identified conservatives support intrusive (and blatantly unconstitutional) laws like Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) which inject the blunt, debilitating power of the federal government into the quotidian workings of local public schools across the county.

Before NCLB, for example, wise principals would often place a few of the more emotionally needy students at a particular grade level in the classroom of a more capable veteran teacher like Walter. (This practice is particularly advisable when one or more of Walter’s grade–level colleagues are newbies.) Such sagacious principals would constantly praise teachers like Walter for taking on this extra burden, and they would also grant Walter a little extra leeway as far as end–of–the–year test scores were concerned.

Today, however, thanks to an ill-conceived reform movement forced down our throats by ignorant billionaires and power-mad federal bureaucrats, principals no longer have such discretionary latitude. And experienced teachers like Walter who hope to hang onto their jobs would say this to a principal who wants to overload their classrooms with “challenging” students: “I’d like to help you, but the Secretary of Education wants to publish my students’ test scores in the paper and then punish me if those numbers don’t go up every year from now until the end of my career.” This is just one of many unintended consequences which result when education policy is devised by people like Bill Gates and Arne Duncan who don’t know shit from shinola about teaching.

Legendary college basketball coach John Wooden toiled at his craft for several years before suddenly winning ten championships during his final twelve seasons. When somebody asked him what happened he said, “I finally learned how to relax.”

It took me a while to figure out how to relax in the classroom. Watching teachers like Walter helped me learn that getting upset and raising my voice in response to unruly students only increases the rancor. It is actually more effective for a teacher to stop talking in mid-sentence and wait for the students to lower their voices than it is for him to try to overpower an entire classroom with displays of stentorian prowess.

The best advice I can give to young teachers is to relax, take your time, and learn from your mistakes. And don’t get into power struggles with your students. Never go to work in the morning full of vengeance over something that occurred the previous day thinking, “I’m gonna get that kid.” (Let it go, and never forget who the grownup is.) Endeavor always to treat all your students with kindness and respect under all circumstances knowing full well that this is a superhuman ideal, impossible to live up to.

A little respect goes a long way. I learned a lot on the occasions when I substitute taught at a “camp” school—camp is a euphemism for prison. Once when a student remained standing as I was preparing to start a lesson, I said in a firm but friendly voice, “Sir, would you please sit down.” He melted into his seat and turned to the kid next to him and said in a tone of bemused disbelief, “He called me sir.”

And as much as possible, try not to be too grumpy. It’s not always easy, but do your best. (And for all of you out there who would like to have a positive impact on America and her future, here’s something you can do to reduce teacher grumpiness—invite a teacher to bed some time. The world will be a better place for your kind work.)

* Not their real names

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Education, Essay, Morsel | 1 Comment »

More Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

May 13, 2010

More Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted.

—Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (34)

The most toxic flaw in NCLB was its legislative command that all students in every school must be proficient in reading and mathematics by 2014. By that magical date, every single student must achieve proficiency, including students with special needs, students whose native language is not English, students who are homeless and lacking in any societal advantage, and student with every societal advantage but are not interested in their schoolwork

—Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (102)

After 9-11, too many of us were just too damn scared to even entertain the notion that our nation was being run by a couple of incompetent poltroons. We are still paying for this in treasure and in lives. Oddly, the same people who would call Barack Obama a socialist for mandating PRIVATE insurance had little problem with a complete federal takeover of the educational system, which has historically been a state and local issue. (The federal government is barely a seven percent stakeholder in education)

Under ordinary circumstances, 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 September 1, 2001, Congress wanted to demonstrate unity, and education legislation sailed through (94).

NCLB passed in the Senate 87-10 and 381-41 in the House despite the fact that “No one truly expects that all students will be proficient by the year 2014, although NCLBs most fervent supporters often claimed it was feasible” (103).

Today many critics of what they consider invasive federal involvement in the healthcare industry would sue the federal government in the name of the basically moribund (since the Civil War) Ninth and Tenth Amendments. But when George W. Bush was president, instead of standing up to a draconian law which demands the surreal goal of universal success, Republicans as well as Democrats overwhelmingly preferred to toe the line and “[m]ost states devised ways to pretend to meet the impossible goal”(16).

Ravitch does a masterful job of laying out how school administrators across the country were forced to engage in deceptive practices or risk losing their jobs in her chapter entitled, The Trouble with Accountability. She draws on the work of Daniel Koretz and Richard Rothstein and other sober-minded thinkers who are wise enough to eschew a harebrained law which delivered us unto a macabre world where students now “master test-taking methods, but not the subject itself” (159).

Sadly, the Magical Thinking which infects our nation continues to thrive in education. President Obama supports policies which have been proven ineffective and he has appointed a Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, whose record as superintendent of Chicago schools was dismal if not downright fraudulent:

In 2009, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago released a study demonstrating that the city’s claims of dramatic test score gains were exaggerated….The Study concluded, however, that “these huge increases reflect changes in the tests and testing procedures—not real student improvement” (158).

