Will Staff Returning from Obama/Duncan Years Compromise Biden’s Public Education Promises?

At the end of his first hundred days, President Joe Biden deserves credit for taking important steps to help public schools serving children living in communities where family poverty is concentrated.

First, the President promised during the campaign to triple funding for Title I schools, and the federal budget he has proposed for FY22 would accomplish two-thirds of that promise by doubling the federal investment in Title I, whose funding has lagged for decades behind what is needed for equity.

Second, in the American Rescue Plan federal stimulus passed in March, the President expanded and made fully refundable the Child Tax Credit. In his new American Family Plan he has proposed to extend these urgently needed changes in the Child Tax Credit until 2025.  The expansion of the Child Tax Credit will make it possible for America’s poorest families with children to qualify for this program for the first time. We know that poverty is an overwhelming impediment for children, and ameliorating child poverty is an important step toward helping America’s poorest children thrive at school.

During the campaign, Biden also promised to move public school policy away from two decades of standardized testing.  That is a promise he has, at least until now, entirely broken.

In a letter, dated February 22, 2021, Acting Assistant Secretary of Education, Ian Rosenblum informed states they must test students this year on the mandated annual high-stakes standardized tests, the centerpiece of the test-and-punish school accountability scheme introduced in 2002 by the No Child Left Behind Act.  Rosenblum said the Department of Education would permit flexibility for states which applied for wavers, but Rosenblum described the flexibility in gobbledegook: “It is urgent to understand the impact of COVID-19 on learning. We know, however, that some schools and school districts may face circumstances in which they are not able to safely administer statewide summative assessments this spring using their standard practices… We emphasize the importance of flexibility in the administration of statewide assessments.  A state should use that flexibility to consider: administering a shortened version of its statewide assessments; offering remote administration, where feasible; and/or extending the testing window to the greatest extent practicable. This could include offering multiple testing windows and/or extending the testing window into the summer or even the beginning of the 2021 school year.”  Not surprisingly there has been enormous inconsistency in which some states have been allowed to cut back or delay or pretty much cancel testing, while others were denied their requests.

Rosenblum released the federal guidance on testing before Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona was confirmed, and everyone hoped he would rescind the policy.  But instead, Secretary Cardona  justified demanding standardized testing in this COVID-19 year, despite overwhelming problems with the practicality, consistency, reliability, and validity of the tests. The Washington Post‘s Valerie Strauss quoted Dr. Cardona: “He said student data obtained from the tests was important to help education officials create policy and target resources where they are most needed… Cardona said… that he would be willing to ‘reexamine what role assessments’ play in education—but not immediately. ‘This is not the year for a referendum on assessments, but I am open to conversations on how to make those better.'”

One would have hoped that Dr. Cardona would be familiar with the huge debate that has consumed education experts and also many parents who have been opting out for years now. He assures us that mandated testing during this school year, which has been utterly disrupted by COVID-19, will be used to drive federal investment into the school districts where tests show students are suffering most.  However, standardized tests, as mandated by No Child Left Behind and its successor, the Every Student Succeeds Act, were not designed to drive a system of test-and-invest. Instead federally mandated standardized tests are now the very foundation of a maze of policies at the federal level—and across the states—to identify so-called “failing schools” and to punish them with policies that rate and rank public schools, punish so-called failing schools by privatizing or closing them, evaluate schoolteachers by their students’ test scores, and require states to remove caps on charter schools.

Now, as the Biden Administration and Cardona’s Department of Education staff up, it is becoming apparent that Education Department and White House staff will include key people returning from President Barack Obama’s administration—people who helped design and implement these test-and-punish policies,

Last week, Education Week‘s Andrew Ujifusa reported that President Biden will nominate Roberto Rodriguez for the position of Assistant Secretary of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development in the Department of Education. Rodriguez was a special White House assistant to President Obama for education policy. And before that, he helped formulate accountability-based school reform as staff to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee when the No Child Left Behind Act was formulated in 2001.

