POLITICS MARCH 15, 2010
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In my new book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, I argue that the current movement to fix schools will not improve American education. In fact, it may very well harm it.
Today’s reformers--few of whom are educators--say that changes in incentives and sanctions and in the governance of schooling will lead to improved achievement. They believe that a stronger emphasis on testing and accountability and an expansion of privately managed charter schools will raise student performance. Because I had endorsed many of these ideas in the past, I had to admit upfront in the book that I was persuaded by accumulating evidence that these strategies are wrong, that I was wrong, and that American education is not likely to be improved by more testing, more accountability, and more choice. I have become fond of quoting John Maynard Keynes, who is said to have told a critic, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
As I assayed the evidence about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), I concluded that it has failed. The testing regime that NCLB installed in every public school has not improved American education. By mandating that scores in reading and math must constantly rise, the federal law has removed any incentive to teach the arts, science, history, literature, foreign languages, geography, civics, or any other non-tested subject.
NCLB requires that all students must be proficient in reading and math by 2014. When the legislation was signed in 2002, this goal was wildly unrealistic--and now, it is merely laughable. The target date is only four years away, but no state is remotely close to 100 percent proficiency. Indeed, in 2008, 35,000 of the nation’s schools bore the stigma of "failing" because they weren't making sufficient progress toward that utopian target.
What NCLB has done with its proficiency deadline is set a timetable for the demolition of American public education. In an effort to meet NCLB’s unattainable goal and avoid the "failing" label, most states have dumbed down their standardized tests or their definitions of proficiency. Many states claim that large majorities of their students are “proficient” in reading or math, but their claims are refuted by federal assessments (called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP) that are given to all students in fourth and eighth grades every other year. For example, Texas reported that 85 percent of its students in those grades were proficient readers based on year-end state testing, but, on the NAEP, only 29 percent were. Nationwide, NAEP scores have gone up in math since 2003, but the rate of improvement has been less than before the passage of NCLB. In eighth-grade reading, there was no improvement at all from 1998 to 2007.
Accountability pressures have also led to widespread gaming of the system. Every so often, a cheating scandal is uncovered, but such scandals are minor compared to the ways in which states have manipulated the scoring of tests to produce inflated results. New York state education officials, for instance, made it easier to rate students as “proficient” by lowering the number of points that a student needed to earn on the state tests. In 2006, a seventh grader needed to get 59.6 percent on the state math test to be rated proficient, but, by 2009, a student needed to earn only 44 percent. Although most people would consider this a failing grade, the lowering of the “cut point” produced the desired results: In 2006, 55.6 percent of seventh graders were rated proficient, but, by 2009, that proportion had soared to 87.3 percent.
I am not opposed to testing. Test scores should be used to diagnose problems or to provide information about student progress or a program's effectiveness. They should be used to help students improve their learning and to help teachers become better at their jobs.
Test scores are misused, however, when they become blunt instruments to punish teachers or schools. States' standardized tests are not the equivalent of yardsticks or barometers. They have margins of error. If Johnny takes a test on a Monday, he could take the same test a week later and get a higher or lower score depending on any number of things, including Johnny’s mood, his health, the weather, the testing conditions in the room, or just random variation. The tests also sometimes contain errors or ambiguities. These are weak reeds on which to hang the fate and future of students, teachers, and schools.
In my book, I attempt to assemble evidence to show that teacher quality cannot be judged solely by student test scores. The scores depend to a large degree on which students are in a teacher’s class, and a teacher may have a highly motivated group of students one year that gets wonderful scores, but an unmotivated group the next year that gets average or poor scores. What's more, although it has become fashionable recently to discount the influence of poverty on student achievement, decades of social science research have demonstrated that test scores are highly correlated with income and social status. Just as teachers can't control which students they have in class each year, they can't control where those students come from.
