My father sent me a link to a recent Newsweek article by Michelle Rhee, and I couldn't help but respond to some of her points.
Rhee accepts nominal responsibility for things she says she didn't do well, but still seems focused on the notion that poor educational outcomes are entirely the fault of bad teachers. How can she be so clueless to the obvious - that exemplary teachers in some settings would struggle greatly in others? That poverty and apathy and uncertainty at home will affect performance at school?
She states: "Spending on schools has more than doubled in the last three decades, but the increased resources haven’t produced better results." She doesn't take into consideration the tremendous financial burdens absorbed by school districts that are required to fully fund educational opportunities for ELL, SpEd, and students who fall under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Don't get me wrong - we should provide funding - but it is important to be able to account for why we have doubled our spending, and I believe the dramatically increased spending on special needs students is part of the equation. Read The Death of Common Sense by Phillip Howard. He highlights many ways in which unfunded mandates of SpED and ADA laws have had devastating financial impacts on school districts across the country.
Rhee doesn't explain the source of her statement, and we all know the quote about "lies, damn lies, and statistics." If we are truly spending twice as much on schools now compared to three decades ago, then we are getting one heck of a bargain educating significantly more than twice as many students today. I have seen so many statistics bandied about to support the overspending vs. underfunding arguments that it is hard to know where to start. But what we see on the front lines are ever shrinking budgets for classroom supplies, money paid out-of-pocket by teachers, class sizes increasing, struggles to find enough desks and chairs, teachers spending time cleaning their own classrooms because of insufficient custodial hours, teachers accepting reductions of salaries and/or benefits, the list could go on and on.
Rhee states: "The U.S. is currently 21st, 23rd, and 25th among 30 developed nations in science, reading, and math, respectively." I was just watching a news story about the latest international "school report" data, and all of the countries that came out on top (mostly Asian countries and Finland) are very homogeneous and do not have a lot of transient or immigrant populations. In some of the Asian countries there is no commitment to compulsory education, so the students who are tested are the ones who stay in schools. (U.S. high school data has always lagged behind in international comparison studies, but our elementary scores have been competitive. I believe that this may be due in part to the fact that we attempt to keep all kids in school through high school and do not track them the way schools in Europe do.)
Rhee uses these numbers to support her contention that education (specifically teacher quality) has been declining for decades. Yet in similar international comparisons of 30 years ago, the U.S. was never ranked near the top (in fact, the rankings were similar to what they are today).
She goes on: "The children in our schools today will be the first generation of Americans who will be less educated than the previous generation." I'd like to know where she gets her data. Until compulsory education laws, many students dropped out and never made it to high school. My students are graduating with more math and science education than I had in high school. NAEP (our "national report card") data show that black kids today or performing better than white kids were 30 years ago. There is still an achievement gap because white students are also performing better. But those data don't fit the Rhee narrative of incompetent teachers and failing schools.
Rhee states: "Go to any public-school-board meeting in the country and you’ll rarely hear the words 'children,' 'students,' or 'kids' uttered. Instead, the focus remains on what jobs, contracts, and departments are getting which cuts, additions, or changes." What sweeping generalizations and, I believe, wholly incorrect! Promoting the notion that teachers and school boards are focused on protecting teacher's jobs without any focus on students is just appalling. I can imagine such a statement being used to describe contract negotiations between districts and unions, but our union has been fighting for the freedom of teachers to use our professional judgment to make appropriate instructional decisions for our students. I have heard stories about principals who are trying to force all teachers to work from a script and to be teaching exactly the same thing as their colleagues on the same day. That's micromanagement on steroids and totally counter to all that we know about good instructional practice.
I am not cutting myself or my colleagues any slack. We should be held accountable. But we need a data driven, scientific approach to school reform that is lacking in much of the rhetoric, including Rhee's article. (Read The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diana Ravitch. She once supported NCLB but has changed her mind based on DATA. What a concept!!) We need to recognize that current societal values (such as lack of student motivation, students' sense of entitlement, lack of respect for authority) and innovations (such as the double-edged sword of technology and multitasking) have led many good and dedicated teachers to feel a sense of battle-weariness and despair about what they are able to accomplish.
In the countries that are doing well in the international data comparisons, teachers are given more paid time for professional growth and collaboration, and students are in school for longer hours and more days.* This costs money which no one will be willing to spend (and which we do not have). It is much easier for reformers to strike fear into the hearts of teachers so they will work longer and longer days and get professional development on their own time and their own dime. Do they even care about the effect this has on the home lives of teachers, especially those with school-age children? Changing the fabric of society itself, so that basic needs are met and common values are shared widely, seems like an impossible task but may ultimately be what we need for true school reform to be realized.
Well, that's my 2 cents worth. Not that it'll do much good.
Post Script: I recently came across an article from the Washington Post, which extends the discussion about international test scores and what we can learn from them. It is worth the read.
Post Script 2: FiringLine: The Grand Coalition Against Teachers by Joanne Barkan is a deeply thoughtful, well-researched and provocative article that addresses many issues in the education "reform" movement and is well worth the time to read. However, for this post I wish to focus on an excerpt that takes a closer look at the PISA data I referenced above:
"U.S. students in public schools with a poverty rate of less than 10 percent (measured by eligibility for free or reduced-price lunches) scored 551, second only to the 556 score of the city of Shanghai, which doesn’t release poverty data. The U.S. students outperformed students in all eight participating nations whose reported poverty rates fall below 10 percent. Finland, with a poverty rate of just 3.4 percent, came in second with a score of 536."
When Joel Klein makes public statements about the American education system being abysmal, then turns around and awards a no bid contract to an online education program owned by Rupert Murdoch, for whom he now works, one wonders if he truly cares about the education of students in poverty, or even of the students who are already doing well but may have radical changes in their education due to the current obsession with high stakes testing.
*Post Script 3: I have learned more about the Finnish system since writing this, and believe I was wrong about their students attending longer hours and longer days. More articles about education reform can be found on my supplemental page Education Reform.
