Yesterday I posted Part 1: Hillary Clinton with editorial board of Newsday with a promise that I would today return to the Secretary’s interview with the editorial board and examine their exchanges on education.
Before I get into the substance of the interview, I want to lay down a couple of markers.
First, if you want a reaction from an important voice in education to the material I am going to examine, I suggest that you look at this blog post by Diane Ravitch, perhaps America’s most important historian of education, and both a noted author and a major critic of much current educational policy.
Second, Clinton brings to any discussion of education a lot of experience with the subject: she was very involved with educational issues as First Lady of Arkansas, and during her time in the US Senate was a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. While she was in that office, I had occasion to be involved in lobbying her office on certain educational issues.
Third, I have a long track record, here and elsewhere, of writing and speaking about educational issues. I have organized four panels at three different gatherings of YearlyKos / Netroots Nation on the subject, I was one of the organizers of the 2011 Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action, I have written on education for a variety of publications including both The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as Education Week / Teacher, and have also served as a peer reviewer for three different professional organizations. I could offer more of my background, but that should be sufficient
Fourth, I am supporting Clinton’s run for the Presidency.
The last will NOT, however, mean that I will be uncritical of what she had to say to Newsday, as will become clear if you continue to read.
First, Hillary Clinton has SOME background as a parent of a public school child: while they were in Arkansas, she and Bill sent their daughter Chelsea to public schools. Once they arrived in DC, however, they enrolled her in Sidwell Friends School. This was at a time BEFORE the mandates of No Child Left Behind and its progeny, because those were established under George W. Bush. However, while Governor of Arkansas, Bill served as head of the National Governor’s Association at the time of the adoption of an agreement between the governors and the administration of George H. W. Bush for a national drive for Standards Based Accountability. Later, as President, Bill Clinton signed into law Goals 2000, in which the US announced it would be first in the world in math and science by that year. Thus Hillary comes to education from an environment which has very much accepted the notion of standards-based accountability.
For the record, I am opposed to that approach, because it quickly becomes test-based accountability, and then everything starts to become distorted, driven by the attempt to obtain higher test scores.
Let me turn to the interview. This section is labeled “Common Core and Opt Out.” In beginning the section, Clinton is told that Long Island is
now the national leader in the rebellion against higher educational standards and teacher accountability.
She is also told that the previous week over half the students in Long Island districts had “opted out” (refused to take) the mandated state tests.
Before I get to the question she was asked, please not the framing. The presumption is that the tests are the indicator of both higher educational standards and teacher accountability. This is in fact not true, and is the rhetoric by which the approach has been marketed.
So here is the first question, with Clinton’s complete, unedited answer:
So, do you support tough national standards like Common Core, and judging teachers partially based on the test results of their students? And these are two very specific things.
Clinton: Well, I have always supported national standards. I've always believed that we need to have some basis on which to determine whether we're making progress, vis-à-vis other countries who all have national standards. And I've also been involved in the past, not recently, in promoting such an approach and I know Common Core started out as a, actually non-partisan, not bi-partisan, a non-partisan effort that was endorsed very much across the political spectrum. Well, you have to ask yourself, what happened? I mean here was this process that seemed to be really on the way of making clear that yes, we have local control, but you parent, you teacher, you elected official in your local district, at your state level, you need to be sure that you are benchmarking to those standards. That's why we need to have them. What went wrong? I think the roll-out was disastrous. I think the way they rolled out the Common Core and the expectation you can turn on a dime... They didn't even have, as I'm told, they didn't even have the instructional materials ready. They didn't have any kind of training programs. Remember a lot of states had developed their own standards and they'd been teaching to those standards. And they had a full industry that was training teachers to understand what was going to be tested. And then along comes Common Core and you're expected to turn on a dime. It was very upsetting to everybody.
I can quibble about the history of Common Core. This Wikipedia article provides a decent history, including the names of the small group of people most responsible. I will say this — the original panels drafting the Language Arts and Mathematics Standards included no current teachers, one former teacher, no representatives of the three relevant professional organizations (National Council of Teachers of English, International Reading Association, and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics), but did include people from think tanks, advocacy groups, and testing organizations.
Further, it was rather obvious from the get-go that this approach would require a massive increase in testing. The federal government is specifically barred from imposing national standards, so the back door approach taken in the Obama administration through Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was to provide funding to two consortia of states to create tests mapped to the Common Core. This was also imposed by the Department of Education as a condition of getting funding through Race to the Top, an initiative basically done through the stimulus program with effectively no input from the relevant House and Senate Committees. Oh, and one last thing: all those states applying for funds through Race to the Top — which required the adoption of standards for college and career readiness — were funded by the Gates Foundation, and oh by the way several of the key people around Arne Duncan came out of that foundation.
