The Great American Educational Shell Game

                                                                                                                      by Alan M. Weber

By now, with all of the speeches and editorials you’ve undoubtedly read, you may be wondering why teachers don’t want to be accountable, what’s wrong with higher standards for students, how parents could object to good old testing to assess whether schools are actually teaching, and what could possibly be objectionable about choice and competition in education.  Why are all of these spoiled teachers, administrators, parents and kids making all this fuss?  Well, if these are in fact your questions, you have been taken in this shell game.  And not exposing the deceit involved will make losers of us all, especially our children.

When one thinks of “Common Core,” a nationalized set of grade-by-grade education standards, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the testing.  Standardized tests have been the subject of controversy for a long time.  They have all too frequently been faulty or misused.  They have often carried inherent gender, cultural, class, language, experiential and/or ability biases.  Some students are better equipped for them than others, based on either economic privilege or emotional makeup.  Yet what is happening now more than ever is that students are being labeled, teachers are being evaluated and schools are being ranked based heavily on assessment tools fraught with the potential for unreliability, inequality and test anxiety.  There is no standardized instrument that is a better indicator or predictor of a child’s ability and success than the child’s own teacher.  But we don’t trust teachers.  We want numerical bottom lines, because that’s how businesses work, and we think a “business model” is more “efficient.”  But teaching isn’t like the tallying of the output or the measuring of the speed of the production of widgets, it’s a fragile, individually human process.  Most certainly teachers should be accountable.  The questions are, what should they be accountable for, how can that standard of accountability be assessed, and who is to do such assessing?

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.  In the 1990’s, as the field conceived what 21^st century American education should look like, hopeful discussions of differentiated instruction (teaching with regard to diverse learning styles and modes of intelligence), developmental learning (children learning at their own pace according to what is “developmentally appropriate” for them), cooperative learning (students working together, engaged in problem solving activities, not drills isolated from peers and from meaning), etc., were being prescribed.  But that all changed with the true Y2K calamity.  This testing craze that is associated with so much controversy and stress began with the education act “No Child Left Behind,” conceived by the Bush Administration (2001: A Test Odyssey).  It was an abject failure, except in its effect of deflecting the discussion away from the things that really do advance quality education: smaller class sizes and better teacher training, renovation and innovation (like those previously proposed).  But those changes cost money, and politicians were fueling and then tapping into a clamor for tax cuts, not new expenditures (except for wars, of course).  The Obama Administration was expected to change all of this.  Before groups of educators, candidate Obama criticized testing as a poor measure of the success of both students and teachers and the catalyst for the lamentable practices of “teaching to the test” and reducing a “well rounded” education to “what’s on the test.”  But with his election came “Race to the Top,” which, in effect, doubled down on rather than, as promised, reversing “No Child Left Behind.”    

The politicization and privatization of public education became further entrenched.  The wall between test results and teacher assessment promised under “No Child Left Behind” fell like the Berlin Wall.  They were now fair game in decisions regarding tenure, promotion, retention and reward.  So were attempts at union busting and private alternatives, as the scapegoating and squeezing of teachers escalated.  The word from Washington was that they really did want innovation, they really did want alternative teaching and assessment tools, really they did, but it was a race now.  States were in competition for desperately needed funding (the whims and inequities of national geopolitics determining which of our children would be bestowed with more), and the clock was ticking.  So if no groundbreaking innovations suddenly came to mind, well, more testing we will go.   In New York, my home state, almost half of teacher assessment scores are based on testing.  This was a result of an unfortunate compromise that unions and local boards were pressured to make under the threat that if districts didn’t come up with a plan that satisfied the Governor, and by his deadline, he would impose his own, even more test dependent methodology.  And herein lies the crux of much of the problem.

Politicians have ordained themselves as education experts.  Governor Cuomo, with two races looming, the one “to the top” and the one for reelection, felt justified in issuing such ultimata because, after all, teachers are “public servants.”  Unfortunately, they’re paid through property taxes, which not only results in a sort of caste system within public education, but it allows the public, who already believe that “anybody can teach,” to support “accountability” standards and measures that wouldn’t even be dreamed of for any other professionals.  Imagine doctors being graded based on the number of their patients who died, without considering what illness they came in with and how they responded to treatment.  Imagine attorneys being rated based on the number of their clients who were convicted, without factoring in the circumstances of their cases and the make up of their juries.  To assist in pleasing the race referees in Washington, Governor Cuomo selected as Education Commissioner John King, whose job it would be to formulate local compliance strategies for assessing public school teachers, despite the fact that he had never walked in the shoes of one, having only taught three years, one in Puerto Rico, one in a private school and one in a charter school.  These are patterns we see over and over.

