Tag Archives: American public education

The Primary Purpose of Public Education

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Because we live in a participatory democracy that depends on its people to accept the responsibilities of citizenship, the overriding purpose of public education is to prepare children to understand and accept their civic duties when they reach maturity.

Democracy exists on a precipice that represents a delicate balance between the rights of individuals to choose how they wish to live while accepting the responsibilities of citizenship. Implicit in those responsibilities are expectations that individuals will:

• Abide by the laws of their communities, state, and nation;
• Share the burden of government by paying their taxes; and,
• Participate in their government through prudent exercise of their right to vote.

The ability to participate in one’s governance and to have choices in life requires a sufficient level of literacy, numeracy, cultural awareness and tolerance, and common sense. Providing the populace with that knowledge, skill, and wisdom is the shared responsibility of parents and our systems of public education.

How we respond to the economic, political, ecological, and socio-cultural challenges of this ever-more-complicated Twenty-First Century is totally dependent upon the quality of our systems of education and the efficacy of the educational process that drives it.

There are some educators who seem to resent the inference that at least part of their purpose is to prepare young people for the workforce. Given the rampant greed with which so many corporate leaders seem consumed there is a sense that the corporate world wants a workforce of unthinking, unimaginative, uncultured worker bees.

As a former business leader, I can assure the reader that automatons are the last thing the vast majority of employers want and there is a real frustration among employers that young people entering the workforce, today, cannot think creatively; lack literacy and the ability to do basic math; are unwilling to work hard; and, are selfish and unmotivated.

The community is the customer of our systems of public education and if the customer is unhappy with the quality of the product, educators must respond or the customer will take its business elsewhere. In that sense, public schools are no different than any other producer of goods and services. When we become dissatisfied with our meal at what was once our favorite restaurant, we start exploring alternatives. Providing alternatives to public schools would seem to be exactly what reformers are striving to do.

Dissatisfied customers are the driving force behind the educational reforms that are sweeping the nation. That the reform efforts of the corporate and government leaders are misguided is a result of their arrogance and ignorance regarding the real challenges in our public schools. They do not understand the challenges because they have not taken the time to walk in the shoes of public school teachers.

The only people who can fix what is broken in American public education are the educators themselves. Because public school teachers are being pummeled with blame for the problems of which they are, themselves, victims, they struggle to separate themselves from the problems. It is also natural that when we are immersed in our daily activities and challenges that we forget to step back to review our purpose and challenge our assumptions about what it is that we do. As professionals, however, this is exactly what educators must do.

Our teachers are in a perfect position to fix what is wrong in our schools and the answers are right there in front of them. It is like a painting with a design hidden within its content and texture. We know it is there but it is not until we step back and view the work from alternate perspectives that the embedded image begins to reveal itself to us.

Educators must have the strength of character and faith in one another, as members of an honorable profession, to acknowledge the things that do not work. They must then accept responsibility for addressing them. Only then can we begin to work together to resolve them.

It is vital that we all work together to maintain the equilibrium between rights and responsibilities and that we assess, unapologetically, the challenges we face as a society in the Twenty-First Century. What we have is a cherished thing but it is jeopardized when we live and interact on the basis of our biases and prejudices rather than the wisdom of an educated populace.

The reader is invited to read my book, Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America, in which I offer a blueprint for a solution to the challenges of public education with a focus on teachers, students, and success.

Denying the Crisis in Public Education a Strategic Error on the Part of Bad Ass Teachers and Their Colleagues.

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The Bad Ass Teachers Association, Diane Ravitch, and every other teacher advocacy group make a strategic error when they argue that there is no crisis in American public education and that our public schools are doing better than they have ever done.

It is a strategic error for several reasons all of which weaken the argument against the corporate reforms that are sweeping the nation. It is a strategic error because it portrays public school teachers as being in complete denial and overly defensive.

The truth is that our systems of public education are in a deep state of crisis and it is a crisis in which teachers bear only a modest share of the responsibility and are as much the victims of the crisis as are the students in their classrooms.

While it is true that our nation’s top students are learning more than at any time in the history of public education we could make an argument that even the interests of these accomplished youngsters are being compromised by the crisis in education. The sad truth is that the students at the other end of the academic success continuum may be learning less than at any time in the history of public education.