The Obama administration's current drive to tie teachers’ evaluations to students’ test scores will only intensify NCLB's pernicious “teach to the test” mentality. Teachers will have even less incentive to teach non-tested subjects than before. As cognitive scientist Dan Willingham of the University of Virginia wrote recently in The Boston Globe, “If you thought No Child Left Behind led to an overemphasis on testing, wait for the test-prep frenzy that follows linking salaries to test scores.”
If we are serious about improving our schools, we must abandon the punitive rhetoric that threatens to drive away many good teachers. Of course, there should be better teacher evaluations, and bad teachers should be removed if they fail to improve with extra support. But evaluations should be thoughtful and must involve human judgment, not just rely on test scores. We can’t fire our way to better education. And we won’t attract better teachers by demonizing and scapegoating them whenever students fail to get higher scores.
The research on charter schools, which the Obama administration also supports, gives little reason to hope that choice will provide the quantum improvement that is needed in American education. There are some 5,000 charter schools enrolling nearly 1.5 million students, or about 3 percent of U.S. public school students, and they have attracted the support of many politicians, philanthropists, and foundations. But charter schools vary widely in quality. Some are excellent, some are abysmal, and most are in-between. On average, they have not produced better results than regular public schools. Charter schools have been compared to regular public schools on the national assessments since 2003, and they have never outperformed regular public schools. Charters in Boston and New York City have gotten positive evaluations, but they typically have smaller proportions of the students who are hardest to educate--those with limited English and those with disabilities--than regular public schools.
High-performing charter chains such as KIPP and Achievement First rely on a steady infusion of young teachers who are willing to work 50 to 60-hour weeks (or more), and their turnover is often high. This model is inherently unsustainable because it discourages teacher professionalism and relies on a steady infusion of eager newcomers. Even friends of the movement admit that the high-performing charter chains will not be able to expand dramatically. Indeed, if the number of charters does expand quickly, many are likely to be mediocre.
There are two other concerns about the charter strategy. First, it is a form of privatization, in which public money and vulnerable students are handed over to private entrepreneurs who may or may not know what they are doing. To the extent that they skim off the most motivated students, public education will be weakened. In addition, the investment of so much public and private energy in the charter sector is ultimately a marginal and nonproductive way to improve American education. It might take five years or more to double the proportion of students in charters, which would bring their enrollment to 6 percent of the nation’s public school students. In the meantime, the system that educates the other 94 percent of students would suffer indifference and neglect.
Surely there is a role for charter schools, but they should not be established with the expectation that they will replace regular public schools. They should use their freedom from regulation to help the students with the highest needs and to share what they learn with other schools.
School improvement is hard work. It should involve students, teachers, parents, and the surrounding community. It will not occur if we continue to seek miracle programs, miracle schools, and miracle districts, which achieve dramatic results that no one else can replicate. The history of American education is already littered with the remnants of failed fads and movements.
We need better teachers, a solid curriculum that includes the full range of arts and sciences, and assessments that reflect the skills and knowledge that society values. Schools must impose standards of behavior, so that learning may proceed unhindered. We need to pay attention to the health and well-being of students, so that they arrive in school ready to learn.
We need to improve education in the United States. But history teaches that there are no shortcuts, no quick fixes, no easy answers.
Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. She is a historian of education.
RELATED:
By Ben Wildavsky: Why Diane Ravitch's populist rage against business-minded school reform doesn't make sense.
By Richard Rothstein: Ravitch’s recent ‘conversion’ is actually a return to her core values.