In 2012, Education Week‘s Alyson Klein quoted Rodriguez bragging about Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top program: “Mr. Rodriguez, the White house adviser, argues that the Race to the Top has spurred big and lasting change, including helping to advance the Common Core State Standards, which 46 states and the District of Columbia have adopted. ‘We are going to take credit for helping to accelerate the adoption of these standards throughout the country.  Race to the Top clearly did  that.'” You will remember that in order to be able to apply for a Race to the Top grant, states had to promise to adopt formal standards, and after Bill Gates had funded the development of the Common Core, most states grabbed onto what was available.

After serving in the Obama White House, Rodriguez became CEO of an organization called Teach Plus, whose website claims its mission is “to empower excellent, experienced, and diverse teachers to take leadership over key policy and practice issues that advance equity, opportunity, and student success.”  Progressive educator and writer,  Steve Nelson reads that mission a little differently: “On the surface it is dedicated to developing ‘teacher leaders.’ The clear sub-text is to inculcate the values of anti-union reform in a generation of young teachers. Sort of like Teach for America, graduate school edition. They rail against seniority as job security, asserting with no basis that subpar teachers are retained in times of cost cuts because of union protection. They also claim that unions stifle innovation. Teach Plus has received more than $27 million from the Gates Foundation and has among its donors the Walton Family Foundation and an all-star roster of philanthropic sources dedicated to so-called reform… For several decades public education has been a battlefield between committed educators with little money or power and committed non-educators with lots of money and power.”

Roberto Rodriguez will face Senate confirmation to his new position. But if he is confirmed, he will join an administration that includes a former Obama era colleague now serving in the Biden White House.  Diane Ravitch reports that Carmel Martin holds the the same position—Special Assistant to the President for Education Policy—that Roberto Rodriguez held in the Obama Administration.

The 74‘s Kevin Mahnken provides some background on Carmel Martin: “Carmel Martin is one of the most powerful education experts in Washington, a top Democratic policy adviser…. So why haven’t you heard of her?  ‘Carmel’s a ghost,’ said Andrew Rotherham, a longtime education commentator and founder of the nonprofit Bellwether Education Partners. ‘You’re not going to find lots of published stuff by her. She’s that archetype that you can work with on various issues, an inside-game person, but she’s set herself up for this moment because she doesn’t have this crazy-long paper trail.'”  Martin also was staff to Senator Ted Kennedy back in 2001, when the No Child Left Behind Act gathered bipartisan steam. Mahnken describes Martin as a defender of Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top and the Common Core standards when she served in Obama’s White House and of Arne Duncan’s policy demanding that states evaluate teachers by their students’ scores.

Secretary Cardona’s has kept everyone’s eyes myopically focused on school reopening after COVID-19. But we all need to pay closer attention to the other policy initiatives that will emerge from Cardona’s Department of Education. Diane Ravitch worries: “that Rodriguez and Carmel Martin will make policy, not Secretary Cardona or Deputy Secretary-designate Cindy Marten. Biden is looking to the future with his sweeping domestic policy plans. But in education, he is looking in the rear-view mirror to the architects of Obama’s failed programs.”

Advertisement

Steve Nelson Believes America’s Obsession with School Policy Based on Standardized Tests Is All Wrong

Steve Nelson is the former Head of School at the private, progressive Calhoun School in Manhattan, but he has also spoken passionately about the danger of current trends in public school policy.  I recommend his book, First Do No Harm: Progressive Education in a Time of Existential Risk, and I also enjoy his new blog, where, last week, he warned against the problems in federally mandated standardized testing—a big issue right now as education advocates are urging the new U.S. Secretary of Education to grant states waivers to cancel federally mandated standardized testing in this COVID-19 school year.

Where did our fixation and obsession with standardized testing come from? Nelson weighs in: “Education reformers and so-called policy ‘experts’ are constantly collecting and analyzing data.  Many of these experts are, not surprisingly, economists. It’s not for nothing that economics is sometimes called ‘the dismal science.’ The hostile takeover of education by non-educators is filled with intelligent sounding phrases: ‘evidence-based,’ ‘data-driven,’ ‘metrics and accountability.’ At every level of schooling, mountains of data are collected to inform ‘best practices’ based on the alleged cause and effect implications of data-based instruction and the feedback gleaned from tests.”

Today’s accountability-based school reform is, writes Nelson, “an increasingly rigid, closed loop of assessment… systematically making schools worse: Define things children should know or be able to do at a certain age; design a curriculum to instruct them in what you’ve decided they should know; set benchmarks; develop tests to see if they have learned what you initially defined; rinse and repeat.”

