Tasks for the 2011-2012 School Year

There are two primary tasks for the 2011-2012 school year: 1) responding to high stakes testing and 2) facilitating more inclusive school environments.

Responding to High Stakes Testing

Recently, many urban principals have kicked off the school year with celebrations of test score gains and the practices that led to them. The celebrations are understandable given the immense pressure to raise standardized test scores and the sad state of American public education. The fact is that raising scores may get some schools to “safe harbor” or minimize the pressure from local districts, but what are we really celebrating?

Several questions arise as we celebrate: Are short term number gains worth what is being sacrificed? Is better teaching happening or is better teaching to the test taking place? When we narrow the curriculum to teach to the test, are students really learning anything that will be of value to themselves, their communities, or the world 20 years from now?  Is the end goal of our educational mission higher test scores or something much greater? Are short term test score gains worth the cost we will pay when we are faced with a generation of people that have limited critical thinking and creative problem solving skills?

With respect to the rabid high stakes testing sensation still gripping public schools, here are a few suggestions for parents and students to get involved:

Parents can join: Opt Out of the State Test: The National Movement

Parents can get informed at: FairTest

Parents should also check out: Parents Across America for information about improving schools and responding to NCLB.

Students can join: The Bartleby Project

Facilitating More Inclusive School Environments

As the new school year begins we have an opportunity to facilitate more inclusive and compassionate classroom environments. While the emotional trauma of being subjected to teasing and bullying is well established, recent studies have indicated that high achieving students of color, particularly Blacks and Latinos also suffer academically from exposure to bullying.

This year No Name Calling Week is January 23-27, 2012. Encourage your school to participate or participate in your own classroom by using the classroom resources and sharing the book The Misfits by James Howe with your students. Students can also take part in a national Creative Expression Contest where they can raise awareness about teasing and bullying.

During the 2004-2005 school year I taught sixth grade gifted English Language Learners at a public middle school in East Los Angeles; my students participated in the inaugural No Name Calling Creative Expression Contest. My English class was very proud when Jessica Carrillo won second prize (view press release here). Jessica’s original story is an inspiration to upcoming authors and this year she should be starting her first year of college. You can view her story below:

Name Calling Hurts by Jessica Carrillo

Name Calling Hurts by Jessica Carrillo from T. Lee

Exciting NCLB and RttT News!

Recently, seemingly exciting and promising news has emerged in the world of P-12 education about No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (RttT). Essentially, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that NCLB waivers will be granted to States that agree to implement the Common Core Standards and privatization/charter-school model changes promoted by RttT.

The waiver move is the latest kowtow to the reality that American public schools cannot and will not meet the ridiculous goal of 100% proficiency in Reading and Math by 2014 as NCLB demands – at best, it’s chipping away with a butter knife at a piece of legislation we need to jackhammer into oblivion; at its worst it is a strong-arm maneuver aimed at a deepening of the corporate agenda for public education.

The cheating scandals of Atlanta and those that have not yet been exposed are just the tip of the iceberg in the debacle that an overemphasis on standardized testing has produced in American public schools. It seems everyone can agree that something is terribly amiss but the few who are in a position to effect legislative change remain reluctant to publicly admit that we are headed down the wrong path with NCLB and RttT – by the by, the “growth model” schemes proposed as compromise measures in both will get us nowhere closer to achievement equity than the absolute proficiency models have for the past 10 years.

Even with waivers and the other roundabouts that are sure to come, the fact of the matter is that NCLB remains the law of the land and along with RttT, it is an egregious affront to The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Let's not get unfocused here, we still need to repeal NCLB and remove RttT.

Waivers are not Saviors

During the past 10 years of NCLB implementation, America’s urban communities have lost almost an entire generation of creative/critical thinkers and problem solvers. For too many economically disadvantaged students and students of color, the entire scope of their elementary, middle, and high school experience has been test preparation, scripted programs, and an emphasis on compliance. The outcomes of these disastrous corporate educational policies are just now beginning to manifest in our higher education institutions and society at large.