Mayor Bloomberg in New York, apparently by virtue of his tough business background, somehow became an education expert, wrestling control of the Board of Education and pushing through a high stakes standardized test for third graders so non-forgiving that failure could result in a child who had otherwise done fine all year long being held back.  President Obama, apparently by virtue of the fact that his mother woke him before the crack of dawn to do his drills, also somehow became an education expert, pushing an agenda of longer school days and years and earlier and harder schoolwork and homework.  And he brought in, as Secretary of Education and chief architect of “Race to the Top,” Arne Duncan, who had never even been fitted for a teacher’s shoes, having instead been what has been referred to as an “education CEO.”  Never mind that there is not a single study that indicates that “earlier is better.”  Denmark, the most literate (and, coincidentally, most “happy”) country in the world is one of the latest in beginning formal academics.  Forget the fact that there are now many credible studies that homework serves no academic benefit whatsoever, except in the singular case of middle grade mathematics memorization, and that places that have dropped homework have seen no decline in performance.  Let’s ignore informed projections of the long-term effects of stress on children from all of this testing and homework and acceleration.  Those who point to how hard, for example, Japanese students, like Japanese workers, are pushed might also want to take a look at their suicide rate. 

But after all, this is not just a competition between students, it’s a competition between nations.  And each time newspaper headlines have ignited fears that America is “falling behind” some other country, whether it was the Soviet Union two generations ago, Japan during the last generation, or China, particularly Shanghai, now, the knee jerk reaction, without any basis in pedagogical research, has always been just this: start our children earlier, work them harder and get “back to basics” (meaning to put aside all of those “fads” like programs for self-esteem, diversity sensitivity or conflict resolution, so that we wouldn’t “distract” our children from the holy triad of “the 3 R’s”).  This led, decades ago, to the first “pushed-down curriculum,” whereby academic content was moved down one, sometimes two grades.  Out went much of the music, the art, the social studies, the nurturing and the play, and in came the ditto sheets, the homework, the tests, the computers, the sitting… and we have never been the same.  And all we got for it was a new psychological phenomenon theretofore unknown by psychologists called “second grade burn-out.”  Just at the age when academic teaching is actually appropriate, children have already suffered too much pressure, tedium, confusion, self-denial and possibly failure, and they’ve had enough. 

Modern brain science validates what most education experts have been saying for a century and more: that if learning isn’t meaningfully connected to children’s experiences, if it isn’t self-motivated and self-constructed, if it isn’t age appropriate, and if it isn’t conducted in an atmosphere of calm and relative pleasure, the synapses needed as the building blocks for further learning simply don’t form.  Yet, having not learned a thing from history or science, we have been pushing down even more, first in the name of  “No Child Left Behind,” and now with “Common Core.”  And we are producing generations of students who can’t think, don’t care, hate “learning,” have little sense of themselves or the world beyond, and just want to know what’s “on the test.”  It might not take a conspiracy theorist to speculate as to whether this isn’t just what the government and business forces who have conducted this educational coup really want: a society that awaits instructions and performs as one, rather than having to bear the inconveniences of one comprised of unpredictable, questioning individuals.  The government gets a citizenship trained to blindly follow campaign rhetoric and calls to war, and the businesses that run charter schools within the public school system and private schools supported by vouchers get a pool of workers trained to the skills and specifications that benefit themselves.

