The educational crisis facing this country at this time has spawned many weird and wonderful things, foremost being random financial carrots tossed by organizations at school districts. In an attempt to salvage public education by trying to grasp at these opportunities, school districts and states bent over backwards in circus displays so as to merit these funds. Obama's recent "Race to the Top" initiative, for which 16 states became finalistsupped the antes for many districts. Though nobody can deny that a steady influx of cash is necessary for operational purposes, and that such funds can relieve many crises, such attempts won't work to alleviate, or even successfully to address, our contemporary educational conundrums.
Why? Firstly, these foundations seek to fund projects resembling business models for alleviating education. Secondly, as illustrated by a recent pathetic example here in Georgia and the CRCT Test, the dog-and-pony show that school districts put on to potentially earn these rewards often have questionable results, both ethics-wise and results-wise. These two considerations also, once again, completely place both teacher and student out of the equation insofar as any actual school reform or educational improvement, by making the former the eternal whipping-boys of bureaucrats and experts, and the latter as little more than guinea pigs. Only when projects and initiatives that truly address and consider learning needs of students and teachers earn attention and funding, will the macabre situation of public education improve.
WHAT OF SCHOOLS AND REFORM PROGRAMS REMIND ME OF CONCEIVING OF RUNNING PUBLIC SCHOOLS LIKE LITTLE FOR-PROFIT MACHINES:
* the way people's jobs are on the line regarding performance through certain numeric standards, very reminiscent of the stock firms whose only existence is to see the bottom line increase by 10%.
* The way teachers' salaries are tied to performance, up to a $2000 cap for bonuses. Just as if the schools were meant to churn out widgets for sale on the open market, the public school funding efforts seem to be fueled by this sort of rhetoric. Is it any wonder that a certain high-tolerance, or at least high-breeding ground for fraud occurs? Here's what someone said re. the environment she encountered at her school district.
A former teacher at Atlanta's Cook Elementary said Friday that no one followed up after she told district officials that other teachers talked about cheating by pointing to answers or hinting at them during the 2007-2008 school year. She declined to be identified because she still works in the field.Like several other teachers the AJC has interviewed, she said the pressure to make the school appear successful was intense. "I was told very often, 'If your children do not pass, you won't be back next year,' " she said, adding that she didn't cheat.
Elsewhere on this site I have read other such tales. This fellow also speaks to what I say.
* The very nature of the grants offered, such as the ones from the Gates foundation, seem to operate on basis of this sort of evaluation. The "Race to the Top" is also framed in this regard. What's more, these grant offerings manage to pervert even the free-market rhetoric of school reform, by making the thing seem like a weird sweepstakes instead: a prize offer to whoever can hold their breath under water the longest (or, in this case, "demostrate the understanding, knowledge, capacity, and the will to truly deliver on what is proposed" in the context of dwindling funds and the constraints on education imposed by NCLB) Of course, these sweepstakes seem to offer something more substantive than a carnival prize, and to be delivered as proof of educational reform. But do they? What criteria do they use? Many of the phrases encountered such as 'dramatic improvement' reek of quality control at the local factory.
Among one of the proposals that Sonny Perdue and Kathy Cox, state school superintendent, used to pitch Georgia's worthiness for the grand prize was the introduction of a pay-for-performance assessment model that would tie teachers’ pay to how well they teach, not to their experience or level of education. This does not sound so macabre per se, were it not that several teachers interviewed regarding the CRCT scandal assure that
the system's use of monetary rewards for meeting district test-score goals adds an incentive to cheat. Bonuses range as high as $2,000 for educators.In 2008, the district spent more than $2 million on the bonuses. Hall received an extra $82,000, partly because of test score increases. Each year a school meets its targets, they go up --- increasing the pressure and, some teachers say, the motivation to cut corners.
Any state that most dramatically demonstrated amazing results improvement was in the running to win the jackpot. Georgia had the Metro Atlanta district and it's amazing improvement, all headed by Beverly Hall, Atlanta schools' superintendent. What was their main criteria? Test scores.