Nelson calls this sort of teaching “direct instruction,” and he describes the direct but fading results: “‘Direct instruction’ does increase scores on the tests the instruction is aimed toward, even with very young children. This self-fulfilling prophecy is not surprising. But multiple studies also show that the gains in performance are fleeting—they completely wash out after 1-3 years when compared to children who have had no direction instruction.”

What kind of education does Nelson believe is consistent with normal child development?  “If we measured the right things (social development, curiosity, empathy, imagination and confidence), we would engage in a whole different set of education behaviors (play, socialization, arts programs, open-ended discovery).”

“After nearly 20 years of reading, observing, teaching and presiding over a school, I’m convinced that this simple statement—‘Measure the wrong things and you’ll get the wrong behaviors’—is the root of what ails education, from cradle to grave. Measuring the wrong thing (standardized scores of 4th graders) drives the wrong behaviors (lots of test prep and dull direct instruction). In later school years, measuring the wrong thing (SAT and other standardized test scores, grade point averages, class rank) continues to invite the wrong behaviors (gaming the system, too much unnecessary homework, suppression of curiosity, risk-aversion, high stress).

Last year, Betsy DeVos cancelled the federally mandated standardized tests in the midst of COVID-19. I think it is safe to say that Steve Nelson would tell Miguel Cardona that we can safely allow states to cancel the tests again this spring as COVID-19 continues to disrupt our schools and our children’s lives.

A Public School Evaluation System That Fails to Account for What We Value

What really matters in public schools?  There are some very different definitions of the purpose of schooling. Proponents of business-driven, standardized test-based school accountability, the system mandated for two decades by the federal government, say we must use data to measure the quality of the student products turned out at high school graduation.  Educators—and I believe parents and children—agree that what matters is students’ experience of learning while they are in school.

In these months when our children are at home because the pandemic has closed their schools, parents, children, and teachers have all been talking and writing about what they are missing—what is most important for them in the daily experience of of formal schooling.  But lots of education policy wonks seem worried about whether schools can quickly get back on schedule with the standardized testing regimen we’ve come to expect since annual testing was mandated in 2002 by No Child Left Behind.

In an important new reflection in The Kappan, Educational Accountability Is Out of Step—Now More than Ever, two professors of education, Derek Gottlieb of the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley and Jack Schneider of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell reflect on what today’s school closures are teaching us about the value of schooling. Gottlieb and Schneider worry: “State governments… may have waived standardized testing this year, but once their public schools reopen, they’ll go right back to measuring them by the same few metrics they’ve used for more than a generation: test scores in reading and math, high school graduation rates, and, in some cases, student attendance… We… need to change the ways in which accountability determinations are made.  At present, accountability scores are calculated via algorithm (metrics in, ratings out)—a mechanical process that leaves no room for human judgment and deliberation about each school’s strengths and weaknesses, or the particular challenges it faces.”

What are some of the important things schools do? This spring parents can name a lot of very basic functions of school.  For children, going to school sets up a comfortable routine for each day and for a five-day week plus a weekend.  For parents, schools care for their children during six hours when parents can comfortably participate in the workforce without paying for child care, and parents can be reasonably sure their children will be well cared for and intellectually stimulated.  Schools are the primary institution that socializes children. They are places where children find friends, learn how to respect others and get along.  And they are places where children have fun learning.  Gottlieb and Schneider add: “Americans have… come to recognize the many vital social services schools offer, including mental health care, occupational and physical therapy, and the delivery of regular meals for low-income students…”

Gottlieb and Schneider also name important school experiences that teachers learn to provide as they pursue the academic courses to prepare themselves for certification: “Educating young people involves far more than getting them into their seats and raising their scores.  We expect our schools to motivate students, care for them, and keep them safe.  Schools introduce young people to the wider world, help them discover their talents and their interests, and alter their life trajectories.  Of course, teaching academic skills that can be measured via standardized test is important, but that can’t be all that matters.” “As so many Americans have come to appreciate, schools pursue a broad range of aims: not just to teach academic content but also to cultivate social skills and critical thinking, prepare young people for work and citizenship, foster creativity, and promote emotional and physical health… ”

