Dana Goldstein

See You in September

I've decamped to Unalaska, Alaska, in the Aleutian Islands, to enjoy Mother Nature and work on some longterm projects. I'll be back on the blog after Labor Day!

The GOP's Shifting School Reform Agenda

I have a new piece up at Slate about how the Tea Party-Christian conservative mind meld on education--anti-standards, pro-homeschooling, pro-culture war meddling with curriculum--has become more and more mainstream within the Republican Party. The trend is epitomized by figures like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, who have both made protest against the federal role in school reform a cornerstrone of their political careers. 

I didn't have space to get to this in the Slate piece, but there are two other major things happening right now within the GOP on education. First, House Republicans would like to allow school districts to redirect Title I funding, which is intended to serve low-income students, to other programs and less needy populations. Second, at the state level, Republican governors are rediscovering the issue of private school vouchers. 

Talking Education Politics on MSNBC

I'm usually quite nervous when I go on television, and I always foget to smile! But doing TV with Ezra Klein, one of my closest friends, was reassuring and so much fun. And how rare to have a policy debate this substantive on cable TV? 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

My Take on "Gloria," the New Documentary about Steinem's Life

"Gloria: In Her Own Words" is airing on HBO Monday evening. I found the documentary pretty problematic. It refused to explicitly tackle race issues, either during the height of the Second Wave or more recently, when Steinem made a number of controversial statements about the relationship between race and gender during the 2008 Democratic primary. 

Though there are interviews in Gloria about how upper-middle class, straight feminists came to embrace lesbian rights and economic justice for poor women, there is no explicit discussion of an equally enduring and arguably more fraught issue: the relationship between feminism and struggles for racial equality. The film does feature archival footage of 1970s white feminists arguing that men’s only bars are the equivalent of Jim Crow lunch counters. Doesn't that contention cry out for debate, for analysis--for something? We see Steinem appear alongside her 1970s “speaking partners,” the black feminists Flo Kennedy and Dorothy Pitman Hughes, but we don't hear much about how these women (who were so often overshadowed by the more famous Steinem) navigated their dual identies as people of color within the feminist movement.

Steinem notes that her own brand of feminism was more radical than that of her elders, women like Betty Friedan, who were concerned mostly with the plight of white, college-educated housewives. Yet there are no interviews with either Steinem or other movement veterans that reflect explicitly on the relationship between feminism and Civil Rights. We hear about how Steinem’s sexy good looks helped propel her to prominence, but not about how her whiteness helped make feminism seem less threatening. We also learn nothing about the sophisticated set of critiques women-of-color, such as Angela Davis and bell hooks, have long made regarding mainstream feminism: that its focus on abortion detracted from their own struggle for maternal rights, and that the assumption that women represent a united interest group often downplayed the struggles of non-white women in overcoming racism.

I should note that Steinem herself, in my experience, is more than game to reflect on all these issues. I hold the filmmakers accountable for failing to explore them in the movie. In any case, read the whole review at The Nation.

More Thoughs on Whitney Tilson and My Essay on Brill's "Class Warfare"

No piece of journalism is ever perfectly-crafted or argued, and I think Matt Yglesias' defense of charter school donor/advocate Whitney Tilson, who I criticize in my essay on Class Warfare, is generally fair.

Yes, Tilson is a Democrat who has donated to many politicians who support progressive taxation and better social services for the poor. I admire Tilson for being one of the "Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength," signing a letter in support of raising taxes on wealthy folks like himself. And I'm a commited reader of Tilson's invaluable, though sometimes overheated, school reform newsletter.

The point I tried to make in my essay, however, was not, as Matt writes, that "the focus on schooling is kind of a mask for people who want to avoid grappling with other inequities." I agree with Tilson, and with Matt, that school reform is a productive lever for social change--if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be devoting my professional life to this topic! Rather, my point was that the political/rhetorical contention of some education reformers that teacher-quality reforms alone can significantly overcome poverty is wildly misleading. This becomes clear when one looks at the body of social scientific research on the forces that shape poor children's lives. As I write in the essay, we cannot downplay or ignore all the other elements of schooling--let alone other policy areas--that can help close achievement gaps, from rich, culturally-relevant curricula; to academic and social counseling; to vocational training; to civics education. 

Unfortunately, we have an education debate that, in the media, is often narrowed into a labor-management issue: "teachers' unions vs. poor kids." Tilson is certainly someone who uses this limiting lens frequently in his writing and speaking. That said, I also know that Tilson, who is intimately involved in the KIPP schools, has a deep understanding of the many challenges of school reform at the classroom and school-level. It wasn't fair for me to suggest otherwise.

I continue to believe, however, that there's a reason why non-unionized charter schools are so attractive to affluent education reformers who hail from the business world: They are a free-market solution based around ideas of competition and choice. But when we require parents to make a complicated set of choices to access a quality education for their children, we set up a certain number of poor kids to get left behind: the vast majority who lose school lotteries or who are never entered into them. Meanwhile, the least-advantaged children become clustered in neighborhood public schools of last resort, isolated from their peers who enjoy more parental involvement.