4 comments
Diane, I've been very heartened by the media buzz surrounding your public criticisms of late. I'm a relatively young teacher, recently laid off due to my K-12 Charter school's inability to maintain adequate student numbers. When I left I was teaching Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry and a couple of electives to largely low-SES, ELL students who generally refused to do their work and were entirely contented to hold D averages. Parent involvement was nil. No union to speak of, nor contracts, the staff was entirely at the mercy of an out-of-touch administration (literally, their offices were 2 hours away) with a very top-down attitude. Basically, they told us to jump and we asked how high. Even in the little time that we did have that was not taken up by largely useless, state mandated yet effectively punitive professional development seminars that offered little practical help in our day to day instruction. The message was clearly that we we're doing something wrong. But what were we being asked to do? Most of the kids were at least 2-3 grade levels behind in reading and language. Their test scores were terrible, but when I proctored them there was an absurd sense that the students saw them as little more than an awful lot of silly bubbles to fill in - not to mention another reminder of what failures they had become. The enterprise on a daily basis felt as though we were all playing our roles in some twisted play that we all knew was going to end well. And of course for many it did. I remember clearly a young lady of about 17, with an 18 month old son at home being cared for by grandma. yet all the girl wanted to do in class was giggle with her friends or sneak into the bathroom to play with her make-up kit. I started out teaching Kindergarten, and I knew full well what her boy would look like when he entered his first day of school. Hart & Risley documented quite well what kind of experiences children of her SES group would be receiving. Lareau explained why. My own daughter, who just turned five, is already reading well into a first grade level. Both her parents are well educated and have raised her in an environment rich in vocabulary, cognitive processing and higher-thinking skills. My poor little Kinders would come in, barely speaking English, and not knowing what letters or numbers were in either language. However I often joked that low-SES native speakers were likely to score lower on English language assessments than their non-native peers from higher SES-homes, simply due to language exposure at all. And so here we were, a dysfunctional charter school, the parents who did attend only doing so out of sheer ignorance. They likely thought they were getting something special because of the "charter" status. We had no lunch program, although most of the students would have easily qualified. There was no special ed day class - parents were simply sent to the "district" school. School policy had been to send low-performers there also, until attendance began to plummet and we took anyone we could get. The staff was bare-bones, the elementary teachers were all saddled with blends and the high school had 6 preps at a minimum. No PE, gym, or music teacher. No librarian. No library. At the end of the year we all sat around waiting to see who would "disappear". They liked to wait until the second to last week of school, usually on a Friday, to fire staff. From what we could gather this seemed to be quite arbitrary. Good teachers were let go. Bad ones remained (I'm not sure what that says about me - I certainly kept my head down). Replacements didn't seem much better. So what is all this? It's an anecdote. But I think it is also indicative of structural problems that aren't being addressed among the new education reformers. According to the NY Times, the main points of the new Obama plans to overhaul NCLB are thus: * replace NCLB's pass/fail school grading system, instead measuring individual students, attendance, graduation rates and something called "school climate" * more vigorous interventions in failing schools * more incentives for performance Yet simply taking that model and placing it on the school I described would have had little impact. We knew we were a failing school. We had very high standards (although that means something entirely different when teaching Biology to kids who can barely read). We certainly were accountable. In fact, I could make the case that not only is this sort of thinking not offering real reform, it is a continuation, albeit slightly better, of policies that actually distract from a lot of good that teachers can simply do on their own without the "accountability", standardized testing, and school interventions. But this seems of minor importance, and likely zero-sum. But I go back to the teen mother, whose child is mere years from repeating the cycle. I go back to those young kids entering school for the first time and being so excited by it all. The stories they were hearing! The academic language and cool new discoveries to be made about the world. Yet from day one they are so far behind that catching them up, in classrooms filled to capacity and one lone teacher doing his or her best to juggle them all, every single soul in the balance, takes a draconian level of mindless repetition and almost militaristic strictness. Sumerhill this is not. I throw that out there not as an ode to that absurd and utopian philosophy, but as a reference point for how far we as a society have forced the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction because that is literally what it takes to take such underprivileged, underdeveloped kids and cram them into a system that is just fundamentally unequipped to deal with the task of correcting for, and then expanding upon what they haven't received from every other area of their social environment in their short lives. These are the students that end up on drugs, in prison, with teen babies, broken homes, or at best working in some low-skill menial job, without health care, destined to live out their lives in a dirty apartment complex somewhere unremarkeable. This is the underclass. This is what America stands against. This is not freedom. This is not equal opportunity. This is social decay and it is wrong. We as citizens have to decide whether or not we really want to leave no child behind. Because that is what we are currently doing. And that is what we are going to continue to do in the foreseeable future as