Executive director's message: Reform, Redux
Among the unfortunately numerous critiques of the state of American education, I ran across the following in Time magazine:
“Only in the U.S., reported Flesch, is there any remedial-reading problem. In Britain, kindergarten children read Three Little Pigs; in Germany, second-grade pupils can read aloud (without necessarily understanding all the words) almost anything in print. By contrast, average U.S. thirdgraders have a reading mastery of only 1,800 words. Why is the U.S. so far behind?”
You may be surprised to learn that the issue in which this copy appeared was dated March 14, 1955, in a review of “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” by Rudolf Flesch. Though this book was more an indictment of a reading methodology than the entire education system, it seems remarkable that for at least the last 55 years public education has been under fire from one or another “reformer.”
My favorite portion of the article was the following passage:
Yet, Flesch adds, U.S. educators by and large refuse to recognize the word method‘s shortcomings. Reading failures are merely blamed on “poor eyesight ... or a broken home ... or an Oedipus complex or sibling rivalry.”
This may be the closest we’ll ever come to seeing parental shortcomings cited as the cause of poor student performance, though I have to feel sorry for those parents of poor readers in that era. One can only imagine what parent/teacher conferences were like.
All of which leads to the conclusion that perhaps the reformers who have been working to improve the public schools for at least the past 55 years should be declared failures themselves, at least in this endeavor. If after 5 1/2 decades of trying, the public schools have proven to fall short of their European and Asian counterparts (never mind the demographic variances or systemic issues such as providing a similar education to all students, regardless of demonstrated academic ability and motivation), maybe it’s time to scrutinize the reformers’ motives and abilities.
Don’t bother me with the facts
There is often an “Alice down the rabbit hole” sense to why some things that are so selfevident to educators are not to those who would tell you how to do your jobs. While there is general agreement that all children can learn, there is too little attention paid to the reality that their learning will not necessarily occur at the same pace, they don’t all start in the same place, and they are not all equally motivated.
A shocking number of reforms, including many if not most of those being proposed at the national level, are also unsupported by the research, most strikingly the idea that somehow student test scores can serve as a proxy for determining how well an individual teacher performs. Numerous studies, from entities as respected as the Rand Corporation and as conservative as the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, have found that the “teacher effect” on student performance is very difficult if not impossible to quantify and measure, and has a far lesser impact than other factors in a student’s life that are beyond the teacher’s control. (For a fairly brief but comprehensive summary of recent education research that is pertinent to the school reform movement, I recommend that you read an article, “Education Indoctrination,” by Leonie Haimson at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie-haimson/education-indoctrination_b_739768.html.)
Given the state of the research, it makes it very hard to understand why so many policymakers are determined to spend vast sums of money on paying the “best” teachers, as determined by student test scores, when the research not only does not support this linkage but often warns against it. The increasing pressure of the so-called “muscle philanthropies” (think Gates and Broad) that are offering large sums of money in return for adoption of their policy initiatives is providing momentum to this movement that is, in many locales, moving beyond the carrot (more money for higher test scores) to the stick (growth plans and proposed contract nonrenewals).
So what’s the problem? I can personally assure you that it’s not bad lobbyists; we provide lawmakers with the research at every available opportunity so they can make informed decisions. The fact that educators have been whipsawed by a series of ill-conceived policy initiatives that are adopted fast and then abandoned quickly for the past couple of decades makes it even more frustrating to watch the current effort to entrench what most researchers would tell you is another wrong turn in federal law. In addition to placing more emphasis on student test scores as a primary measure of teacher performance, the current administration is also pushing for more charter schools despite most research indicating that the majority underperform their public school counterparts, especially in Texas. Yet both of these initiatives are expected to be key components of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, formerly known as NCLB until that brand came to be considered tarnished) if and when it is reauthorized by Congress.
The conundrum
Once again, research may provide the answer. In an article appearing in the Boston Globe last summer, reporter Joe Keohane reviewed research by political scientists that concluded that “…when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation.” He also noted that “A 2006 study by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge at Stony Brook University showed that politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. These people may be factually right about 90 percent of things, but their confidence makes it nearly impossible to correct the 10 percent on which they’re totally wrong.” (The link, for those of you who may wish to share this article with a spouse, mother-in-law, or other loved one, is http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire).
As you’ll read elsewhere in this issue, the upcoming legislative session promises to be an especially difficult one, and we expect to have to fight to keep many of the good provisions in current law intact, such as the 22:1 class-size caps in grades K-4. The class-size caps seem to be an early target as some administrators seek cost-saving measures in anticipation of flat or reduced school funding for the next two budget years. Even though the Texas Education Agency has granted all but five of the requests for waivers of class-size caps that have ever been submitted by districts, some are still seeking even more flexibility.
The recently released interim report of the Senate Education Committee gives us a sneak preview of some of the fights that may be brewing. Among the recommendations made are: “Modify class-size limitations to allow more flexibility to school districts to meet the needs of their students; provide districts greater flexibility in educator contracting; include a student achievement component in teacher evaluations to measure individual educator’s effectiveness; and remove the cap on the number of charters able to be awarded.” As previously noted, the research does not support many of these recommendations. However, as also previously noted, the research may not be particularly persuasive to those who have strongly held beliefs.
That’s where you come in. Your experiences in the classroom provide a different perspective than research, and it’s hard to argue with someone who speaks from personal experience. Legislators are always interested in hearing from their constituents (generally more so than they are in hearing from lobbyists), and many are likely to be particularly attentive after the upsets in the last election cycle and when they don’t know whether their districts will be redrawn in a fashion making re-election more challenging. It is critical that now, before legislators get to Austin and are besieged by advocates on literally hundreds of issues, you start making contact with your state senator and representative. If you’re not sure who your senator or representative is, or if there have been changes, you can find that out and get contact information at http://www.tcta.org/gain.
Throughout the session, we’ll be providing you with updated information, generally via e-mails or tweets (you can sign up to follow TCTA’s Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/texascta), and we’ll need your help. Even if you just speak to the person who answers the phone in your legislator’s office to leave a message that says “I’m Jane Doe, a constituent of Representative Bestyet, and I oppose changes to class-size limitations,” that message will count and is far more effective than signing a petition or faxing a form letter.
By all accounts this is going to be a difficult and potentially nasty session. Education is almost inevitably going to have to share in the pain of budget cuts, and that means that once again you and your districts are likely to be asked to do more with less. But there’s no reason for collateral damage in areas like teacher rights and benefits, or conditions that are conducive to student learning. With your help, we’ll be fighting the good fight and building on the progress we’ve made in previous years rather than creating problems that will need reform up the road.
