De-Testing and De-Grading Schools recognized as Outstanding Academic Title

I'm pleased to announce that my book De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Standardization and Accountability, that I co-edited with Paul Thomas, was awarded an Outstanding Academic 2014 title by Choice magazine.

Each January, Choice publishes a prestigious list of the best in scholarly titles reviewed during the previous calendar year. Bower and Thomas’s book was chosen based on overall excellence in presentation and scholarship, importance relative to other literature in the field, distinction as a first treatment of a given subject in book or electronic form, originality or uniqueness of treatment, value to undergraduate students and importance in building undergraduate library collections.

De-Testing and De-Grading is Bower's first book and was co-edited by American educator Paul Thomas and published by Peter Lang USA.

A.L. Hsu, chair of the Childhood Education and Literacy Department at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury, described the book:

"Bower and Thomas have edited a powerful volume that criticizes testing and the quantification of education. A selection of contributors with wide-ranging experiences in both K-12 and higher education settings offer diverse perspectives on the dangers of standardized testing and the utilization of grades to sort, classify, and compare students. The varied accounts push readers to reconsider the purpose of giving grades and reflect upon the difference between assessment and measurement. With the increasing number of state assessments and the elaborate systems of accountability in education, this volume inspires readers to focus on the primary goal of learning and how that can be achieved, beginning in kindergarten and going all the way through graduate school studies. Contributors offer alternatives to traditional assessments in the form of authentic tasks where the emphasis is on learning and recognizing growth and development. A must read for anyone in the field of education, including parents, teachers, administrators, and policy makers. Recommended for general readers, undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals.  

--A. L. Hsu, State University of New York College at Old Westbury

A critical truce in the war between traditionalists and progressives

This was written by Paul Thomas who is Associate Professor of Education (Furman University). He taught high school English in rural South Carolina and co-edited (with me)De-Testing and De-Grading Schools. Follow him on twitter here and read his blog here. This post was originally found here.

by Paul Thomas

Harry Webb has launched A War of Words: “The war is between traditionalists and progressives and it is an old war.”

Yes, this is an old war, and what is most frustrating about this battle for me is that, once again, critical perspectives are left out entirely. So let me offer here a brief critical truce to this war between traditionalists and progressives.

First, Webb’s post highlights some of the essential problems with the war itself.

Since the mid-1900s, progressive educators and progressive pedagogy have been demonized (and usually misrepresented) as key sources of educational failures, but traditional practices have historically dominated and currently dominate what happens in real classrooms daily.

We have ample anecdotal (I have been in education for 31 years) and research-based evidence that even though, as Webb notes, colleges of education and education professors disproportionately claim to be progressive, that once teachers enter the classroom, they tend to shut the door and practice relatively traditional pedagogy—often teaching as they have been taught or defaulting to traditional practices since they are more efficient and more easily managed in the challenging environments of mixed-ability and overcrowded classrooms.

I invite everyone to read Alfie Kohn’s examination of this in Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find. Kohn offers not only a solid discussion of how rare progressive practices are, but also details how progressive practices are misrepresented along with what he considers to be genuine progressive pedagogy.

Another problem I have with this war, however, is that I am not a progressive and am not offering here an apology for progressivism.

I am noting that when I wear my history of education hat (I am the Council Historian for NCTE and wrote a biography for my doctoral work), I recognize a demonizing and marginalizing of progressives that is misleading. As a critical educator, I must add, I believe that progressives have failed and do fail in many ways similar to the failures I associate with traditional practices.

I will confess that it is likely we have failed progressivism, but that point is pretty academic.

Along with Kohn’s discussion of progressivism, I also invite you to examine what I believe is an accurate model of what progressivism is by exploring the work of Lou LaBrant, the focus of my educational biography. Her work disproves the stereotypes of progressives as “touchy-feely” educators who have no grounding in empirical evidence. LaBrant practiced classroom-based research and considered herself a scientific teacher throughout her career from 1906 to 1971. She also fiercely defended the progressivism of John Dewey (something, again, that almost no one represents accurately and then almost no one practices—even those education professors who claim to be progressives).

Another problem with the war is that once traditionalists have mischaracterized progressives in order to attack those mischaracterizations and progressives have mischaracterized the traditionalists in order to attack those mischaracterizations, little value comes from the war, and as is typical of wars, we have only collateral damage.

So let me pause on one comment from Webb: “Yet, their argument is weak and not supported by evidence,” he claims about progressives.

I must call a foul here. Education has a century of research, a research base that has been ignored by policymakers and often discredited by those with narrow definitions of what counts a research (action research by teachers doesn’t count, they say, effectively silencing teachers and indirectly the voices of women in their own profession). Thus when Webb proclaims, “There is an imbalance of power here,” there is an unintended irony since that imbalance is exactly what I am highlighting.