The overwhelming majority of our nation’s public school teachers are heroes of the first order as they dedicate their lives and careers to serving the interests of our nation’s children. Yes, there are bad teachers just like there are underperforming members of every other population of professional men and women. Do teachers need to do a better job of policing their own? Absolutely! Do teachers’ unions and associations need to do a better job of serving the interests of both their members and the teaching profession? Absolutely!

When examining the problems of our systems of public education, no one is guiltless, teachers included. The flip side of that statement is that when examining the problems of our systems of public education, no group of people does more for the children in America than the men and women who stand in front of our classrooms. When examined with an objective eye, in the midst of all of the forces that conspire to thwart their efforts, what public school teachers accomplish is nothing short of remarkable.

The truth is that teachers deserve all of the support we can give them and they deserve none of the mounting blame and criticism that is heaped upon their heads and shoulders, unmercifully.  It is also true that teachers need their unions and their associations. These are, after all, the only entities that support the efforts of teachers consistently. We do not plan to let the teacher organizations off the hook, however, as they are no different than any other business organization and need to relentlessly re-examine their mission, their strategic objectives, and retool themselves in an ever-changing political environment.

The one thing about which we can be sure is that very little of that which has worked in the past can be expected to work in the future.

Let us examine the evidence for the argument that our systems of public education are in a state of crisis. For the benefit or our teachers we are going to save the empirical evidence for later. The compelling truth is that teachers know in their hearts that public education is in crisis because they deal with the reality of it every single day in their classrooms.

You know it every day when the emphasis you are asked to place is more on test preparation than sustained learning. You know it every day that you must move your class on to a new lesson when you know there are students who are not yet ready; students who do not yet understand yesterday’s material and will be even less prepared to understand what is presented to them tomorrow.

You know when you deal with the disruption of students who will not behave and will not try and when their parents are convinced that you are being unfair to their child.

You know it when you deal with students who could be honor students if only they would try. You know it when parents of such students seem to have no more ability to motivate their children than you do.

You see it when you experience, first hand, the performance gap between the white and minority students in your classrooms and you know that many of the students who are failing place no value at all on education and neither do many of their parents.

You know it when, at the end of a school year you are approached by administrators asking what you can do to help a student improve his or her grade so they are able to graduate with their class; students who have done little or nothing to earn that grade for an entire semester or school year.

You know it when you look at children who are weighed down by the crushing burden of a range of disadvantages: disadvantages with which the students are as powerless to deal as are you, their teachers.

The empirical evidence for the crisis is so overwhelming is seems almost pointless to rehash the data. That teachers are unfairly blamed for the results of the standardized competency examinations administered in their respective states does not mitigate the fact that far too many children are failing.

There is the performance gap between white and black students, and between white and other minority students a gap that show no sign of narrowing and yet is rarely the topic of frank discourse.

NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) results that show that a full 60 percent of American students are below proficiency in virtually every subject of inquiry and anywhere from 85 to 90 percent of minority students are below proficiency. Contrary to the arguments of so many of the defenders of public education, the demarcation line between proficiency and below is the one that counts. NAEP defines “proficient” in several ways but the most noteworthy is the assertion that students must be able to use in real-life situations what they have learned in school. Anything less than this is simply unacceptable no matter how much we might wish, otherwise. After all, if we cannot use knowledge or skills in real life then we have not really learned.

So, the reader may ask, what are teachers to do in the face of the unreasonable scrutiny and the unfair burden of blame heaped on them by reformers and many of the families they exist to serve? It is so easy for teachers to feel overwhelmed by the forces that impede their ability to do what they know must be done.

The answers to these questions are the subject of my book Reinventing Education, Hope, and the American Dream: The Challenge for Twenty-First Century America.

For the purpose of today’s subject, the answer is that teachers need to stand tall and declare, going beyond what the Bad Ass Teachers are declaring:

“Damn right the system is in crisis and we’re through taking the blame for an antiquated educational structure and process that has not been substantially altered for more than a century.”

“We are through taking the blame for what may be the lowest level of student motivation to learn on the part of students in decades.”

“We are sick and tired of being held responsible for the cavernous disparity in the levels of preparation of students when they arrive at our door for their first day of school.”

“We are fed up with being blamed for the burgeoning population of American parents who have lost hope and faith in the American Dream and no longer believe that an education provides a way out for their sons and daughters.”