At the end of an inspiring 2016 book, First Do No Harm, progressive educator, Steve Nelson publishes what he calls an Educational Bill of Rights, defining the school experience all children and families ought to be able to expect their teachers to provide: “Recognize the broad consensus that early childhood education should be primarily dedicated to free, imaginative play. Provide arts programming, recognizing that the arts are critical to all learning and to understanding the human experience. Provide ample physical movement, both in physical education classes and in other ways… Exhibit, in structure and practice, awareness that children develop at different rates and in different  ways… Acknowledge the large body of evidence that long hours of homework are unnecessary and detract from children’s (and families’) quality of life. Exhibit genuine affection and respect for all children. Honor a wide range of personalities and temperments. Encourage curiosity, risk-taking and creativity. Cultivate and sustain intrinsic motivation rather than relying on elaborate extrinsic systems of rewards and punishment. Understand that brain research supports active learning, engaging all the senses. Understand that children are intelligent in multiple ways… Listen to each child’s voice, give them real experience in democratic processes, and allow them to express their individuality. Know each child well, appreciate the unique mix of qualities each child brings, and never demean, discourage or humiliate any child.” (First Do No Harm, pp. 244-245)

Finally, UCLA education professor and writer, Mike Rose, spent several years visiting and observing classrooms across the United States as the basis of his wonderful book, Possible Lives. In an article for The American Scholar, Rose describes the qualities that defined the excellent classrooms he visited: “The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety, which in some neighborhoods is a real consideration. But there was also safety from insult and diminishment….  Intimately related to safety is respect, a word I heard frequently during my travels.  It meant many things: politeness, fair treatment, and beyond individual civility, a respect for the language and culture of the local population… Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority. I witnessed a range of classroom management styles, and though some teachers involved students in determining the rules of conduct and gave them significant responsibility to provide the class with direction, others came with a curriculum and codes of conduct fairly well in place.  But two things were always evident.  A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed. Students contributed to the flow of events, shaped the direction of discussion, became authorities on the work they were doing. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility.”

Not all classrooms, of course, exhibit these standards of excellence every day, but the descriptions by Derek Gottlieb and Jack Schneider, Steve Nelson, and Mike Rose are a way to share what the experience of schooling ought to encompass for every child as well as being a standard toward which every teacher should aspire. Students are missing many of these experiences this spring while their schools are closed. Certainly virtual schooling on iPads, Chromebooks, or computers may help children stay in touch with their teachers and their peers and, to some degree, continue with educational activities designed by their teachers or their school district. But what’s happening over the internet, for those students who are lucky enough to have broadband access, cannot compensate for the in-person educational experiences the children are missing. Most children will eagerly anticipate getting back to school.

None of these reflections by educational experts on the experiences schools regularly provide for children has anything to do with the standards-based, test-driven school accountability our federal government continues mandate. When public schools reopen, it’s time to reject the kind of school accountability that counts children as though they are products turned out at graduation.

Success Academies: Can No-Excuses Charter Schools Be Called Progressive?

An important piece by Rebecca Mead in this week’s New Yorker takes us into Eva Moskowitz’s very controversial Success Academy charter schools in New York City. Mead explains the point of her piece: “For all the controversy, one question has, surprisingly, been overlooked: What are the distinguishing characteristics of a Success Academy education?”

Mead’s subtitle names a contradiction at the center of Moskowitz’s educational theory: “Inside Eva Moskowitz’s Quest to Combine Rigid Discipline with a Progressive Curriculum.” Even as Moskowitz defends the rigid and punitive discipline for which her schools are famous (In Mead’s piece, Moskowitz is quoted as defending the suspension of young children out of school as an important way of impressing a lesson on children and their parents.), Moskowitz claims John Dewey, the father of progressive education, as a guide to what happens in her schools. Moskowitz describes her curriculum as an example of progressivism—“circle time on the classroom rug; interdisciplinary projects that encompass math, science, social studies, and literacy.”  The question that underlies Mead’s analysis is whether it is possible to run a progressive school with no-excuses discipline.