Hall is at the high point of her career, basking in national accolades for a dramatic turnaround of the city's schools --- with rising state test scores cited as key evidence. [...]
Hall has [cultivated an image] as the tough-talking leader of a district that overcame a troubled past through hard work, a no-excuses attitude and innovative teaching methods. That image has plunked Hall and the system on a national stage, and attracted millions in grants from corporate foundations.
Which is why this is a problem:
More than two-thirds of Atlanta's public elementary and middle schools face investigations into cheating after the state unveiled a statewide analysis of suspicious erasures on standardized tests. Atlanta had more schools flagged than any other district. In one school, nearly 90 percent of classrooms are under scrutiny.
In October, the AJC reported a dozen other Atlanta schools posted highly unlikely gains or drops on the 2009 Criterion-Referenced Competency Test, the state's main academic measure for students in grades one through eight. For some, the odds of such changes were less than one in a billion.
Well - just as at times it is far easier for an accountant to massage numbers than either meet unrealistic sales quota or have a moment of reckoning with whiny stockholders, it can also prove far easier to massage test results than to miraculously get a thousand disadvantaged, confused and seriously undertrained elementary school kids to begin acing every test under the sun. But, the same issue which motivates people to fake test results is the same reason that compels the state to guarantee that the test results are accurate:
This year’s education initiatives from Perdue are built around winning the "Race to the Top." Last month, the governor proposed a shift away from teacher pay scales based on seniority or advanced degrees.
Tests will be a crucial measure — if they are reliable. Which could explain Perdue’s eagerness for Georgia to be seen as an aggressive self-enforcer in the testing scandal.
If the test results were found to be false, it's like Georgia losing the third round of American Idol after Simon Cowell had discovered that the contestant had lip synced the whole way.
In the end, Georgia was not a finalist- that award went to Delaware and Tennessee.
Meanwhile, kids continue not learning, teachers continue being punished, and administrators keep losing it, even as the governor, various pundits, and consulting firms from Utah are hired to analyze these test scores, so as to not leave anyone a shadow of a doubt that the scores are not fake. In the end, you ask me, it makes no difference whether they were faked or not. We're talking about time and resources in an already gutted education system not going towards childrens' welfare but towards mobilizing experts to prove some sort of point of honour.
One can summarize the situation in the following manner:
Obama and others offer funds to the school district that, like a trained seal, can jump highest to demostrate an ability to "better engage and prepare our students for success in a competitive 21st century economy and workplace." -> school districts, hideously strapped for cash so as to meet even the most basic operations, jump at the chance. -> school administrators such as Hill and others seek to overhaul results as quickly as possible so as to look good and win it over the other districts -> the numbers crunch, as it were, and the district is approved for thousands of grants -> a red flag of cheating - the kids really are not learning! We're not making our numbers! -> haul in the experts to see if the cheating took place. Now, the experts don't go near the kids, oh no. Their only job is to audit the bubble-test results scores. Standard quality control.
Where, once again, is any sort of commitment to kids' experience, to what and how they learn, what and how they are learning, and anything at all like that?
It reminds one of the very failure of the NCLB which, in its 1000 plus pages of legislation, laid the groundwork for where we are today, with talk of 'meeting benchmarks', utilizing research methodologies based on those that are "evaluated using experimental or quasi-experimental designs in which individuals, entities, programs, or activities are assigned to different conditions and with appropriate controls to evaluate the effects of the condition of interest (NCLB, 2001, Section 9101 (37)). And what is directly quantifiable? Test scores. Graduation rates. Children viewed as guinea pigs or microbes in a petri dish. "Here, let's try this...." Has this scientifically based approach or whatnot provided good results?
One thing that does not appear in NCLB at all is the concept or phrase "student engagement." In fact, currently, students report experiencing the highest level of disenfranchisement ever, stating that schools offer neither healthy psychosocial development nor academic development (Joselowslky 267). In the same article, we see cited sources which posit the effects that engagement has for students' studies.