And, “We categorically reject responsibility for a reality that the combined power of the influence of the peer group and social media, both of which are fueled by the power of Madison Avenue, has made it exponentially more difficult for parents to sustain their role as the biggest influence in the lives of their pre- and post-pubescent children.”

When parents have ceased being the major influencing force in the lives of their children it will be that much more difficult for teachers to preserve their own level of influence in the lives of those same children.

But complaining about these realities will only take teachers so far. The operative question is what can be done about these challenges and right now, in this point in history, the only ones coming forth with what they believe to be a solution, however ill-advised it may be, are the corporate and government reformers with their “runaway train of misguided educational reforms.”

The Bad Ass Teacher Association, by taking a stand and shouting that they “aren’t going to take it anymore,” has positioned itself to play a lead role in countering the “reformers” with real and meaningful reforms of our educational process. In my next post, I will publish and open letter to the Bad Ass Teachers of America challenging them to take the lead in changing this reality and offering a comprehensive plan of action as a place to begin.

The Vergara Ruling in California will do more harm than good!

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Wouldn’t it be more productive to focus our energy and attention on supporting and protecting our good public school teachers?

It seems that we always focus on the negative. Bad teachers can already be fired, tenure or not. Tenure does not prevent school corporations from dismissing incompetent teachers it simply requires that they take the time to do it right and to make a well-documented case.

At a time when teachers are already under attack, falsely accused of being the cause of the failure of so many American students, this decision comes across as more of a “witch hunt” (or witch/warlock hunt if we want to be politically correct) than as a reasoned decision in an attempt to address our nation’s most important issue – the crisis in education!

It is similar to what happens so often in the work place when a few problem employees abuse the rules and privileges of their employer. In these instances, management rushes in to create more rules or take away privileges and the only people they impact are the good employees who come to work every day and do the best job of which they are capable. The new rules and restriction of privileges are like water off the proverbial duck’s back to the abusers because the problem employees do not care and will not abide by the rules, new or old.

In education we are in a state of public panic in which government officials, corporate reformers, and other policy makers are rushing around like incorrigible children, looking for someone at whom to lash out—looking for someone to blame. Teachers just happen to be the most obvious target.

Few if any of these officials and reformers, and also judges, have ever spent so much as a single day in a public school classroom, striving to understand the challenges with which our teachers are confronted.

Instead, they see teachers as easy targets. They tell themselves and the world that they are taking bold action and they puff out their chests in false pride over their bravado, oblivious to the great harm they do.

Not only do they hurt all of the good public school teachers who come to work every autumn to continue an important and seemingly impossible job from which the majority of us would abruptly shirk. What they also do is distract us from taking the time to understand the dynamics of our educational process and taking meaningful action to fix real problems.

If the critics of teachers would take the time to walk in the shoes of our public school teacher these high profile reformers, officials, and policy makers would see that teachers are as much the victims of the  dysfunctional system that is American public education as are the students whom they strive to teach under what are often adverse circumstances. They would see minimal support from parents in our most challenging schools and an alarming lack of motivation to learn on the part of the children of those parents.

They would see the damage that is done when they provide incentives, in the form of vouchers for the small number of families who are motivated to take advantage of them, to abandon our most challenged public schools. In the process they leave the teachers and students of those abandoned schools in their wake to deal with the unforeseen and often invisible consequences of their action. They also deprive those abandoned schools and their teachers of much needed revenue.

It is the symbolic equivalent of washing their hands of the problems facing those schools and their teachers and, most of all, our nation’s most vulnerable kids.

This is unacceptable and it will not do! It is time for teachers to rally together and fight to put a stop to the misguided and paralyzing reform initiatives of people who know not what they do!

It is time for teacher unions and associations to re-examine their mission and work together with school administrations to develop meaningful measures to improve teacher skills on the one hand and to develop measures of true accountability on the other.

Just last night, on “Just Let Me Teach” a program host by Justin Oakley on Indiana Talks, an online radio network, a caller told us about a peer review program called PAR in Anderson, Indiana. It is a program making real strides to improve rather than harm our public schools and their teachers. It is a program in which teachers and administrators are working together to create real, meaningful, and sustainable accountability.

These are the kind of programs our elected officials and so-called reformers should be supporting and replicating all over the nation.