long as we continue to make excuses by blaming teachers for not being up to the task of correcting what we as a society have created. What do we expect is going to happen when the poorest, most dysfunctional and disadvantaged among us are forced via the housing market into segregated, ghetto communities. They all send their children to the local school, which is then by default comprised entirely of children from the most disadvantaged, dysfunctional members of society. These aren't bad people. Some of the Kindergarten mothers I met were some of the most warm and loving people I've ever known. But they were maids, gardeners, cashiers, single parents, or uncles and aunts who babysat because mom or dad was high. I had a 1st grader miss the first two months of school because a gang-banging uncle accidentally shot him in the stomach. I had multiple students whose fathers were locked away. They were doing the best they knew how to do. Chances are, like the 17 year old girl in my class, they didn't have such a good start themselves. Yet this population is expected to perform at the same level as my daughter, along with the other students in her lily-white neigborhood with higher income, college educated parents who read to them every night and took them camping and to tide pools. And their teachers are expected to produce the same results. Take a walk through a high school common area in a middle class neighborhood and then a poor neighborhood and compare the behavior and attitude towards learning of the respective populations of students. One group is likely bored or non-plussed, but mildly chatty and for the most part aware of what kind of behavior society will reward them for. The other is a battleground of anxiety and fear, or outright depression. School for these students has meant failure and embarrassment. For many what has saved them is finding ways to be proud despite their inability to perform how society expects them to. They are proud to be fighters. They are proud to disrespect authority. Despite the shame that surrounds them, they manage to hold their head high, dress fashionably, and just make it one more day on their feet instead of their knees. I became a teacher because I knew about social inequality. I knew how unfair it was that just because you were born on the wrong side of town you were statistically destined to be scrubbing some wealthier man's dishes, or taking out his trash, or the boss expecting you to smile and pretend that you don't scrape by month to month with no seeming way out. I knew it would be hard. But I wanted to be that cool teacher that made school interesting and fun. I wanted to be the one that understood, or at least tried to, how hard life can be, and how oppressive the system can feel. And I found those kids. I was that teacher. They used to come in to eat lunch in my classroom and feed bees they caught outside to the pet praying mantis. They wanted ask me questions about the world. But I failed them. Everyday, every class, I was lucky to bring them just a bit further than the allotted content. But even that was a challenge, given that so many of them struggled so deeply with the material - and had no support home. And even then, their trajectory was lucky to get them to graduation, much less college. So many of their friends had dropped out. School was just a seat to fill, a place to be that would get them picked up by the police. I had to remind myself everyday that in the end, it wasn't really me. I wasn't Atlas, holding each of their lives in the balance. If only. I was just one man in a savage life that pulled at their young flesh, whispering in their ears that this wasn't the life for them. Not only was it just a stupid game, but a game that was stacked against them, that they weren't going to win. All I could do was my part, and if I was lucky maybe convince just a few more to hang in their just a bit longer, that they too could leave their neighborhood and attend college, to be the one that someone else washes dishes for, that washes their car, that they could look further than a weekend into the future. So what do these kids need? There are a few schools that are able to do amazing work, but they aren't scalable. They either rely on a large amount of outside funds or extraordinary teacher sacrifice. Yet they offer fascinating glimpses at what kinds of things we might be able to do with some real social will behind meaningful reform. Low SES kids need a lot more support than they are getting. And it needs to start earlier, and it needs to extend beyond the walls of the schoolhouse. Support services need to reach deeper into communities to connect with students and parents where they are. Neuman gives us some good road maps as to evidence-based programs that are doing this effectively. I think NCLB has shown the public just how many of our schools are "failing". But they seem stuck, at the moment, on seeing the problem as being based at the school, or teacher level. But the research on communities that produce failing schools shows that our current model of school-based social reform is woefully unequipped to deal with the magnitude of the development task required. We've thrown ever larger sums of money a the problem, with few seeming results to show for it. But throwing bad money at the problem not only isn't effective, but creates the impression that more money isn't the answer. And money alone isn't. Yet real reform will be costly - likely very much so, although much savings could be had in deconstructing our one-size fits all approach and opting instead to specifically target funds toward programs that are both necessary and effective. In the end this is a moral issue. And I think most Americans would agree that every child deserves a fair shot at success. But that's a tall order. It means nothing less than the eradication of generational poverty as we know it. Much of our economy is not set up to operate without a considerably large underclass of low-skilled workers. We may effectively be tasked with the problem of what it looks like for every generation to turn out a well-educated and upwardly mobile graduating class. But what a wonderful problem to have. If nothing less, what this means for the electoral process is a radically transformative body of young voters. This is the world I'd like my daughter to grow up in. Where her fellow citizens are determined by more than what family they came from. This is the American dream I have for her. And for us all.