While on one level Mead entertains Moskowitz’s rhetoric about progressivism, Mead seems puzzled by the circle time on the classroom rug: “In the second-grade classroom in Queens, the gridded rug seemed less like a magic carpet than like a chessboard at the start of a game. Within each square there was a large colored spot the size of a chair cushion.  The children sat in rows, facing forward, each within his or her assigned square, with their legs crossed and their hands clasped or folded in their laps. Success students can expect to be called to answer a teacher’s question at any moment, not just when they raise their hand, and must keep their eyes trained on the speaker at all times, a practice known as ‘tracking.’  Staring off into space, or avoiding eye contact is not acceptable.”

Like students at progressive schools (and all kinds of public schools, actually), students in Success Academies go on field trips.  And Mead visits a room where Kindergardeners are taken to play with blocks: “The school has dedicated a special classroom to the activity, and shelves were filled with an enviable supply of blocks. The walls of the room were decorated with pictures of architectural structures that the students might seek to emulate, from the Empire State Building to the Taj Mahal. There was also a list of rules: always walk; carry two small blocks or hug one large block; speak in a whisper.” Unlike free-play at progressive early childhood centers—with dolls, and blocks, and easels and paint, and clay or PlayDoh—block time at the school Mead visits is a specific activity provided by the school in a “block” room to which the entire class of children is led for an assigned period.

For older students there are what Moskowitz likes to consider seminar-type discussions in which children explore ideas. Here is Mead considering one of the class discussions: “The teacher, after establishing that the story’s genre was realistic fiction reminded the class of the necessary ‘thinking job’ required in approaching such a text: to identify the character, the problem, the solution, and the ‘lesson learned.’…  Success Academy students are required to speak in complete sentences, often adhering to a script: ‘I disagree with X’, ‘I agree with X,’ and ‘I want to add on.’… But the lesson seemed to be as much about mastering a formula as about appreciating the nuances of the narrative. When the students were called to ‘turn and talk,’ they swivelled, inside their grids (on the rug), to face a partner, and discussed the section of the text that had been examined collectively. The exchanges I heard consisted of repeating the conclusions that had just been reached rather than independently expanding them. Some students seemed to be going through the motions of analysis and comprehension—performing thought… Nor was there time for more imaginative or personally inflected interpretations of the text—the interrogation of big ideas that happens in the kinds of graduate seminars Moskowitz held up as a model.”

These descriptions of what happened in the Success Academy schools Mead visited sent me to First Do No Harm: Progressive Education in a Time of Existential Risk, a book published just last year by Steve Nelson, the recently retired head of the Calhoun School, a well-known progressive private school in New York City. What follows are just three of the many characteristics of progressive education that Nelson explores in this book:

• On the difference between discovery and being taught: “While the distinctions between progressive education and conventional education are not always stark, it is reasonable to differentiate between ‘education and training,’ between ‘learning and being taught,’ and between ‘discovery and instruction.”'(p. 11)
• On progressive education growing from and enhancing the curiosity of students rather than being driven by adults: “In a conventional school, students are seen as vessels into which authoritative adults pour ‘content.’  In a progressive school, students are seen as unique individuals, partners in learning, with their own important ideas, values and experiences.  While there are many shades of grey, conventional schools tend to value and insist on compliance and conformity, while progressive schools encourage skepticism and originality.” (p. 12)
• On intrinsic motivation—not rewards and punishments—as essential to progressive education: “Extrinsic motivation, especially in education, is driven by systems of rewards and punishments… Intrinsic motivation is driven by factors that emanate from within, such as self-satisfaction, desire for mastery, curiosity, fulfillment, pleasure, self-realization, desire for independence, ethical needs, etc.  Intrinsic motivation is a powerful innate characteristic of all human beings across all cultures and societies… (I)ntrinsic motivation declines as extrinsic structures dramatically increase.” (pp. 160-163)

Contrary to what Nelson identifies as the kind of child-centered, intrinsically motivated, experiential learning that defines progressive education, Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies are rigid, relentlessly adult-driven, test-prep factories. Mead explains that to compensate for high turnover among teachers, “Teachers do not develop their own lesson plans; rather, they teach precisely what the network demands. Like the students in their classrooms, Success’s teachers operate within tightly defined boundaries…”

According to their purpose, Success Academy charter schools are are successful: “(T)hey get consistently high scores on standardized tests administered by the state of New York. In the most recent available results, ninety-five percent of Success Academy students achieved proficiency in math, and eighty-four percent in English Language Art: citywide, the respective rates were thirty-six and thirty-eight percent.”  There are, of course, extenuating circumstances: Success Academies do not replace students who drop out after fourth grade; Moskowitz has shamelessly admitted that students who do not fit the Success culture and expectations are encouraged to leave. Public schools, of course, must accept all children. In 2014, Success Academies opened its first high school, which last spring presented diplomas to seventeen students, whose “pioneering class originated with a cohort of seventy-three first graders.”