Any sort of waivers granted to states will not change the real drudgery of teaching and learning in urban schools that NCLB implementation has created; they will not change the demoralization and dehumanization of students and teachers that continues to occur on a daily basis. Unfortunately, new administrators and teachers have been raised up in a climate that promotes and celebrates McEducation and given the high attrition rates for many educators it is all they have ever known.

Understanding the Political Landscape

For a moment, let’s pretend that party lines still mean something. The 111^th Congress had great potential to address No Child Left Behind head on. The fairly young (average age 58.2) Democrat dominated Congress  was comprised of a record number of women (95),  African Americans (41), Hispanics/Latinos (31), Asians/Native Hawaiians/other Pacific Islanders (11), and American Indians /Native Americans (1) – its predominant religious affiliation was Protestant with a strong representation from the Roman Catholic denomination.

In 2009 I warned, “Such a composition may seem to bode well on the surface for restoring American education, but what is unknown is how many members of the 111^th Congress have already pledged their allegiance to sell American public schools down the river to corporate and military interests that are deeply entrenched in the political mechanisms on Capitol Hill and have been steadily working towards the goal of privatization since the 1980s.” (Lee, 2009, “The Human Fallout: Educators' Perspectives about No Child Left Behind Implementation in Urban Schools,” p. 284).

The fact of the matter is that the 111^th Congress had the opportunity to make a positive change and rollback or repeal NCLB, an educational policy gone completely wild - and they failed. Instead, they did absolutely nothing and left NCLB in legislative limbo; instead, they were more concerned with not rocking the boat and maintaining their positions in the corporate pantheon that calls itself our representative Congress.

A Word of Caution

Too many are rallying against NCLB and RttT along party lines instead of seeing the big picture.  While it’s easy to unite and rally against a “bad guy” – a harder task is to understand that the struggle is not against a personality or even the illusory “party lines” that too many hold too dear.

Unlike some of the recent counter-rhetoric, the struggle to save our public schools is not against “Obama’s Education Plan” any more than it was against “Bush’s Education Plan” – this struggle is against a longstanding conglomerate of corporate interests that supersede and outlast presidential appointments and political parties -- deeply entrenched baobabs that threaten to implode our very existence.

Sure, the education summits held by George H.W. Bush set up the playlist for the reforms to come; yes, Clinton primed the dance floor with Goals 2000 and George W. Bush was the dancing fool that announced No Child Left Behind; and now Obama did in fact pop lock Race to the Top in your face to the States. But, it’s all in the family and each of these actions are but tiny brushstrokes in the big picture.

The architects of our current state of P-12 educational policy transcend political party. These think tanks, lobbyists, and corporate/business associations have a staying power that outlives the presidential figureheads that serve as the mouthpieces who present their seedy machinations to the public.

The Time is Now

• It’s time to stand up for our public schools in the struggle against corporate greed and privatization by resisting the establishment of charter schools and vouchers in our local communities.
• It’s time to call our so-called representatives to task and demand that they represent the will of the people and not corporations.  
•  It’s time to monitor and call organizations like the CCSSO, NGA, BRT, ALEC, and others to the floor and tell them to stop mucking around in urban educational policy.
• It’s time to get involved with teacher and administrative training and preparation programs to build up a force of educators committed to public education, social justice, and an increased understanding of pedagogic sociology. 
• It's time for local school boards to mount stronger resistance to federal and state mandates for local education practices; they are seeing firsthand the human fallout of these harmful laws.
•  It’s time for parents, students, and communities to actively resist the overemphasis on standardized testing by opting out or refusing to participate and telling administrators and teachers that we won’t stand for school time being devoted to doing test prep.
•  It’s time to vociferously call out the illegitimacy of the Common Core Standards which have been developed by special interest groups and corporations to represent their CORE and not the core of any community.
• It’s time to Save our Schools.