Even Diane Ravitch, assistant secretary of education in the administration of George H.W. Bush and firm supporter of NCLB, came to see how this sort of view of the public education thing as some sort of highly competitive accountability machine has brought nothing but failure. The problem is, you cannot quantify learning the way you can quantify success on Wall Street. Well, let me take that back: you could, if, like Ravitch says, you understand that Standardized Tests are only meant to measure 'reading writing rithmetic'.
Because the law demanded progress only in reading and math, schools were incentivized to show gains only on those subjects. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in test-preparation materials. Meanwhile, there was no incentive to teach the arts, science, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages or physical education.
In short, accountability turned into a nightmare for American schools, producing graduates who were drilled regularly on the basic skills but were often ignorant about almost everything else. Colleges continued to complain about the poor preparation of entering students, who not only had meager knowledge of the world but still required remediation in basic skills. This was not my vision of good education.
And most damning, the whole system fails to take into account the very real intangibles that so affect student performance - community life, parental situation, socioeconomic status, etc - factors which the beleaguered teachers with ever-dwindling resources have to rein in as much as possible.
Other types of projects need to be funded so that the above described travesty happening in Georgia doesn't happen elsewhere, and so that education actually occurs.
What are the best ways to optimize public funds in public schools so that the most learning occurs for all? These are questions that legislators and districts are finally beginning to take seriously, in part thanks to the gross failure of NCLB. California Rep George Miller says that the administration's $4 billion Race to the Top competition for states has opened a national conversation about how to improve teaching and learning through better use of data on student performance, so, even though I made fun of it earlier, Race to the Top and other factors have paid the way for true progress. Current efforts to rewrite NCLB to remove the damning standard of "adequate yearly progress" that caused so much trouble - that which got so many fired.
Speaking of Race to the Top, one of the reasons, aside from the CRCT debacle, that Georgia qualified as a finalist also, to me, holds a key to what real educational reform could look like. In a March 5th article of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Gracie Bond Staples states that fifteen Georgia high schools improved their graduation rates by at least 10% points over 5 years. Georgia is considered one of the five states with the worst graduation rates nationwide, making this improvement stand out. Though I tend to take such statistics with a grain of salt and caution against the use of such statistics in evaluating true learning, I will allow that quantified evidence, in many cases, might be all we have to go by. Certainly the legislators will go by these numbers. What, in this case, accounts for these increases? Steve Dolinger, president of the Georgia Partnership, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization focused on improving student achievement, gives his assessment.
"When we started to look at the numbers, a group of schools stood out," he said. "We wanted to know what they were doing and what were the commonalities we could share as best practices."
The schools, for instance, worked with the community to create a culture of success, and administrators and teachers worked together to make the curriculum relevant and fostered relationships with students and their families.
"In many cases, graduation coaches took the percentages and turned them into names, helping students over the goal line," Dolinger said.
Grady Principal Vincent Murray said the school formed a community-based tutorial program. Instead of waiting for students to come to them, they formed a team of teachers and made it visible in the community, he said.
"We found our kids wanted to take advantage of tutorial but home called them more strongly," said Murray. "We put together a team of teachers and went to them. The participation rate has been phenomenal. We even had parents come out to find out what we were doing."
Community involvement, making curriculum relevant to students, and fostering relationships with students and families apparently all hold a key to improved student performance. Who knew? Apparently framing public education in terms that include communities yields actual education. Well, some would not be surprised. Further research, such as those the Forum for Youth Investment of 2005, or the Framework for Success for all Students of 2006 yielded, demonstrated that an engaged populace of students, once the real structural challenges of the frameworks were overcome, yielded great results. I will speak more to this in the near future, but suffice it to say for now that the time may be ripe, now that all other traditional venues are melting down, and that the public educational system is in such crisis, to begin seriously considering such options.