And, why are these high profile leaders not talking about the important role that parents play in the education of their children? Why are they not brainstorming with local educators to come up with meaningful programs to reach out into our communities and pull parents in as partners in the education of their children? Why are we not taking the obscene amount of money that is being squandered on meaningless reforms and investing it, instead, in a nationwide initiative to Pull Parents in as Partners?

We need to recognize that the absolute most important things we can do to fix the systemic deficiencies in the American educational process is for teachers, both individually and collectively to partner up with school administrators to work on teacher training and accountability while, in our classrooms, parents and teachers partner up to give our nation’s children the best education possible!

 

Part 7 of the chapter by chapter review of “Reign of Error” by Diane Ravitch – What about PISA?

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Whether or not Ravitch is correct about the validity or significance of PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and other international student assessments, and she may well be, it is still embarrassing when we argue that the test itself was biased, unfair, or otherwise flawed whenever the results do not suit us.

The most important thing we need to learn from PISA is something that no one seems to recognize or acknowledge. The very existence of PISA and its assessment process signals a desire on the part of other nations to demonstrate that they can compete.

Dr. Ravitch may also be correct that we have no significant enemies that threaten to conquer us. What we do have, however, is a growing number of significant challengers in the “competition” that we know as the world marketplace. These nations are committed to competing with us economically and even surpassing us as the preeminent economic power. There is little evidence to show that we take this competition seriously. Most Americans seem to feel that we are somehow invulnerable to such challenges.

We need to remind every American citizen that our nation did not acquire its status as the richest and most powerful nation in the world as a birthright and we cannot sustain it because we feel entitled. That status was achieved because we had the best educated and the most productive workforce in the world. As we speak, other nations are working hard to change that reality and we need to be cognizant of the zeal of their efforts and commitment.

Competition is a bad thing only for those people who are unprepared or unable to compete. In the case of the U.S., it has been a long time since we have been sufficiently challenged that we have felt any need to work hard to sustain our advantage. That reality has been and is being altered irrevocably and we must respond. It is imperative that we view this challenge not as a threat but rather as an opportunity to expand our limits and raise our expectations.

Whatever one’s opinion about PISA, it is only one small piece of a growing body of evidence that the American education system is in crisis and that our national well-being is at risk. It is ironic that the only people who seem to recognize the risks are people who have no clue what to about it while the people who have the expertise to address the problems of American public education seem to be in denial and are more focused on defending their profession.

Far more important to us than PISA, the other evidence seems, to this writer, compelling and overwhelming:

1) According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) results show that only 40 percent of American eighth graders are “proficient or above” in math. The achievement levels that have been defined by NAEP are “Below Basic,” “Basic,” “Proficient,” and “Advanced.” (The reader is referred to the May 13th segment of our chapter by chapter review of Reign of Error, explaining why we reject Dr. Ravitch’s assertion that the benchmark should “basic or above” in favor of the far higher threshold of “Proficient or above.”) Our nation’s NAEP results for eighth grade reading, science, and writing were 31, 30, and 33 percent respectively. I don’t see how anyone can feel good about the fact that only 30 to 40 out of every 100 children have developed sufficient mastery of the subject matter to be able to apply what they have learned to real-world situations.

2) The performance gap between white and minority students, whether measured by NAEP or state competency exams, clearly indicates that the educational needs of minority children are not being effectively addressed in American public schools. Saying we have closed the gap a few percentage points over the past decade does not even approach acceptable. NAEP results show that 44 percent of white kids scored a Proficient or better compared to only about 15 percent of African-American students and 20 percent of Hispanics. This is an untenable situation and we dare not rest until we have altered this reality.

3) Employers throughout the U.S. are frustrated that young people entering the work force are poorly prepared to do the jobs for which they are being hired. (See the May 19th column by Paul Wyche of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette headlined: “The Young and Unreliable: Millennials’ work ethic appalls employers, who can’t find skilled help”) As a result, employers must incur significant costs to assess and provide remedial training for huge numbers of new hires.

4) The frustration in public school classrooms in communities throughout the U.S., on the part of teachers who must devote significant time and energy to maintain order – the lack of which deters millions of other students from taking full advantage of their opportunity for a quality education.

5) The burgeoning population of American parents who have lost hope and faith in the American Dream and no longer view an education as a ticket to a better life for their children.

The author’s personal experience as an ASVAB test administrator for the Department of Defense validates the existence of a crisis in education. Let there be no doubt that the military service will be only one of many doors of opportunity to close on young men and women unable to meet minimum eligibility requirements for enlistment in the Armed Services of the U.S.