Now let’s examine Clinton’s response.
“Well, I have always supported national standards. I've always believed that we need to have some basis on which to determine whether we're making progress, vis-à-vis other countries who all have national standards.”
First, not every country has national standards. To a large degree, high performing Finland does not.
Second, most countries with standards have far fewer standards to be met than exist in the Common Core.
Third, many of the things in Common Core are developmentally inappropriate — here I might note that there was not a single expert in Early Childhood Education involved with the original drafting.
Fourth, the international comparisons are bogus: I have written about this many times, and pointed at the research. I will not revisit it all, but the US has NEVER been at the top of such international comparisons, and there are several reasons
- some other countries do not include in their testing non-native speakers of the main language, and we do
- some countries have on science and math tests (TIMMS for example) been known to do things like exclude questions on coastal biology because they lack a coastline, while we insist upon it for students who go to school in the Great Plains States
- most important, we have a higher degree of poverty in our public schools than do any of the countries ranked above us. In fact, were we to control for poverty, our schools match those of any other nation.
Having sat for 8 years on the relevant committee, it is more than disappointing how easily Mrs. Clinton buys into the reform rhetoric that we read in what I have just quoted.
To her credit, she is correct that the roll-out has been a disaster. At one point one of the major architects of the approach described what they were doing as building an airplane while flying it. This has been destructive to real learning and effective teaching.
Let’s go on to the followup questions.
Filler:So you wouldn't say don't do it, you would say do it right.
Clinton:Do it right. Do it right and I would say I think we need better and fewer tests that are used for what tests should be used for, first and foremost as to how to improve the educational outcomes for individual children, for classes of children, and for schools of children.
Filler: Should they be used at all to determine whether teachers are being successful?
Clinton: I think given the state of where testing is right now, I don't think they're good enough to make that determination.
Filler: But if they were very, very good?
Clinton: Well, that's a big hypothetical. Right now I have to say, no. I do think it's fair to say, and the federal government just passed a new education law. And in that education law, I don't know that a lot of people on Long Island may have been aware of this, it still requires yearly testing from third grade...
Filler: We tell them all the time.
Clinton: ...to eighth grade and in high school. And it also continues to require, which was a demand on behalf of Civil Rights groups, and disability groups, that it disaggregate data so that there can be a clear picture, because in the past, we had a lot of schools that you know, they pushed kids out on test day. They also did terribly with non-English speakers, or kids with disabilities, or whatever, minority group-wise, and so you weren't really understanding whether or not they were educating all the children. So we have to do a better job of explaining why a common set of standards is really in the interests of the parents who are opting their kids out. Because remember, it is parents who are opting their kids out. And the parents are feeling like what is this about. This doesn't have anything to do with educating my child. So clearly, we haven't done a very good job of explaining it.
Okay, Clinton acknowledges that the quality of the tests is not good enough to be used to evaluate teachers, yet states are doing so. In fact, one big complaint is that if you teach an untested subject — say art or music — in some states you are evaluated by the scores on reading of math, which you do not teach, and sometimes of students you do not even teach in your subject.
But even that begs the question — the relevant professional associations dealing with psychological measure, which includes educational testing, have issued joint statements warning against using tests designed for one purpose — to evaluate how much a student knows at a given point — for any other purpose, whether it is the effectiveness of the teacher or of the school or of the system. It is difficult to use them even to determine how much the student has learned IN SCHOOL.
Teachers, research shows, are the most important in school factor in student performance. But in school factors in total represent less than 20% of the influences. And our approach to testing and evaluation, which in theory Clinton still accepts, refuses to recognize that.
I also think that Mrs. Clinton does not grasp why parents are opting their kids out. She and others can be “explaining it” until hell freezes over and that will be entirely beside the point: the objection is not just to too many tests (which to some degree she acknowledges) but to the very notion of tests as the primary way of evaluating learning. There are so many other ways.
If by now you have grasped that I am not happy with this part of the interview with Newsday, you are correct. Were education the only issue on which I decided who to support for the Presidency, I might have real reservations — provided there was a candidate who showed a deeper understanding. In fact this cycle there is not, in either party, of ANY of those who were ever in the race.
Further, on almost all of the other issues important to me, Hillary Clinton’s experience, understanding of government and international issues, makes her far superior to anyone else who sought the Presidency this cycle.
I knew I would not be completely happy with her approach to education at the time I decided to support her.
I will give Mrs. Clinton credit in that she has been supportive of the right of teachers to unionize. Of course she does accept the notion of charters, and there are very few charters that are unionized. My sense is that what I read in this interview is that she does not have a very deep understanding of the problems of much of the current charter sector. But then, since she left the Senate she has not been dealing all that closely with educational issues.