- elirector
March 15, 2010 at 4:32am
For more on my writings (albeit considerably more irreverant) on politics and education, my blog can be found at: http://supervidoqo.blogspot.com/
- elirector
March 15, 2010 at 4:34am
Eli, good read...your frustration is clear. My sister-in-law teaches in Cali in a program designed for pregnant girls. The stories I hear are troubling. You write: "In the end this is a moral issue. And I think most Americans would agree that every child deserves a fair shot at success." This is true. But what do you do when the child isn't a willing accomplice in this plan? What do you do if they get pregnant at 14, if they stay up playing xbox until 3 AM? If they missed last week because they didn't feel like coming to school? We spend 3.5X more today than 50 years ago on educating K12, and that is all in today's dollars. The fundamental difference between today and 50 years ago is the breakdown of the family, and that can be traced back to kids having kids. We need an all out war on teen pregnancy. It is the single greatest screwer-upper of lives. The mom is destined to poverty and the child is destined to a crappy upbringing, usually without a father, which is a massive predictor for failure. An intact family unit can accomplish wonders, even if the parents were marginal students themselves.
- seattleeng
March 17, 2010 at 10:32am
Dr. Ravitch's column and response highlight some of the bizarro-world features of teaching in today's NCLB-polluted environment. I have had the 'pleasure' of watching NCLB's deleterious effect on education as a parent of two children who have been making their way through the public school system and as a fairly new teacher in a high school in the same district. My daughter, who graduated with an International Baccalaureate diploma from her high school, perpetually lamented the ad nauseam testing she was forced to endure for three years in preparation for the state's 11th grade exam. I am now experiencing the same joy with my second child in the school district. Fortunately, I teach a subject that is not considered vital to the education of our children, at least according to NCLB: history. And has been evidenced by those who teach in the elementary schools, not a whole lot of history has been taught. All of the emphasis has on math and reading in order to boost scores. And to boost scores we have lots of teacher meetings about this very subject. In fact, the vast majority of our 'professional development' meetings are focused on how to convert those 'bubble kids' – an abhorrent term for students that are a couple of points above and below the line of 'proficient' on the state proficiency-o-meter. My colleagues in math and English (I'm sorry 'English Language Arts') are supposed to meet three times a week on professional development that is supposed to help these students become proficient. Oh, and please, do not offer me more money to push those 'bubble' students over to the proficient category. I entered this profession because I love learning, I want to share my love of learning, and I want to see all of these kids succeed. Offering me a bonus isn't going to make me want them to succeed more. If you entered this profession, it was not so you could earn mutual fund manager-type bonuses. There are a lot of problems with today's educational system. Many of which the schools are not set up to deal with. And in this era of tax-cut mania (both major parties are guilty of this) – or fear of raising taxes – and inequitable/inadequate funding of school districts, addressing those problems will be slow in coming, if at all.
- saulstraussman
March 17, 2010 at 10:54pm