Diane Ravitch is a major figure in educational circles, having served as an Assistant Secretary of Education in the administration of Bush 41, and being a well known author as well. I often find myself in disagreement with her, but have never doubted her thoughtfulness both as a person and as an observer of educational issues. In my daily email from Huffington Post today one featured item is a piece she did on a letter to the NY Times which was NOT printed, and for which she she has received permission from the author to publish in full. I will strongly urge you to read The Unprinted Letter about Changes in U.S. Education. Below the fold I will give you the general context and offer a few remarks of my own. I will focus on two issues
- the absurdness of what can happen when a mayor or others bring in a non-educator in to run schools
- the problem with newspapers who effectively advocate in their news reports and are then unwilling to print responses that balance or correct the record
Ravitch begins her piece as follows:
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times printed an adulatory interview of Sir Michael Barber about what needs to happen in American education. Mr. Barber was at one time a close educational advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair. As best I can make out, he advised him to do more testing at every grade.
(the piece in question was written by Sam Dillon and published on August 15. It is now in the archive, which means you need TImes Select or have to pay 4.95 to read FACE BOOK; Imported From Britain: Ideas to Improve Schools. I have objections to the piece beyond those raised by Ravitch, but for now I will remain focused on her concerns).
Ravitch notes that Barber is now working for the international consulting firm McKinsey, and that his most notable client is Joel Klein, the lawyer brought in by Mayor Bloomberg to run the NYC schools. Klein, apparently under the guidance of Barber, has decentralized the school systems, making principals and teachers responsible for student scores. Relying on newspaper reports Ravitch writes
Chancellor Klein wiped out the regional structure of the school system and essentially set 1500 schools afloat as little islands on their own, with only minimal supervision. At the end of each year, test scores will determine which students get promoted and which get flunked, which adults get a bonus and which get fired.
I have written about the idiocy of using test scores for such purposes before, and the inevitable results that occur, and have discussed several books which explore the problems with such an approach. I will not revisit them now.
What is important is that Ravitch, somewhat inaccurately labeled as a conservative in educational matters (her positions cannot so easily be pigeonholed) questions the approach, and her focus is a letter sent in response to the Time by Richard Pring, a government official responsible for reviewing education of students 14-19 in Wales and England (Scotland has a separate educational system). When the Times failed to print the letter, it was circulated widely on the internet. This led to Ravitch seeking and getting permission to post the entire letter, of which she writes
It ought to cause school officials in the U.S. to slow down and think twice before buying the line that Mr. Barber is selling. It may be time to reflect on the possibility that a nation of good test-takers is not necessarily a well-educated nation.
In the letter, Pring writes that the picture Barber paints of English education is not accurate, noting
Not everyone agrees with his analysis, and indeed the £1 million Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training in for England and Wales, which I lead, is not, in the light of evidence, presenting such a rosy picture
.
The entire letter is well worth pondering. Let me offer one key paragraph:
The results of the 'high stakes testing' are that teachers increasingly teach to the test, young people are disillusioned and disengaged, higher education complains that those matriculating (despite higher scores) are ill prepared for university studies, and intelligent and creative teachers incleasingly feel dissatisfied with their professional work. I believe it is no coincidence that, according to the recent UNICEF Report, children in England are at the bottom of the league of rich countries in terms of happiness and feelings of well-being, or that England now criminalises 230,000 children between 11 and 17 each year (the highest in absolute and relative terms in the whole of Europe), or that nearly 10% of 16-18 year olds belong to the Not in Education, Training and Employment group, despite the massive investment in that group over the last ten years. And why should one expect anything else as most of their day light hours consists of preparing for tests, totally disconnected from their interests and concerns, present or future?
I want to thank Diane Ravitch for making the Pring letter more widely available. And now I want to offer a few comments of my own.
First, we have had an unfortunately tendency to assume that we can bring executives who may have had success in one field into a new field and that they will somehow magically address the problems of their new responsibilities. While there may be some ability to transfer skills and knowledge within business and from the military to business, one should not assume that such an approach is universally applicable. After all, were it the case, then we would have no trouble taking a senior executive of Coca-Cola or General Motors and making him a four-star general. I know people will argue at the senior level of civilian leadership of the military we have brought in executives from GM (Wilson) and Ford (McNamara). I would respond that at least in the latter case McNamara had prior military administrative experience (as one of Tex Thornton's 'whiz kids" during WWII) and his administration of DoD is nothing to brag about. To make my point more clearly - if you assume that the skills of running the military or a corporation or a large government agency, then I presume there would be no objection to taking the superintendent of a large school system and having him take over a major corporation, government agency, or military unit. And yet the last example of doing this - Rod Paige as head of the United State Department of Education, has proven to be a disaster (of course, that may more be of the nature of the inadequacies of Rod Paige, whose tenure as superintendent in Houston was not so sterling, as some in the media did not bother to find out before he was confirmed as SecEd).
There has been one sterling success of bringing in a military man to run a school system. John Stanford in Seattle. People who attempted to emulate that pattern unfortunately looked as his prior military background rather than at the man, and as a result we saw disasters such as Julius Becton in DC.
The list of non-educators who have wrought destruction on schools systems is extensive. Unfortunately, too often the press in the city buys in to the idea that a non-educator can appropriately shake up the system. We often see this kind of takeover as the result of a strong mayor (such as Bloomberg) who wants control of the schools (which after all represent a major source of employment and perhaps the largest category of expenditures in any local community). This can lead to a person who really was NOT successful somehow getting recycled from one city to another: the classic example here would be Paul Vallas, originally in Chicago under Richie Daley, then in Philadelphia courtesy of Ed Rendell (as former mayor), and now New Orleans. Unfortunately the local press often is unequipped to properly examine the tenure of such people, and as a result they are able to manipulate the press coverage.
That leads to the second point I wish to address. I acknowledge that not every critic of a news article is entitled to a free forum to respond. But when someone of the stature of Pring offers a critique, a paper like the Times which claims to be a paper of record has a responsibility to give that response sufficient attention to balance the picture it has painted, which in this case was very inaccurate. In fact, publishing Pring's letter might have been insufficient. Upon reading it, I believe the editors should have contacted him and done a story, or else offered him sufficient space to do a long op ed, which fully explored the insufficiencies of the coverage of Barber - in this case the current direction of British education is away from the nostrums of Barber and such reliance upon high stakes testing. Partly as a result of the Nuffield review Britain is coming to the conclusion that such an approach as that advocated by Barber is counterproductive. It would seem that such information might be appropriate for the readers of the Times to consider along with the puff piece on Barber.
This diary is a result of the frustration I feel with trying to get appropriate coverage of education in the MSM. Far too often those writing about it are unequipped - they lack the requisite background in educational issues, are unequipped to deal with issues of the use of statistical data and research methodologies, and their experience of the realities of schools and classrooms are largely limited to the time they spent as students. Part of the reason I spend time I really do not have on a school day such as today writing a diary like this is to provide some indication that the picture we see is far from complete.
I apologize in advance that I cannot present a more detailed portrayal. I am glad that Arianna is willing to provide a forum for people like Diane Ravitch and Gerald Bracey to offer some balance to the otherwise very inaccurate portrayal of educational issues which is all that most readers of papers like the Times ever seem to see. And I hope that everyone will read what Diane posted yesterday, and distribute it as widely as possible.
Now I have to go to school.
Peace.