Ravitch offers an eloquent argument for rejecting the focus on standardized testing, whether international student assessments or state competency exams, and preserving the educational traditions that contributed the U.S.’s rise to the top.

Yes, what we have been doing has brought us to where we are today but that does not mean it will take us where we need to go from here. Let us not forget that this same educational process that has gotten us where we are today also gave us a performance gap that is staggering in its scope and will continue to have crippling consequences.

And, NO, we cannot blame that all on poverty. One of our great weaknesses is our inability to step far enough back that we are able to see how our educational process contributes to the failure of so many of our children. It is a process that both contributes to and exacerbates the problems of poverty. These things are both interdependent and symbiotic.

One of the great misfortunes of the current corporate reform movement with its focus on privatization, choice, standards, testing, and accountability is that it distracts us from what should be our real mission. Our professional educators, justifiably or not, have chosen to slip into a defensive mode rather than use their experience and wisdom to evaluate and address the weaknesses of our current and obsolete educational process.

Quoting Yong Zhao, a Chinese born professor at the University of Oregon, Ravitch brings us to the crossroads but then sends us down the wrong path. Ravitch quotes Zhao, “that China wants to transform itself from ‘a labor-intensive, low-level manufacturing economy into an innovation-driven knowledge society. . . . Innovative people cannot come from schools that force students to memorize correct answers on standardized tests or reward students who excel at regurgitating spoon-fed knowledge. Zhao then writes, “If China, a developing country aspiring to move into an innovative society, has been working to emulate U.S. education, why does America want to abandon it.”

China seems to be beating us to the logical leap to where we should already be as illustrated by Valerie Strauss’ report in the May 26th issue of the Washington Post, “No. 1 Shanghai may drop out of PISA.”

Quoting Yi Houqin, an official of the Shanghai Education Commission the article shares that they are no longer interested in a focus on standardized testing. “What it [China] needs are schools that follow sound educational principles . . . and lay a solid foundation for students’ lifelong development.”

If anything should alarm American leaders, this shift in direction on the part of China’s educational leaders, should.

In the U.S., we tell ourselves that this is what we are about but our actions speak the truth. We say we want to develop the individuality of students and teach them to think and to explore but the way we structure the process is to ask all students to rush down the same path on the same schedule. Our educational process (not our schools or teachers) is focused on grading rather than learning; on failure rather than success.

If our objective is that kids learn something, why do we grade and then record their unsuccessful attempts. All those mistakes on practice worksheets and failed quizzes do is tell us that the child has not yet learned and is not ready to move on. So what do we do? We grade the worksheet or quiz, record the “C,” “D,” or “F” and move them along to the next lesson, module, grading period, semester or grade. What those practice worksheets and quizzes are really telling us is that our job on that particular lesson with that specific child is not yet completed.

Our real issue with testing, standardized or otherwise, should be on the purpose for which the test is designed to serve. Testing should always be, first, diagnostic: asking the question what has the child learned and how prepared are they for future; or, second, documentary: has the child mastered the lessons that we have striven to teach them? How they rank in comparison to other students is no more consequential than how the U.S. ranks compared to China or other nations on PISA assessments.

We come back to the only question that matters. How far has the child progressed; what are his or her strengths and weaknesses; and, where do we go from here.

The nation that is the world leader in economic performance will be the nation with the best educated workforce, with the best work ethic, and with the highest level of productivity. Economic laws and principles care nothing about the political, racial, or ethnic make-up of the population, only about what a people can accomplish.

We have already experienced, as a nation, what it is like to lose huge chunks of low-paying jobs to China, Mexico, and parts elsewhere. Imagine the consequences if we begin to lose chunks of our highest paying jobs for skilled or professional workers.

Imagine the impact if the average American household income was to drop by 10, 20, or even 30 percent. As earned income shrinks, how do we continue to bear the cost of the millions of baby boomers who are withdrawing from the workforce and can be expected to live until they are in their 80s and 90s. How do we continue to bear the cost of the growing population of Americans who are under-employed, unemployed, and unemployable when fewer people are working for fewer and fewer dollars.

If we want to get a different outcome we must begin doing things differently. Sadly, the opportunity cost is staggering when the powerful platform of Diane Ravitch is distracted from the real issues.

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