Were it her choice, she would not opt out her granddaughter from the testing regime.
There is some good material in this interview. Let me offer what I think was the most positive material I read, although I will still have a bit of a critical comment:
Clinton: Well, more than a century, but historically there's been a big uproar about what works, what doesn't work, what the expectation should be. How do you teach disadvantaged kids. There's a lot of turmoil within public education. And I am a stalwart supporter of public education. I think it still remains one of the foundational institutions of our Democracy. So I don't want to see it be discredited, undermined, dismissed in any way. We have got to have early childhood education, especially starting with low income disadvantaged kids, if we're going to prepare kids to succeed when they get to elementary school.
Filler: Is that a priority on a Federal level?
Clinton: It is.
Filler: It has to happen in every poor community?
Clinton: It's a big priority for me. And you know, I've seen only early results so I don't want to extrapolate from them, but there seem to be some very positive early results in New York City about universal pre-K, because it's not just the sort of academic environment, it's the social environment. It's giving kids a chance to learn how to work in groups. It's giving, you know, kids who needed, maybe more structure, so there seems to be some positives coming out. We'll follow that closely. But everything that I've seen and I've worked in this field for a long time since I was at the Children's Defense Fund, what I did in Arkansas, is that quality pre-school programs can help to level the playing field for poor kids, for disadvantaged kids. Okay, so then when you get kids in school, we have been having this battle about what works and what doesn't work, and who gets to make that decision and really this new Federal law basically turned a lot of the authority back to local communities.
And it did so on a nearly unanimous bi-partisan basis because a lot of members of Congress were just getting barraged by people saying this doesn't make sense. We can't figure out what they're doing from year to year. Because there was so much pressure on districts and teachers and there were so many fads, you know try this, try that, let's do this now, that it just became a confusing array of mixed signals. And there is very solid research about how you help little kids learn to read, help them with numeracy, help them develop the skills to be a student, and we should get back to those basics. We know that if you have a longer school year and a longer school day for disadvantaged kids, it gets better results. If you have more help in the classroom, particularly if the classroom has a lot of kids who are poor kids and remember this is the first year that it's been recorded, that we have a majority of poor kids in our public schools. They are coming to school with all kinds of issues and problems. We've taken nurses out of school. We've taken social workers out of school. We have disconnected the school from the larger community, so let me end with this, saying you know I think our schools need some more TLC. What do I mean by that? We've got to invest more in good teaching. Yes, we need accountability measures, but let's connect them to what the teachers are facing. When you are a teacher in a poor school, and you have enormous behavioral problems, when you have kids coming to school hungry, when you have kids who are homeless, you have a tougher job than the kids who show up in Chappaqua where I live.
Secretary Clinton clearly understands the challenges of educating children from poverty, with disabilities, with language learning. Some of that clearly goes back to her early work with Marion Wright Edelman, more from her work as First Lady of Arkansas. She is absolutely correct that we need nurses and social workers in schools, people trained to deal with issues that we know are parts of the lives of the children we teach, and which we as academic teachers are usually not trained to address. And yes, there are real issue about homeless kids.
I am going to raise some concerns about the emphasis on how we do early childhood education. I have a lifelong friend, Sam Meisels, who is one of America’s great experts on the subject, and he fought long and hard to keep Head Start from being turned into a reading program.
Finland does not start formal education until age 7. We know how developmentally different children are at younger ages — between each other, but also sometimes one child in different domains. A child can be wonderful with arithmetic but struggle with reading, or the opposite. This is also something that argues against a standardized approach. It is also well past time that we stop obsessing that if a child is not reading on grade level by 3rd grade that somehow that child is destined for prison, or a lifetime of poverty.
Let me clear. I know Hillary Clinton is a very caring person. I believe her intentions about education are good, but more than a little misguided.
But that has been far too true of too many in the political world, who really do not understand education, and too often listen to people from business rather than to people who actually deal with education.
One of the people who is a strong supporter of Mrs. Clinton is Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who is also a close personal friend of mine. As Governor of Iowa he made sure there were NO graduation tests in Iowa public high schools. He was influence in part by his wife, who before she became the state’s first lady was herself a teacher.
In the very first face to face conversation I had with Tom, I reminded him that a then recent National Governors Association Meeting on education, each governor had brought a business man. He acknowledged that. I asked why each had not brought a teacher, or even a principal. He was surprised, but admitted he had never considered that.
I hope that when she becomes President, as I believe she will, Hillary Clinton will make sure that she includes the voices of teachers in (a) who she picks for Secretary of Education, (b) how her administration shapes it educational policy.
I know from others how good a listener Hillary Clinton can be.
I hope very much that she will apply that skill set and listen to different voices on education, because what I read in this interview with the editorial board was disappointing.