Mead reports that the high school has struggled with students’ learning styles formed in Success Academy elementary schools: “There was to be a lot more free time, in which students would be the stewards of their own studies.”  But, “Students accustomed to second-by-second vigilance found it difficult to manage their time when left unsupervised.”

Shael Polakow-Suransky, president of the Bank Street College of Education, tells Mead that a Success Academies education is the very opposite of progressive: “They have a philosophy that, to create a context for learning, it’s necessary to build a total institutional culture that is very strong, enveloping, and quite authoritarian. This produces a level of compliance from children that allows for pretty much any approach to instruction, and eliminates many of the typical challenges of classroom management. There is a reason why there is a continuing pull in human organizations toward authoritarian approaches. You can get a lot done. But what kind of citizens are you producing?… Can you educate children in an authoritarian context and also empower them to be active agents in their own lives, who think critically and question injustice in the world around them?”

Clueless Betsy DeVos Blames School Teachers, Doesn’t Get that Test-and-Punish Is Core Problem

After our new U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited a Washington, D.C. middle school last week, she insulted the teachers there.  She said the teachers were “in receive mode,” and continued: “’They’re waiting to be told what they have to do, and that’s not going to bring success to an individual child,’ DeVos told a columnist for the conservative online publication Townhall. ‘You have to have teachers who are empowered to facilitate great teaching.’”

Let me point out that I have not noticed this “receive mode” among the teachers I know here in Ohio. Just last week Melissa Cropper, President of the Ohio Federation of Teachers (OFT), sent out a call for “activism now.”

Ohio requires far more testing than the annual test that was mandated by No Child Left Behind.  The new Every Student Succeeds Act  offers a way for states to develop their own accountability plans and a way to reduce—at least somewhat—over-reliance on test-and-punish.  Cropper is protesting the inaction of the Ohio Department of Education, which has just provided evidence that it will ignore the opportunity for states to have more latitude for shaping their plans for educational accountability rather than just have punitive sanctions imposed on them by the federal government. Patrick O’Donnell of the Plain Dealer reports: “Ohio’s proposed new state education plan under ESSA… avoids making any changes in state tests or even any recommendations, despite complaints of excessive testing of students dominating surveys and feedback sessions across the state.”  O’Donnell adds that Ohio’s draft plan isn’t final.

Cropper castigates the draft plan: “This plan is devoid of an overall vision for education and does nothing to move Ohio away from a testing culture and towards a culture that is more responsive to the needs of children.”  Why, wonders Cropper, does the Ohio Department of Education intend to submit its empty draft to the federal government on April 3, despite that the state doesn’t really have to submit its final draft until September 18?  Is the state rushing this along to avoid public input and discussion?

Cropper urges school teachers and members of the public: “Continue your activism. Take the online ESSA survey now.  In each section, feel free to add whatever comments you might have about the topic, but make sure to include something that indicates that the plan does nothing to change our current testing culture and that the state needs to wait until September to submit so that it can be rewritten to reflect the vision Ohio wants for its students.”  She adds that the Ohio Department of Education will accept comments until March 6.

Bill Phillis, Executive Director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding amplifies Cropper’s plea for engagement by forwarding an e-mail notice from the Legislature’s Joint Education Oversight Committee, which is also holding hearings on Ohio’s ESSA draft plan: “The Joint Education Oversight Committee will be hearing testimony regarding Ohio’s State Plan for the Every Student Succeeds Act.  JEOC will hold two meetings on Thursday, March 2, 2017 at 2:30 PM and Thursday, March 9, 2017 at 1:30 PM in the Senate South Hearing Room. If you are interested in testifying please contact Haley Phillippi,  haley.phillippi@jeoc.ohio.gov or 614-466-9082 and indicate a date preference.” People wishing to testify should send their testimony to Phillippi 24 hours prior to the meeting.