If we want to address this problem, we should be considering integrationist education reforms, not just policies that seek to make the best out of 100 percent high-poverty schools. And we need to figure out--fast--how to apply the lessons of high-performing schools, whether they be charters, privates, parochials, or traditional publics, to failing schools. As successful school leaders will tell you, an obsessive focus on teacher evaluation and pay isn't enough: Successful schools are built on engaging curricula, effective outreach to families, and so many other factors. 

Read more: Research shows good teachers flee segregated schools

The practicalities of school integration

Why housing policy is school policy

On Steven Brill, Kids, Teachers, Poverty, and Test Scores

My essay on Steven Brill's new book, Class Warfare, is out in this week's Nation. The book is an impressive work in many ways; Brill does a great job at documenting the many financial, political, and personal connections that animate the standards-and-accountability school reform movement. And his thinking on charter schools and Teach for America has become more sophisticated and critical since his famous "rubber room" and "teachers' unions last stand" articles came out in 2009 and 2010.

That said, Class Warfare is filled with the sort of myopic, test-score-obsessed thinking that dominates far too much of the education conversation. I write:

School reform is just as much about the three Cs: curriculum (what knowledge and skills students actually learn); counseling (how we prepare young people, professionally and socially, for adult life); and civics (whether we teach students how to participate in American democracy).

Brill never mentions any of this. Class Warfare is built around the idea of children, particularly poor children, as test-score-producing machines, with little to no attention paid to other aspects of their personalities or lives. The book’s heroes are philanthropists, school administrators, policy wonks and politicians. We meet few students or parents.

Most pernicious is Brill’s repeated claim that the effects of poverty can be not only mitigated but completely beaten back by good teachers. “A snowballing network of education reformers across the country…were producing data about how teaching counted more than anything else,” Brill writes in the book’s opening pages. Later, he devotes a chapter to economists Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger, whose work on value-added teacher evaluation has powerfully influenced Bill Gates’s education philanthropy. “It wasn’t that poverty or other factors didn’t affect student performance,” Brill summarizes. “Rather, it was that teacher effectiveness could overcome those disadvantages” (emphasis added).

In fact, the work of the many researchers Brill approvingly cites—including Kane, Staiger and Stanford’s Eric Hanushek—shows that while teaching is the most important in-school factor affecting student achievement, family and neighborhood characteristics matter more. The research consensus has been clear and unchanging for more than a decade: at most, teaching accounts for about 15 percent of student achievement outcomes, while socioeconomic factors account for about 60 percent.

It is tiring to make this point over and over again. 

Read the whole thing.

Randi Weingarten: Wisconsin Fight "Inspirational," Citizens United Contributed to Dem Losses

I had lunch with American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten this afternoon here in New York. Our conversation was filled with interesting tidbits, and I'll give it a fuller treatment on the blog tomorrow. For now, I want to share her take on the recall vote in Wisconsin yesterday, in which Democrats won two of the six Republican seats up for grabs, falling two seats short of the number needed to gain control of the state senate. 

The election was an important milestone for labor unions, which spent millions attempting to recall Republican lawmakers allied with Gov. Scott Walker, who successfully curtailed collective bargaining rights for teachers and other public employees. Conservative organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch brothers, also poured millions into the state. "If you don't think Citizens United had an impact, just look at Wisconsin," Weingarten said, referring to conservative fundraising in particular. 

She spent Monday on the ground in Wisconsin with union and Democratic organizers, who were operating in districts that typically lean Republican. "Setting a high bar and not reaching it is disappointing, but getting this close was amazing," she said. "I'm really proud of them. Being there was so inspirational." This afternoon, Weingarten raised questions about voting irregularities in Waukesha County, which released its results late in the evening after both yesterday's vote and the May Supreme Court election. And she also pointed out that mid-August is a terrible time to campaign on public school issues, since many families with children are away from home. 

"The labor movement is always about those who have little power fighting back," Weingarten said. "We don't always win the first time around. But those who try and suppress people now know that they're going to have a real fight on their hands."

A Minute or Two

 

Matt Damon, Arne Duncan, and the Divisive Teacher Quality Debate

Last weekend, two very different speeches on the future of the teaching profession made news.

The first was from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who appeared Friday before the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, which runs the elite National Board certification process for teachers. The United States must follow the example of nations that out-perform us educationally, Duncan said, and begin to recruit most of our public school teachers from the top thirds of their college classes. To do this, he argued, we will need to raise average starting salaries from $30,00 to $60,000 and average salary caps from $70,000 to $150,000.

Is that really possible in a climate of federal, state and local budget cuts? We can find the money, Duncan said, by utilizing technology to “reorganize” schools (read: raise class sizes and shrink the teacher corps); instituting teacher merit pay based in part on student test score data; loosening teacher job security protections; and cutting teacher benefit and pension packages and redirecting some of the funds toward salaries.

Duncan knows such proposals remain controversial among teachers. “I respectfully urge everyone to take a deep breath, hold their fire, and see this as an opportunity to transform the entire profession,” he said, “not as a threat or as an investment we don't need.”