P.S. I blog, twitter, and facebook infrequently. But, for those who have emailed me, my thoughts about the Save our Schools Conference, March, and Congress are found in the Comments field of the previous post. Please feel free to leave responses or questions about my posts directly in the comments fields and I will publicly respond to each one in due time.

Response - “Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change” by R. Barker Bausell

Oh, the Education Reform folks are at it again touting a little 2010 doublespeak appeal to common folk sensibilities while promoting wild, harmful ideas for American public education. Who doesn’t get excited by a sexy title like “Too Simple to Fail: A Case for Educational Change,” by R. Barker Bausell? Unfortunately, Bausell’s argument is foundationally flawed in its dismissal of the importance of teacher training. Teacher training is one of the most relevant components of improving instructional quality; spending more time in a classroom led by an untrained teacher who lacks classroom management, pedagogical knowledge, or instructional delivery skill sets is detrimental to students. That the primary source of support for his argument is to point to KIPP schools as models of reform is problematic; Bausell fails to consider how the student application and selection processes, small class sizes, and high levels of parental commitment play into any measure of student success at charter schools like KIPP. Instead of considering the aforementioned known contributors to student achievement, Bausell attributes KIPP “success” to more time in class (also note that the quantifiers this biostatistician uses to define educational “success” at KIPP schools remain unclear).

Bausell at once praises standardized testing then lambasts it. He rails against the fact that these darn standardized tests aren’t measuring a standardized curriculum – then he asserts that good teachers are those who never deviate from a prescribed curriculum (designed by disconnected corporate interest groups with little background in curricular or human development); this is more of the same nonsense thinking that seeks to reduce teachers to technicians who deliver testing outcomes. The idea that anybody can jump into a classroom and effectively deliver instruction is preposterous and I invite Bausell to go beyond the limited scope of his experimental study and evaluate the success of multiple lessons across subject areas in a few urban schools. Please note that his study essentially involved drilling math concepts for an extended period of time and measuring student short term recall of drilled concepts. This isn’t the “learning” I want to practice or promote.

At the end of the day, Bausell argues for making the content of standardized tests more congruent with what is actually taught in schools; in his learning utopia, teacher-technicians would then spending more time simply teaching to the tests and we would all see a success – if we could just standardize everything then robo-teachers will deliver the lessons and good student workers will posthaste fill in the correct corresponding bubbles that their corporate overlords have deemed essential truths. If this is the “success” we’re racing to the top for… if this is how we will measure innovation and creativity and critical thinking, there is great concern for us all.

Bausell’s Policy Prescriptions

Bausell’s suggestion that Pre-K instruction should solely rely on direct instruction demonstrates his lack of understanding of Pre-K developmental and instructional needs. Pre-K instruction needs a skillful blend of direct instruction and constructivist instructional design with primary emphasis on the constructivist aspect. Even follow ups to the HighScope studies show that urban, economically disadvantaged students who solely receive direct instruction in preschool become more academically disengaged, actually perform at lower levels, and suffer from more social and discipline problems. I can speak on the benefits of constructivist and/or blended models of teaching for this age group at length, but there is not space here.

More time is not needed; quality time is needed with well-trained teaching professionals. Even Finland and other countries that are widely regarded as educational success stories have shorter days and shorter school years. The solution is not to “learn-them-to-death” and “beat-and-drill-it-into-them” until they spit it back at us.

The attacks on teacher autonomy and calls for hyper-monitoring of compliance to a prescribed and scripted curriculum shows what Bausell is really all about, and it’s nothing good for schools. The idea that just about anyone can jump into a classroom and “make students learn” is misguided.

The bottom line is that the individualized computer program vision Bausell puts forth for education as some sort of Skinnerian Teaching Machine endeavor, replete with programmed instruction that students sit and endlessly punch away at for extended hours until they earn rewards for correct responses is harrowing. The suggestions that teachers are disposable and teacher training does not matter are #moreoftthesame denigrating and dangerous rhetoric we have come to expect from Bausell and his kind.