Group items tagged

Diane Ravitch has again done the seemingly impossible. She prompted Education Sector's Kevin Carey to take a glance at the history of education. Even so, Carey's piece in The New Republic, "The Dissenter," indicates that he did not read carefully. Carey wrote that Ravitch "left a polarized history profession in her wake," as if she did not enter the field at a time when traditional historians were under siege. During the sixties, history was dominated by class-based analyses of theories on the oppressiveness of various power structures. History was dominated by genres, ranging from the New Social History to the various Marxist schools of thought, that sought evidence for or against ideological orthodoxies. Too many fell under the umbrella of "history with the people left out."

The nation has just celebrated Labor Day, yet few Americans have any idea why. As high school students, most were taught little about unions-their role, their accomplishments, and how and why they came to exist. This is one of the conclusions of a new report, released today by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center. The report, "American Labor in U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor's Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks," consists of a review of some of the nation's most frequently used high school U.S. history textbooks for their treatment of unions in American history. The authors paint a disturbing picture, concluding that the history of the U.S. labor movement and its many contributions to the American way of life are "misrepresented, downplayed or ignored." Students-and all Americans-deserve better.

A popular history of vouchers suggests that they are a "new" reform tool and a product of free market ideas. They captured national attention relatively recently when they were implemented in the Milwaukee and Cleveland schools in the early 1990s.  In 2002, the Supreme Court resolved the constitutional questions concerning Cleveland's voucher program. This history typically cites Milton Friedman as the intellectual father of vouchers. Not so fast, says Professor Jim Carl. The origins and purposes of vouchers in American education are closely tied to our social history, he argues. In Freedom of Choice: Vouchers in American Education, Carl skillfully traces the origins of vouchers back to the segregated South in the 1950s. In this context, they were used to combat desegregation post- Brown.  However, through their history, civil rights advocates, free market economists, and policy makers all have embraced vouchers, seeking solutions to urban education. In other words, vouchers have been pliable and appealed to different groups, for different reasons. But, importantly, they began as a product of a social agenda in the South.

School reformers are a dime a dozen these days, with education policy a suddenly sexy field and more than a few people willing to challenge the status quo. But it wasn't always so. Back in the 1960s, when Fordham Institute president Checker Finn got his start as an education gadfly, contrarian thinking was hard to come by. In Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik, Finn takes readers on a magic bus ride through the most momentous twists and turns of the past 40 years of education history-many of which he found himself in the middle of. What lessons should today's reformers take from past education battles? Which critical episodes are most often overlooked? And does Finn's own life experience make him optimistic or pessimistic about America-and its schools-going forward?

As a parent I find it easy to understand the appeal of charter schools, especially for parents and students who feel that traditional public schools have failed them. As a historical sociologist who studies race and politics, however, I am disturbed both by the significant challenges that plague the contemporary charter school movement, and by the ugly history of segregationist tactics that link past educational practices to the troubling present. 

"It has been difficult to discern what specific details are left on the table in the Chicago teachers' negotiations. Broadly, we know the union leadership resents Mayor Rahm Emanuel's enthusiasm for non-unionized charter schools and neighborhood school closings. It is also clear that professional evaluation is a big issue, as it is in states and cities across the country. To what extent should teachers be judged by their students' test scores, as opposed to by more holistic measures? Job security, especially for teachers in schools that will be shut down, has been eroding, which the CTU sees as a calamity, yet many reformers applaud. And of course, there is pay. Is it fair for teachers to demand regular raises when unemployment is so high, and budgets at every level of government are strapped? I'm not going to pronounce on these questions today, but I do want to offer a quick history of teacher unionism to keep things in perspective. The modern teachers' union movement began in Chicago in 1897, and many of the problems back then -- from low school budgets to testing to debates over classroom autonomy -- remain more than salient today."

"What's interesting is precisely how varied the list of "reformers" is-representing contradictory developments that still have an impact on American public schools.   It helps see how the back and forth of our history was responding to changes in society itself and how many different viewpoints have influenced schooling, reflecting its specific time and circumstances."

"Ms. Goldstein's book is meticulously fair and disarmingly balanced, serving up historical commentary instead of a searing philippic. A hate-read is nigh impossible. (Trust me, I tried.) While Ms. Goldstein is sympathetic to the unionized public-school teacher, she also thinks the profession is hamstrung by a defensive selfishness, harboring too fine a memory for ancient wounds. The book skips nimbly from history to on-the-ground reporting to policy prescription, never falling on its face. "

"I'm sure you've heard for years-even decades-that the public schools are failing; that teachers are lazy, incompetent and their labor unions are responsible for this so-called failure. The solution: fire the teachers, close the public schools and get rid of the labor unions. Then turn education over to private sector corporations run by CEOs who only answer to their wealthiest stock holders. For instance, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdock and a flock of Hedge Fund billionaires. Let's see what you think after we go back to 1779 and walk through 235 years of history to the present. It won't take long-a few facts and a conclusion."

At its annual meeting held in Saratoga Springs the weekend of March 23-25, the New York State Council for the Social Studies passed five resolutions condemning the national and state common core standards for marginalizing social studies. The resolutions charged that attention to math and reading left little time or money in K-12 classrooms for effective instruction in social studies, citizenship, and history. The Council demanded that the state develop a new set of core standards that emphasize the teaching of social studies, citizenship, and history. This action by the NYSCSS is one of a number of reasons to question whether the much ballyhooed national common core standards will deliver promised improvements in education.

