Summer Reading

Just finished this book. The author was Assistant Secretary of Education in the first Bush administration. She has gone back and forth on the issues of school choice (vouchers, charters) and accountability (testing). Being a teacher, a lot of the info is nothing new but the history behind why these issues are popular was very interesting.

I wish she'd spent more time on ways to fix education. She pointed out lots of flaws and why choice and accountability don't work but not many solutions. Her major fixes are:

• National curriculum - Every child should have a set of common educational ideas. It illegal for the US government to make a national curriculum mandatory but if states volunteer it is okay. This is very close to fruition today but would have been adopted in the 80s except for the history curriculum. Lynn Cheney threw a fit over the "liberal" ideas in the history curriculum and because of all the publicity most districts gave up on the idea.
• Having educators make decisions, not politicians or businessmen. Agreed although I find it interesting that Ravitch was never a teacher but feels free to comment on all of this.
• Family involvement early in children's lives. Duh. Unfortunately, our society no longer supports this. The famous KIPP schools in inner cities are excelling because parents and kids are expected to be respectful and participate. (Of course, the success of these schools is overstated since the kids who don't want to follow the expectations drop out of these schools and return to public schools which are required to educate them.)
• Higher wages for teachers, not merit-based. Agreed but good luck with that. :) I'm afraid merit pay is here to stay.
• Expect charter schools to educate the students who need them most. Instead of letting charter schools "skim the cream," they should work with the children that are not finding success in public schools and experiment to see if they can find success. Charters were originally designed as laboratories for teachers to experiment with new techniques.

Now we all know statistics can be manipulated and of course Ravitch used the ones that supported her position, but I see no benefit to charter schools. About 10% of charters were shown to be much more successful than public schools, about 10% were way worse, but most were in the middle. Of course, most had half as many ELL, sped, and minority students as the comparable schools in the area. Hmm, wonder how good my tests scores would be if I didn't have to count my ELL kid?

Now, as I said earlier, I like the idea of variety. Kids are so different from one another and need different environments to learn. But my problem with charters has to do with their connection to public schools. Because of the discrepancies between school demographics, comparisons should not be made between the two models. Secondly, public schools lose funding to charters. Third, if the popularity of charters continues, public schools are going to be left with the non-cream of the crop.

Solutions? Well, I'm not sure myself. (Otherwise, this would be a book and I would be rich.) But I've been shocked by the lack of research behind teaching ideas. Education is fad based and the fads just seem to circle around and around without any proof of success or failure. Balanced literacy and PLCs were mentioned in this book as being adopted in the mid-90s. (Hmm, JSD seems to be a little behind.) When research is done, it is usually done by or funded by folks with a stake in the results.

With my business background and strong belief in capitalism, I struggle being a part of public service. I think this is one of the huge problems today. Politicians and the media rip apart schools and teachers for not being able to produce results, while teachers try to point out the variety of raw materials we have to work with. Teachers, on the other hand, fight accountability tooth and nail, even though it is ridiculous to think an employee should not be reviewed in some way. Unfortunately, neither side makes an effort to understand the others point of view and so success is not achieved.

Well, I seem to have felt the need to write a paper so if you've read this far thanks for doing so. Enjoy your summer!