Race to the top?

I got in an argument today with my dad. He's becoming more and more of a curmudgeon these days (can't blame the guy, though).

The subject of our argument had to do with the conversation on Meet the Press this morning between Arne Duncan, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Newt Gingrich, a trio that has been touring the country to look at schools and talk about what direction education policy needs to take in the years ahead.

I just happened to catch this 20 minute conversation while I was walking on a treadmill in a hotel fitness center this morning. I don't have TV at home, so had it not been for the particular circumstances of this morning, I would never have seen this.

The first thing my dad said to me when I entered his living room later in the day was something that asked me to agree with him that the conversation on Meet the Press this morning was thoughtful, balanced, and thought-provoking.

Well, I had already discussed with my husband this morning over breakfast that this was not exactly my assessment of the Duncan/Gingrich/Sharpton Meet the Press dialogue. To me it was one more example of educational discourse that looks at our public schools only in terms of the extremes (it opened with stats about the public schools in Washington DC--while the stats are true and horribly sad, they contextualized the conversation within a view that public schooling in America is failing all of our kids dismally). There was a good amount of conversation that demonized teachers (without considering the horrible, impossible conditions that some teachers are asked to teach within--a massive failure of our system as a whole). There was anti-teacher union sentiment. There was a promise from Duncan that none of the Race to the Top money would be doled out to any state/district that didn't tie their reform plans to test scores.

In short, it was a group of politicians (with NO actual educators) sitting around discussing the needs of educational policy in our country.

My dad is proud of Obama for challenging the teachers' unions. Now, I'm not exactly the most fervent fan of teachers' unions, but they are there for a reason. Teachers have a history of being treated very badly by their school districts. My dad said to me, "you're a good teacher and everybody knows it--you don't need the protection of the teachers' union." Well, until I feel valued for my experience and expertise by my district administration because I see them placing a priority in all of their decision making on valuing teachers, I will still see a need for a teachers' union in my district. My dad made a sweeping statement writing off teachers' unions for protecting bad teachers. Sure, that happens, and I don't like it--but teachers' unions also protect the rest of us who work unbelievably hard.

I told my dad that so far Obama's educational direction is not really a dramatic change of course from the No Child Left Behind bus driven by W. What we certainly don't need is more mandated testing and holding teachers accountable to test scores. The tests are flawed for a whole range of reasons (see the link below for someone else's take on some of those reasons). I do not oppose higher standards or meaningful, rigorous assessment in public schools. I do not oppose requiring districts to examine their test score data by the sub groups of student population within their school and to use that test score data to identify the groups of students who are struggling the most and find ways to close those achievement gaps. In a nutshell, those are the requirements of NCLB, the most recent revision of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that has been around since 1965 and responsible for scores of significant and important educational reforms in this country. What I have a problem with is the mandated high-stakes testing--meaning real world consequences for schools that don't make the grade on test scores.

If the tests were meaningful and rigorous with a minimum of fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice test questions, I might be able to get behind it. But they're not. We do not have a testing industry that can support meaningful tests at the scale that federal law requires. So we're left with the tests that are able to be scored efficiently.

But there is nothing efficient about measuring what students truly know and are able to do. It's a messy, complex, nuanced process. And that--as I tried to make the point to my dad today --is why I had a problem with Meet the Press this morning. There are probably scores of Americans who now think they are more educated in this issue after watching that program this morning. But they have no idea how nuanced and complex public education in America is. There is NO simple fix for reform. Each school and district is its own universe with its own unique community context that spills into the school in myriad ways to affect what happens in classrooms. I happen to work in a district situated in a research university town--you bet that spills into our classrooms. The community expectations are high enough that on the whole we believe our students can achieve. And most of them do. You might not believe what we are able to accomplish here at the high school level with many of our students. F. Scott often says that essentially our students are getting a private prep-school caliber education for free. And he's right.

But that doesn't mean that we can't still do better. And we want to. And pressure to tie all of our reform ideas to scores on our state test is not what will make for meaningful reform. Actually--we'll enact meaningful reform, unique to the needs of our students in our community, simply by working together to work on the problems particular to our school context (an achievement gap for our second-language learners, students in the non-IB/non-AP courses who are generally disengaged from school, an impending doom that threatens to bring budget cuts of 6 to 9 percent next year when we are already trying to manage huge class sizes...).

This was going to be just a short piece to direct your attention to the Open Letter to our President that I came across today in the Edurati Review because I believe it gets into some of the nuance that I thought was lacking from Meet the Press this morning. But apparently I had a lot to say (either that or I'm just avoiding the stack of grading and other things I have sitting here staring at me...).

By the way, speaking of the stack of stuff staring at me--in a few weeks, F. Scott and I have agreed to capture here (as well as we can) a typical week in each of our teaching worlds--all in the spirit of helping others to understand what it looks like to do the work that we do.

Signing off,
M. Shelley