I recently wrote two review articles for the New York Review of Books about the teaching profession. The first was a review of Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons, about the exceptional school system of Finland, which owes much to the high professionalism of its teachers. The second of the two articles was a review of Wendy Kopp's A Chance to Make History, and it focused on her organization, Teach for America. I expressed my admiration for the young people who agree to teach for two years, with only five weeks of training. But I worried that TFA was now seen -- and promoting itself -- as the answer to the serious problems of American education. Even by naming her book A Chance to Make History, Wendy Kopp reinforced the idea that TFA was the very mechanism that American society could rely upon to lift up the children of poverty and close the achievement gaps between different racial and ethnic groups. Wendy Kopp responded to my review of her book with a blog called "In Defense of Optimism.

The New Republic has published a provocative profile of Diane Ravitch by my friend Kevin Carey, and it serves as a useful companion to the profile of Ravitch I wrote in June. Kevin, who works for the standards and accountability think tank Education Sector, is unsurprisingly more harshly critical of Ravitch than I was. He focuses a great deal of attention on her shortcomings as a historian, and while I think it's fair to point out that an ideological, polemical writing style has colored all of Ravitch's work, it's also the case that many celebrated, serious historians have held ideological worldviews, from Charles Beard to David Hofstadter to the Schlesingers. Gordon Wood's The Idea of America contains a lot of interesting thinking on the contributions and limitations of history colored by contemporary political concerns, and I think Ravitch's style follows the politically-engaged example set by the progressive historians in particular.

"The champions of corporate education reform insist that efforts to strip teachers of the procedural guarantees of due process embedded in tenure are somehow an extension of the Civil Rights Movement. In the latest iteration of this make-believe history, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown and her ally, lawyer David Boies, wax philosophical about how their campaign to end tenure is really "about Civil Rights." While the rhetoric plays well in the press, it deliberately misrepresents the actual history of Civil Rights. In reality, teachers played a critical role in the movement. In some cases, they were able to do so because they were bolstered by tenure, preventing their arbitrary dismissal for activism."

There have been many individuals with the qualities of Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta born in villages like mine in human history, but they have been "educated," in various rigorous ways, to become anything but Lady Gaga. Out of necessity, societies and families must ensure that their future generations have the ability, knowledge, and skills to live a successful life as workers, parents, and citizens. Thus they must have an education, formal or informal, that focuses on cultivating what meets the needs of the society. For a long period of time in human history, many societies have only needed a very narrow spectrum of human talents on a large scale and a very small pool of special talents. As a result, the dominant education paradigm has been to reduce the vast diverse potentials of human talents, interests, and abilities to what the society deems as useful or employable skills and knowledge.

"As high school seniors all across the country graduated this week, history was quietly being made in Washington, D.C. at the Department of Education for 23 D.C. public school students with developmental and intellectual disabilities. They, like their peers across the country, were graduating too. They all participated in a program called Project SEARCH. The 15-year-old program now operates in 39 states and four foreign countries, but this is the first year that the federal government has hosted the project in three agencies including the Departments of Education, Labor and Health and Human Services."

Erich Martel, one of the hardest-working D.C. teachers ever, received an e-mail last month from a former student. The man said he was switching from a successful business career to research in ancient history, in part because of Martel, "the best history teacher I ever had." That happens often to Martel, 68, an Advanced Placement history instructor. He has been teaching for more than 40 years, mostly at Wilson High School. His post-AP-test classes on the Vietnam War are famous, first for insisting on study during the usual late May and June playtime, and second for thrilling his audience with visits by Vietnam veterans and war opponents such as former senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern and prisoner of war Everett Alvarez Jr. Yet, Martel was forced to retire last summer after a long campaign to get rid of him. He had too much energy and investigative zeal for his supervisors' comfort. It also didn't help that he was a school representative for the Washington Teachers Union.

Many of us who have strongly opposed what has been happening in public education is because we see its thrust precisely as creating a compliant work force dependent upon others for their income.  While middle class schools can continue to offer art and music and other "soft" subjects inner city and some rural schools are being deskilled, forced to concentrate on preparation for those subjects that are being tested.  At the same time, by cutting back on history and civics we do not provide those students with the knowledge that these battles have been fought before, and there was pushback then.

It is hard to put in words how honored I am to have been invited to speak to this group. I can think of no gathering whose work is more important to the future of this nation, or have handled this responsibility more honorably, than public schools principals in the state of New York. You are the last line of defense between public school teachers and a political juggernaut of unprecedented proportions seeking to change the way public education in the United States is organized. This movement, led almost exclusively by people who come from business and the law rather than education, is responsible for the public demonization of members of a human services profession unprecedented in American history, yet it commands virtually unanimous support of the press and broadcast media, leaders of both political parties, the nation's wealthiest foundations and some misguided civil rights leaders.

One common strain of modern education reform has a direct, yet familiar logic: An education crisis persists despite more spending, smaller classes, or curricular changes. We have ignored the major cause of student achievement: teacher quality. Seniority and tenure have diluted the pool of talented teachers and impeded student learning. Reformers such as Michelle Rhee have acted on this assumption, implementing test-based accountability measures, merit pay, and lesser job protections. Unfortunately, the current educational reform movement shares its logic with the early-twentieth-century American eugenics movement, which in efforts to improve our gene pool, wrote a horrific chapter in our history. In suggesting this provocative comparison, I hope to guide readers through three shared errors. Both eugenics and modern school reform view education too deterministically, share a faith in standardized tests, and exaggerate the fixedness of traits.

Education reformer Diane Ravitch gave a keynote speech Friday at the Save Our Schools and National Call to Action, speaking for one hour on the history of education while offering a litany of rebukes aimed at policymakers and stakeholders in toe with President Obama's Race to the Top programs.