The reason I was so amazed to hear Betsy DeVos criticize teachers as “in receive mode” is that, as part of a local education coalition in my own community, month after month, I listen to our teachers complain about the burden of testing and test prep on them and the students in their classes.  The teachers in our coalition were the people who demanded that we all read Alfie Kohn’s The Schools Our Children Deserve, a plea for a return to progressive education.

While Betsy DeVos insulted teachers last week as “in receive mode,” in my community and my state, teachers are dismayed and up in arms about what they are receiving. Here in the words of Steve Nelson’s new book about progressive education—First Do No Harm, is the kind of pressure our teachers are irate about receiving from the U.S. Department of Education and the Ohio Department of Education: “Public schools all over America are judged by the standardized test results of their students. In many, perhaps most, communities the test results are published in local newspapers or available online. The continued existence of a school often depends on its standardized test scores… Neighborhood public schools are labeled ‘failing’ on the basis of test scores and closed, often to be replaced by a charter operation that boasts of higher test scores… What has occurred is a complex sorting mechanism.  The schools, particularly the most highly praised charter schools do several things to produce better scores…. (S)tudents  are suspended and expelled at a much higher rate than at the ordinary public schools in their neighborhoods. Several studies show that charter schools enroll significantly fewer students with learning challenges or students whose first language is other than English.” (pp. 68-69)  All this pressures school administrators to force teachers to teach to the test at all cost.

Steve Nelson’s definition of progressive education is exactly what the teachers in my community’s elementary, middle and high schools are demanding: “While the distinctions between progressive education and conventional education are not always stark, it is reasonable to differentiate between ‘education and training,’ between ‘learning and being taught,’ and between ‘discovery and instruction.’ Conventional schools tend toward training and instruction, while progressive schools insist on learning and discovery. Perhaps the most powerful and misunderstood facet of progressive education is the notion of democracy. Progressive schools see themselves and their students as inextricably connected to the society in which they operate. The problems and fascinations of the world around them are the problems and fascinations they examine.” (p.11) He adds: “Education should cultivate the capacity to recognize and create beauty. School is a place where empathy and compassion should be honored and developed. The flames of curiosity should be fanned, not smothered. Skepticism should be sharply honed.” (p. 48)

The teachers I know describe how they slip progressive projects and exploration in around the edges of the demands made on them to prepare children for tests.  They also manage to save enough energy to respond when Melissa Cropper of OFT asks them to speak up for a better Ohio ESSA Plan.  We must join them in speaking up.

We should also remind Betsy DeVos again and again that by reducing test-and-punish she could help everybody at school—superintendents, principals, teachers and children—escape education “in receive mode.”  If Betsy DeVos were honestly concerned that too many students are being trained and taught and instructed and that they are in schools that fail to emphasize deeper education—discovery, examination, problem solving, skepticism, curiosity and compassion, Betsy DeVos would be absolutely in agreement with the school teachers I know.

If Betsy DeVos really believed in progressive education, as Secretary of Education she could use her powerful position to support  teachers as they excite children’s curiosity and support their personal interests and development.

In Fine, New Book, Steve Nelson Urges New Education Path that Is Less Dangerous for Children

Steve Nelson’s new book, First Do No Harm: Progressive Education in a Time of Existential Risk, is refreshing in the author’s declaration of privilege as he applies all that he has learned in nineteen years as Head of the Calhoun School, a private, progressive school in New York City to an analysis of what’s gone wrong in public school reform over the same period.

Nelson begins: “I am mindful of the position from which I write. Those of us in independent schools enjoy great privilege. This privilege allows us to draw our students into deeply satisfying and thoughtful lives. But we must recognize that these experiences should not be limited to only those children who are wealthy and/or lucky enough to enroll in our schools. Non-sectarian private schools enroll only about 6% of America’s children. So what about the other millions of children? Do we who carry privilege also bear responsibility? I think so.” (p.5)

This is a refreshing and deeply grounded book for these times when so many of our long-held values about education are being tested.