The second speech was from the actor Matt Damon, a public school graduate and son of a teacher who made news in March when he slammed the Obama administration’s teacher evaluation and pay proposals in a CNN interview. Speaking at the Save Our Schools protest march Saturday near the White House, Damon brought some in the crowd to tears as he painted a more holistic, even romantic portrait of the public school teacher’s role.

“I don’t know where I would be today if my teachers’ job security was based on how I performed on some standardized test,” Damon said. “If their very survival as teachers was based [not] on whether I actually fell in love with the process of learning, but rather if I could fill in the right bubble on a test. If they had to spend most of their time desperately drilling us and less time encouraging creativity and original ideas; less time knowing who we were, seeing our strengths, and helping us realize our talents. I honestly don’t know where I’d be today if that was the type of education I had. I sure as hell wouldn’t be here. I do know that.

“This has been a horrible decade for teachers. I can’t imagine how demoralized you must feel.”

After the speech, Damon and his mom did a short interview with a libertarian Reason.tv reporter. After criticizing “MBA-style thinking” in education policy and defending teacher tenure, Damon angrily contested the cameraman’s assertion that 10 percent of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers are bad at their jobs. “Maybe you’re a shitty cameraman,” Damon countered.

The video went viral.

The Obama administration’s education policies have always been controversial among more traditional education liberals, who are disappointed to see a Democratic president pursue an agenda of standardization and weakened union protections. But the always-contentious school reform debate has gotten even nastier over the past several months, with the role of multiple-choice tests emerging as the flashpoint.

Adult test-tampering scandals in Atlanta; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Pennsylvania; and elsewherearound the country have focused new scrutiny on efforts to tie teacher evaluation and pay to student test scores. Polls of teachers’ opinions on performance-based pay schemes are divided; according to Education Next, 72 percent of teachers oppose such policies, while the National Center for Education Information finds 59 percent support them. What’s clear is that there is no teacher consensus in favor of the testing regimen created by No Child Left Behind, and that teachers don’t broadly support the Obama administration’s attempt to expand high-stakes assessments to subjects other than math and reading. Education Next found that 60 percent of teachers oppose tying tenure decisions to test scores. The NCEI poll reported that 44 percent of teachers are dissatisfied with student achievement testing in general.

Teachers (and parents, and Matt Damon) are right to be skeptical of the administration’s testing push. While “standards-based-assessment” doesn’t have to mean that students are sitting for dozens of new bubble tests—there are other ways to “test,” including portfolio-based systems, performance tasks and presentations—the fact of the matter is that some states and school districts will respond to the incentives of Obama’s Race to the Top program in ways that over-rationalize learning.

Case in point: While reporting from Colorado this past winter, I observed a school district, Harrison District 2 in Colorado Springs, that gives pencil-and-paper exams in every subject at every grade level. The second grade physical education exam asked, “Draw a picture of how your hands look while they are catching a ball that is thrown above your head,” and, “What are two rules students can follow so they do not run into others when running around in physical education class?”

The results of this exam, which tested reading, writing and drawing far more than physical fitness, impacted the gym teacher’s evaluation score and pay.

Arne Duncan is aware that there is a difference between sophisticated student assessment and bad student assessment. That’s why the Department of Education should provide states and districts with much more specific guidelines about best practices in assessment, particularly in non-traditional subjects such as art, music and physical education. In fact, this would be a great subject for one of the department’s national conferences, something akin to the event the DOE hosted in Denver in February on union-district partnerships.

Absent that kind of guidance, the protests of the Matt Damons of the world will only grow louder, and the Obama administration will lose crucial public support for its teacher-quality agenda.

cross-posted at The Nation

Matt Damon, Arne Duncan, and Tests in Gym Class

Check out my new column at The Nation on the divisive teacher quality debate.

Teachers (and parents, and Matt Damon) are right to be skeptical of the administration’s testing push. While “standards-based-assessment” doesn’t have to mean that students are sitting for dozens of new bubble tests—there are other ways to “test,” including portfolio-based systems, performance tasks, and presentations—the fact of the matter is that some states and school districts will respond to the incentives of Obama’s Race to the Top program in ways that over-rationalize learning.

Case in point: While reporting from Colorado this past winter, I observed a school district, Harrison District 2 in Colorado Springs, that gives pencil-and-paper exams in every subject at every grade level. The second grade physical education exam asked, “Draw a picture of how your hands look while they are catching a ball that is thrown above your head,” and, “What are two rules students can follow so they do not run into others when running around in physical education class?”

The results of this exam, which tested reading, writing, and drawing far more than physical fitness, impacted the gym teacher’s evaluation score and pay.

Arne Duncan is aware that there is a difference between sophisticated student assessment and bad student assessment. That’s why the Department of Education should provide states and districts with much more specific guidelines about best practices in assessment, particularly in non-traditional subjects such as art, music, and physical education. In fact, this would be a great subject for one of the Department’s national conferences, something akin to the event the DOE hosted in Denver in February on union-district partnerships.

Read the whole thing.