So what’s really wrong with “Common Core?”  Well, there are certainly things that could have been right about it had independent educators had more of a voice in its completion.  One can’t question that there are many teachers who need parameters, direction and resources.  We also need standards.  But the standards we need are professional, not prescriptive.  We need inspired, enlightened and empowered teachers who can be decision makers, adapting goals and methods based on individual developmental levels, needs, cultural backgrounds, learning styles and interests, not drones who are forced to follow a recipe or script.  The problems with “Common Core” are two-fold.  First, it seeks to homogenize education, to ignore differences in children, environments, methodologies and “teachable moments” and essentially expect every child to be doing the same thing at the same time in the same way.  Second, it perverts the idea of sequential learning, one concept or skill built systematically from a previous foundation, by moving not developmentally but exponentially.  While the pre-kindergarten standards are basically on target, with each subsequent grade the gap between what is appropriate and inappropriate, sometimes even possible and impossible, to be teaching and learning grows wider.  So whereas knowledgeable and creative preschool teachers can stick with the meaningful, quality activities they’ve always done, such as making play dough or going on nature walks, and simply demonstrate to the education bookkeepers that they are already meeting expectations naturally, teachers in higher grade levels too often have to sell out and comply with artificial top-down lessons that they don’t believe in and sometimes don’t even understand.  Not only has this left teachers demoralized and confined, it has resulted in increasing failure among students.  And that’s part of the shell game, too.  

Every one of the politicians mentioned is an insistent supporter of the incursion of business into public education, in the forms of charter schools, vouchers for private schools and their role in all of this testing.  Publishers like Pearson spend over a million dollars in donations to these career and educational politicians, and they, not independent educators, have been granted domain over the constructing of the tests, the test-based curriculum books, the test preparation guides and the test remediation materials.  The fact that more children are struggling and more are failing as a result of “Common Core” turns out, whether intentionally or not, to be in the material interest of these publishers and think tanks.  (The better to fail you with, my dear.)  As we obsess about “outcomes,” are we being blinded to the reality that it’s really about “incomes?”  When American public education first began, it was developed by industrialists, not educators, for the purpose of training the factory workers the changing economy needed.  Do we really want to come full circle and hand education back to business?  Do we really want the profit motive to corrupt education as it has health and pharmaceutical care?  Do we really want to allow the businesspeople who manage charter schools the unfair competitive advantages of loosened regulations and red tape while further tightening the grip on the educators in our already underfunded and under sieged public schools (especially now that we know that most of the claims about their superior results turned out to be false, more a product of what business is really good at, effective advertising, being able to “hire” the most productive and reject the least profitable “workforce” [i.e., children], and “cooking the books,” than what they purport to be good at, education)?  Do we really want to continue to devalue and disempower our educators, or do we really want innovation and success?  Aren’t our children more than combatants in a battle for technological supremacy, and education more than a training ground for industry? 

So what do we do now?  If we are to look to other countries for answers, we discover that those who have maintained greater success educationally have not done so by transforming kindergarten from the “garden of children” it was intended to be from its inception to an early academics factory.  In fact, our very own studies, including one conducted by the District of Columbia school system in the 1990’s, reveal to us that kindergarten programs that make academics a priority not only place children at a disadvantage socially, a dangerous enough consequence, but, ironically, academically as well.  Where learning is based on memorization, children forget.  Where learning is based on extrinsic motivation, like gold stars and candy jars, ongoing inner motivation is denied.  Where learning is devoid of context and meaning, no foundation for future learning forms.  No, the systems that have succeeded are those that have understood that the firmest foundation for future learning is play, characterized by exploration and imagination.  The quality of teacher training and treatment, the priorities and temperament of the culture, and the science and creativity of the pedagogy are also found to be factors.  If we are to save our schools, we need to better train and properly assess teachers, not scapegoat and shackle them.  And that assessment should come not from politicians who look at “bottom lines,” but master educators who look at the actual teaching and the underlying circumstances.  How can those like Obama and Cuomo, who were anti-poverty crusaders before they became politicians, no longer understand that test scores are more greatly influenced by factors like nutrition, health, environment, resources, parental education, discrimination and belief than by the actions of one teacher?  Nonetheless, those educational and ethical actions are important and obligatory if we are to begin a ripple that will ultimately reverse the current, and, in the meantime, positively affect individual lives. 

We need smaller classes and better teacher to child ratios so that more individualized attention and curricula become realistic possibilities again.  And we need to fundamentally change the way we conceptualize teaching and the arc to success, which, to the dismay of the bean counters, is ultimately an immeasurable, unpredictable, synergistic process of taking individual children from where each comes to us and bringing them as far as their own unblemished potentials and our own best efforts can take them.  We are rapidly reaching the bottom of a slippery slope, so far down we can’t even see the landscape anymore.  Like Sysiphus, we have to roll a boulder up a steep hill, but unlike him, we can reach the top, the real top, if we cooperate and deliberate, not race to it.