How Obama Can Fix Schools

Yesterday I came a cross a newspost titled "How Obama can fix schools" it was a digest of a Wall Street Journal article by New York City School Chancellor Joel Klein and Reverend Al Sharpton titled "Charter Schools can Close the Education Gap" The article presents a sob story of America's youth, particularly minorities who are suffering under the current school system and in some cases are being left four grade levels behind. The article goes on to champion the Education Equality Project which, while tossing accusations at the current system of schools, tows the line of No Child Left Behind. The EEP offers advice to the President Elect on how to close the achievement gap between white and minority students and beyond expanding federal support for charter schools, their first idea is "more stringent standards."

First, the federal government, working with the governors, should develop national standards and assessments for student achievement. Our current state-by-state approach has spawned a race to the bottom, with many states dumbing down standards to make it easier for students to pass achievement tests. Even when students manage to graduate from today's inner-city high schools, they all too frequently are still wholly unprepared for college or gainful employment.

I read this and almost had an aneurism, the mental equivalent of screaming "Are you ephing kidding me Ref?" at the top of your lungs at someone who cant hear you. Stricter standards mean more "assessment" more "accountability" and more "Enforcement" Which means more tests for students (less time spent learning), less freedom for teachers to decide how best to educate their students, and stricter punishments for teachers who don't have the resources to bring some of their students scores up to grade level save by teaching to the test, which is a strategy that not only rarely works, but denies the students any useful education.

I immediately ran to my bookshelf and dug out a few old textbooks, and rifled through the boxes in my closet to find some old essays from my education courses. Here's the thing, I never had to experience NCLB first hand, I graduated high school in 2002, a private high school so we didn't even have exit exams or star testing or whatever. My first contact with this program was studying it in education courses, and it left a bad taste in my mouth. Now I work with, and am friends with many educators, all of whom have nothing but venomous words to spit about NCLB and how it's hindering the education of their students. It's not just the assessments and accountability that pressure teachers into teaching to the test and forgoing their duties to actually educate their students, it's the idea that these standards are doing more to hinder the education of their students than to help.

To make my point I'm going to lean heavily on a collection of essays both for and against standards, digest thirty pages into a few paragraphs and share them with you. The first of which is written by Deborah Meier titled "Educating a Democracy." This one essay had a lot to do with forming my own ideas of education. Meier states that the educational crisis facing our country is not the crisis presented in "A Nation at Risk," it is not based in economics and can not be solved with higher test scores, and our actions to improve education by implementing and enforcing standards in education have only caused a rift to widen within society.

"An understanding of this other crisis begins by noting that we have the lowest voter turnout by far of any modern industrial country; we are exceptional for the absence of responsible care for our most vulnerable citizens (we spend less on child welfare–baby care, medical care, family leave–than almost every competitor); we don’t come close to our competitors in income equity; and our high rate of (and investment in) incarceration places us in a class by ourselves."

"One important change has been in the nature of schooling. Our schools have grown too distant, too big, too standardized, too uniform, too divorced from their communities, too alienating of young from old and old from young."

"In such settings it’s hard to teach young people how to be responsible to others, or to concern themselves with their community."

"By shifting the locus of authority to outside bodies, it undermines the capacity of schools to instruct by example in the qualities of mind that schools in a democracy should be fostering in kids–responsibility for one’s own ideas, tolerance for the ideas of others, and a capacity to negotiate differences. "

"Because of the disconnection between the public and its schools, the power to protect or support them now lies increasingly in the hands of public or private bodies that have no immediate stake in the daily life of the students."

"We need to surround kids with adults who know and care for our children, who have opinions and are accustomed to expressing them publicly, and who know how to reach reasonable collective decisions in the face of disagreement. That means increasing local decision-making, and simultaneously decreasing the size and bureaucratic complexity of schools. Correspondingly, the worst thing we can do is to turn teachers and schools into the vehicles for implementing externally- imposed standards."

"A democracy in which less than half its members see themselves as "making enough difference" to bother to vote in any election is surely endangered–far more endangered, at risk, than our economy. It’s for the loss of belief in the capacity to influence the world, not our economic ups and downs, that we educators should accept some responsibility. What I have learned from thirty years in small powerful schools is that it is here above all that schools can make a difference, that they can alter the odds."

After six years of college there was one thing I learned that will be of more value to me in the real world than anything else; from calculus, stress (both personally and in structural geology) to composition of essays or symphonies, the one thing I learned that I value most was how to think critically and the ability to interact with and critique the society in which I live. It is this mindset, more than any skill that Meier is pushing, preparing and motivating students to go out into the real world and make a difference. Holding students and teachers accountable to scores on singular high stakes tests which don't go into any depth of studying a child's education beyond their ability to fill in bubbles has neither brought about a better America nor closed the achievement gap.

"Americans invented the modern, standardized, norm-referenced test. Our students have been taking more tests, more often, than any nation on the face of the earth, and schools and districts have been going public with test scores starting almost from the moment children enter school."

"We have test data for almost every grade thereafter in reading and math, and to some degree in all other subjects. This has been the case for nearly half a century."

"In short, we have been awash in accountability and standardization for a very long time. What we are missing is precisely the qualities that the last big wave of reform was intended to respond to: teachers, kids, and families who don’t know each other or each other’s work and don’t take responsibility for it. We are missing communities built around their own articulated and public standards and ready to show them off to others."

Meier finishes by bringing to light the problem of trying to tackle the achievement gap between students of differing socioeconomic standing with standardized testing.

"We can’t beat the statistical advantage on the next round of tests that being advantaged has over being disadvantaged; we can, however, substantially affect the gap between rich and poor where it will count, in the long haul of life."

In short, we can't begin to address the achievement gap that Sharpton and Klein are so worried about by enforcing more stringent standards and implementing more restrictions on the teachers of these kids. To tackle this problem, Educators need to be able to do their job and, prepare them for life outside of their classroom, to provide them with an education. I'm going to borrow the words of one of the President Elect's close personal domestic terrorist friends, William Ayers:

"The purpose of education in a democracy is to break down barriers, to overcome obstacles, to open doors, minds, and possibilities. Education is empowering and enabling; it points to strength, to critical capacity, to thoughtfulness and expanding capabilities. It aims at something deeper and richer than simply imbibing and accepting existing codes and conventions, acceding to whatever is before us. The larger goal of education is to assist people in seeing the world through their own eyes, interpreting and analyzing through their own experiences and thinking, feeling themselves capable of representing, manifesting, or even, if they choose, transforming all that is before them. Education, then, is linked to freedom, to the ability to see and also to alter, to understand and also to reinvent, to know and also to change to world as we find it."