Nelson isn’t utopian; he doesn’t imagine that all public schools could possibly afford to indulge children in classes of 15 students where teachers personally appreciate each student’s learning style and developmental level, but he does believe the constructs of progressive education are a far better way to organize schools than the test-and-punish system that came with No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the Every Student Succeeds Act.

A good teacher, Nelson summarizes the history of progressive education from Socrates and Aristotle through Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, A.S. Neill, Rudolph Steiner, John Dewey, Francis Parker, Felix Adler, Lev Vygotsky, Jerome Bruner, and Howard Gardner.  He also explores the neurobiological and psychological research supporting progressive education.

What is Nelson’s definition of the kind of education he’d like to see for more American children in their public schools? “While the distinctions between progressive education and conventional education are not always stark, it is reasonable to differentiate between ‘education and training,’ between ‘learning and being taught,’ and between ‘discovery and instruction.’ Conventional schools tend toward training and instruction, while progressive schools insist on learning and discovery. Perhaps the most powerful and misunderstood facet of progressive education is the notion of democracy. Progressive schools see themselves and their students as inextricably connected to the society in which they operate. The problems and fascinations of the world around them are the problems and fascinations they examine.” (p.11) He adds: “Education should cultivate the capacity to recognize and create beauty. School is a place where empathy and compassion should be honored and developed. The flames of curiosity should be fanned, not smothered. Skepticism should be sharply honed.” (p. 48)

Nelson’s critique is biting. Writing at the end of the Arne Duncan era, when mega philanthropy collaborated actively with government to drive “corporate reform,” Nelson comments: “In short, business leaders and free market economic principles have gained increasing control over education. Education has become highly dependent on philanthropy, as public funding has declined.  Philanthropists didn’t make their fortunes as violinists, so they bring their business perspectives to bear on the institutions they support. As the old saying goes, ‘If your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail.’  Today’s economist-driven version of education reform is the hammer that mistakes America’s children, particularly the poorest kids of color, as nails to pound.”

Nelson considers just how A Nation at Risk misunderstood our educational challenges; how testing and the intense pressure of high stakes works in children’s brains to undermine memory; how children who are drilled never learn to question and inquire; how the no-excuses charter schools enforce compliance and destroy curiosity; how scripted learning aimed at test scores hurts children and makes it impossible for good teachers to do what they know best; and how our notion of IQ which focuses on linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence is insufficient and leaves out the seven other domains identified by Howard Gardner. And we learn why schools need to nurture these other domains through the arts and physical activity—the classes schools are cutting these days as test prep takes more and more time.

Nelson’s strength is his experience—nearly twenty years in his most recent position alone—working with children and adolescents at school. As he defends the needs of public schools that serve the mass of our children and emphasizes the need for reallocating our society’s resources, his focus is on what money can do inside a school to free the teachers to teach and create space for children to explore.  He doesn’t cover what he doesn’t know—meeting the children’s needs in a school where all the students qualify for free lunch, for example—assembling the resources and expertise for a quality English language program for immigrant children—finding the resources to serve severely disabled students.

Nelson style is fresh and engaging.  He is not ideological despite his strong belief in progressive schooling. He nudges schools and policy makers to move in a progressive direction. And while a lot of books about progressive education are dated, this one is very much up to date—exploring progressive education theory in the context of the destructive pressure of  “corporate reform” accountability.

While the book was written in the last year of so of the Obama Department of Education, it speaks clearly to the problems we are likely face in a Trump administration with Betsy DeVos as education secretary. As the Head of an exclusive New York City private school, Nelson knows precisely why the kind of school choice being promoted by Trump and DeVos won’t work: “The private schools where privileged parents send their kids are expensive and highly selective. I know. I’m the Head of one of them. Calhoun’s tuition is an embarrassing $48,000 per year—about average for Manhattan private schools. Poor families in New York City don’t have the ‘choice’ to attend Calhoun or any of the other private schools. At Calhoun we offer a great deal of tuition assistance so that our students are not all from wealthy families, but the glib come-on in support of privatization is inaccurate and dishonest. Try taking a $5,000 to $7,000 voucher to a place like Sidwell Friends, where the Obamas sent their daughters. Sidwell’s tuition is also about $40.000.” (p. 112-113)