Ravitch Speech at AERA in New Orleans

I heard Diane Ravitch speak last night at the conference of the American Educational Research Association. She was in a medium-sized room that had to be opened to double its capacity and that still wasn’t enough for the crowd that overflowed into the halls and corridors of the hotel. She held up improving PISA scores and the education system in Finland as the aspirational goals that the current testing mania wishes for the U.S. The problems with these two include many statistical issues and the difficulty of moving a large diverse population ahead with a poorly paid and poorly trained and low status teaching profession. In addition, the belief that any administrative background from outside of education will lead to improved administration and therefore the improvement of student test scores.

The flaws of the film, Waiting for Superman, become more and more apparent to her as she follows the money and the one-sided narrative. Charter schools are not usually better than matched public schools; indeed, only about one in six shows scores that exceed matched public schools. Furthermore, the billionaires who produced this film have an agenda that does not pay attention to research or data about the public schools. They move in corporate reform circles and believe that testing will lead to improvement, so they support more testing.

Administrators at school levels are the ones responsible for tenuring bad teachers and not removing them from the schools. It’s not the teachers’ unions. Firing teachers based on test scores will not work because that will barely raise test scores to the average; it will demoralize teachers and lead to regression to the mean for test scores. How do we find administrators who can recognize good teachers? They have to be trained to ask parents about the quality of teachers because parents will know within a month of starting school.

The idiosyncratic autobiographical blindness of policy makers, bureaucrats, and legislators has led them to believe that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are widely accepted as good by educators and the public alike. They do not understand the amount of time being devoted to test preparation and testing is increasing so dramatically that children are not having the time to learn and teachers are not having the time to teach the content that the children need. What these policies are doing is learning to various forms of testing dishonesty throughout the country as the tests are used for purposes that were never intended. For instance, merit pay does not lead to better teaching and better test scores, but the Obama administration is putting a billion dollars into that without any evidence of success. Testing does not lead to improved learning although is does lead to slightly improved test scores.

Corporate school reform and the billionaires meddling in public education without ever experiencing public education as a student or teacher is most probably a search for control and wealth. After all, Bill Gates wants more of his computer software in all children’s hands throughout the world because that will indoctrinate them into demanding that software as adults. The view that teachers are interchangeable and should be paid the minimum comes from a corporate view that the schools are factories and the teachers are the line workers. They point to miracle schools that have some self-proclaimed measure of how wonderful they are; for instance, all of their graduates go to college, but they fail to point out that the attrition from entrance to the school to graduation is about 90% and the amount spent on each student per year is three to five times that of the average public school.

Her call to activism includes researchers, administrators, teachers, and parents. We must communicate to the president, governors, legislatures, and bureaucrats that the current testing mania is not working. So here’s my draft letter:

Barack H. Obama

President of the United States

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Washington, DC 20500

http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact

Dear Mr. President:

It is too late to fix No Child Left Behind (NCLB). NCLB and other federal initiatives in education are leading to a decline in our American school systems. These much touted reforms, based in the testing movement, are causing teachers, even the best teachers in public schools, to have less and less time to teach; consequently, their children are having less and less time to learn. I believe that NCLB and other laws that include testing students uniformly across the country should be eliminated. The funds should be redirected to pay off the deficit and to increase opportunities for teachers to develop excellence in teaching content areas, with a two-fold emphasis on academic knowing and pedagogy while using advanced internet technologies.

The idiosyncratic autobiographical blindness of policy makers, bureaucrats, and legislators has led them to believe that No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top are widely accepted as good by educators and the public alike. They do not hear or see the objections. They do not understand the time being devoted to test preparation and testing is increasing so dramatically that children are not having the time to learn, and teachers are not having the time to teach what children need. These policies are leading to various forms of testing and data dishonesty throughout the country as tests are used for purposes that were never intended. Testing does not lead to improved learning although is does lead to slightly improved test scores. If this testing mania continues, children will have to learn outside of school because testing will become the entire business of the school.

Because of the time devoted to testing, the curriculum is narrowing. Many schools have eliminated art, music and physical education, but the elimination of social studies and science in the elementary grades is growing because of the focus on testing in the areas of literacy and mathematics. A teacher recently explained to me that her eighth-grade, inner-city, African-American students believed that Martin Luther King, Jr. freed the slaves, and they did not know that many of our early presidents, including George Washington, owned slaves.

I believe that we need excellent teachers in our schools. They must be bright and talented and committed to spending more than five years honing their profession as teachers. They also need our support because without them our children will not have a chance in the next century.

Sincerely,

Richard B. Speaker, Jr., Ph. D.

I sent this to the president this morning.

Further reading: http://www.dianeravitch.com/

Ravitch, D. (2010). The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. New York: Basic Books.

Blog: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/