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Education, Essay, Morsel | 2 Comments »

Some Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

May 4, 2010

Bill Gates

Some Thoughts on The Death and Life of the Great American School System

Our society is just beginning to recover from a long spell of Magical Thinking. Instead of confronting our problems and dealing with them, Americans spent the better part of a decade hoping that great men on horses would ride into to town bearing sanctified sidearms which fire magic bullets—instead we got George W. Bush in a flightsuit. But after 9/11, most of us we’re too scared to acknowledge or even see The Emperor’s Clothes. We just pretended that there were new, bold serious solutions that would preternaturally eliminate serious issues. Decisive Federal Action would fix public education just as it would defeat Islamo-facism and unfetter the Titans of Finance. Those were some heady times.

Today, our institutions are just beginning to recover from the febrile dreams which have infected (and continue to threaten the very existence of) our body politic. Sadly, no one is yet bowing in obeisance to the heroes who were banished from the Punditocracy for the crime of premature wisdom (i.e., Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield and Robert Sheer). Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of the people who advocated these asinine and self-destructive policies over the last decade are still running this country and they’re not about to begin pointing fingers at one another.

That’s why Diane Ravitch should be praised for speaking up about her recent recovery from Hedda Payness Disease:

I too was captivated by these ideas. They promised to end bureaucracy, to ensure that poor children were not neglected, to empower poor parents, to enable poor children to escape failing schools, and to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. Testing would shine a spotlight on low-performing schools and choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for better schools. All of this seemed to make sense, but there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope(3-4).

I remember seeing a documentary years ago about how hospital administrators in the Soviet Union (who obviously knew nothing about how hospitals actually work) used to do surprise inspections in hospitals in which they would randomly swab the walls looking for evidence of bacteria. Consequently, the medical staff wasted a good deal of time scrubbing the walls with bleach. Funny thing about big bureaucracies, they tend to replicate such madness:

Measure, then punish or reward. No education experience needed to administer such a program. Anyone who loved data could do it. The strategy produced fear and obedience among educators; it often generated higher test scores. But it had nothing to do with education (16).

In our age of Magical Thinking, even really smart guys (because we all know that the billionaires are the best among us) like to dream of a simple world with simple solutions. For example, Bill Gates was blissfully “unaware of the disadvantages” of promoting smaller highs schools as a one-size-fits-all panacea for American education:

It was never obvious why the Gates Foundation decided that schools size was the one critical reform most needed to improve American education. Both state and national tests showed that large numbers of students were starting high schools without having mastered basic skills…the root cause of poor achievement lie not in the high schools, but in the earlier grades (205).

After pissing away a couple of billion bucks, the Foundation wised up, but it wasn’t about to admit any mistakes:

In late 2008 the Gates Foundation announced that it was changing course. The $2 billion investment in new small high schools had not been especially successful (although it was careful not to come right out and say it was unsuccessful) (211).

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Diane Ravitch, Education, Essay, Morsel | 3 Comments »

New Yorker Magazine Buries the Lede in Puff Piece on Education Secretary Duncan

January 31, 2010

Arne Duncan

New Yorker Buries the Lede in Puff Piece on Secretary Duncan

I’m glad that Carlo Rotella decided to do some actual reporting in his treacly ode to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the February 1st edition of the New Yorker Magazine. Unfortunately, it’s buried at the end of the article. After four puffy pages wherein we learn that Duncan is a marvelous human being who loves basketball, the author finally begins to do his job as a reporter, and the results aren’t very comforting. You see, there isn’t a whole lot of evidence that the programs Duncan is spending billions of taxpayer dollars on actually work. I’ll let the quotations speak for themselves:

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies (who describes herself as “basically in favor of Duncan’s policies”) gives this rousing endorsement of the upshot of Duncan‘s policies as head of the Chicago schools: “I don’t think there’s any real evidence that people are made worse off, and there’s limited evidence that that they’re making things better.”

Kenneth Saltman, professor of education at DePaul University, calls Duncan a “hatchet man for (Mayor) Daley” and a “militant privatizer who label(ed) schools in black communities as failures to justify opening new charters that could skim off the highest-achieving students, thereby widening the gap between winners and losers.”

Erik Hanishek of the Stanford Institution “is one of the most outspoken senior academics in the market forces camp. But even he describes the reforms that Duncan has pursued as ‘the best guesses for how to go forward’”

According to Rotella, Diane Ravitch of New York University believes that Duncan’s so-called “market forces party can offer nothing better than a vague idea that their reforms should work, rather than evidence that they actually do.” “You shouldn’t set the agenda if you’re not sure the agenda works,” argues Ravitch.

Steven Rivkin, an economist at Amherst, “worries that Duncan may be pushing too hard for policies which haven’t proven effective.”

by Richard W. Bray

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Posted in Education, Morsel | 3 Comments »