Just as one example, Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde have offered for many years an examination of just what the body of evidence shows regarding effective pedagogy. This work calls into question two claims by Webb: first, it shows there is a robust research base, and second, the practices that are likely most effective are fairly characterized as progressive (the sorts of practices that reflect an accurate use of the term).

However, what is most important to note about Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde’s work is that what we know about best practice includes that no pedagogy is rejected and no pedagogy is demanded; in other words, best practice is implementing the instructional practices that best meet the needs of the students and match the learning goals.

For example, the evidence on teaching writing since at least the 1930s and 1940s has shown that isolated grammar instruction does not transfer to original student compositions; in the mid-1990s, George Hillocks showed that isolated grammar instruction actually inhibits writing quality. So the most effective way to teach students to write, including the most effective way for students to learn standard grammar, is through actual writing—something most people would call a progressive perspective.

However, that same research base shows that evidence-based (the evidence being found in actual writing samples from students) direct instruction (what many would call a traditional practice) is vital, and that some students (although a minority) can benefit from targeted isolated grammar instruction.

In other words, the research base emphasizes both the effectiveness of pedagogy most would call progressive, but it certainly doesn’t discount that ultimately what works best is what each student needs. As Webb noted, lecturing can be highly effective, and it can be abysmal—but that has more to do with its delivery and appropriateness than to some default judgment on the practice itself.

When traditionalists say that all students must learn standard English, they likely have a point, but their goal often falls apart when they insist on instructional practices that the evidence has shown are ineffective. “I shall prove my pedagogy is king!” is a shallow thing against seeking ways to teach each student effectively and with compassion and patience.

When progressives say that student must be engaged in authentic activities, they also have a point (although as Webb notes, and I agree, the jargon of education offers no proof that what is claimed is what is taking place), but that goal often falls apart when they fail to recognize that having students participating in a workshop demands a teacher who also provides a great deal of structure and manages purposeful direct instruction as student work reveals the need.

In my experience, traditionalists and progressives tend to become trapped in their pedagogy and fail to see their students or the evidence of their own ineffectiveness.

If you demand all children read The Scarlet Letter, lecture on it brilliantly for two weeks, prepare a detailed study guide, and then have a class score wonderfully on the test at the end of the unit, what have you gained if most of those students never actually read the book and the entire experience taught them to hate reading?

If you invite your students to participate in writing workshop, offer no structure, fail to provide expert feedback, have no process for students to revise and improve their essays, and then bundle a portfolio of all that work with a nice decorated folder cover, what have you gained if that workshop involved more time meandering and decorating, resulting in students writing no better at the end than the beginning? (See LaBrant’s brilliant critique of failed efforts at the project method in ELA classes, a sharp unmasking of failed progressive claims.)

So, where’s the truce? Because a reasonable person could read this so far and say that I have embedded in the discussion a sneaky endorsement of progressivism (do I associate more with progressives than traditionalists? Sure. But I find they fail just as often as traditionalists, and thus, my disappointment with progressives is much more intense).

Here’s my truce.

I bet that someone as thoughtful and purposeful as Harry Webb appears in his blogs is a stellar and effective teacher, despite our differences about pedagogy.

I have seen brilliant traditionalists teachers and lousy self-proclaimed progressives. More than anything, I have seen too many teachers bound to their practices, ignoring their students and the evidence of their ineffectiveness.

Thus, my truce is that the key (the olive branch?) to this war is whether or not a teacher has a critical lens.

Let me end with a couple invitations:

I have posted before a chart that I use to introduce students to the traditionalist v. progressive divide juxtaposed with the often ignored critical alternative; please see it here.

Also consider a longer post in which I explore this dynamic in detail, Education Done To, For, or With Students?

Maybe, as Webb suggests, there is no hope for ending this war, but I would prefer a different approach, one that requires that we all step away from our commitments (as Webb critiques well, our words, labels, and jargon), take an honest assessment of the impact our commitments have on students (because the only real things that matters are ifstudents learn and that we never sacrifice their dignity and humanity in the process), and then begin again, determined to do better the next time.

Peace?

Little Merit in Rush to Report Merit Pay Report

This was written by Paul Thomas who is Associate Professor of Education (Furman University). He taught high school English in rural South Carolina and co-edited (with me) De-Testing and De-Grading Schools. Follow him on twitter here and read his blog here. This post was originally found here.

by Paul Thomas

Mathematica reports and journalists have proven to be problematic—as I noted about the Mathematica claims about KIPP middle schools.

With a fresh Mathematica study, Talent Transfer Initiative: Attracting and Retaining High-Performing Teachers in Low-Performing Schools, also comes the rush to report: 

• Top Teachers Retained Effectiveness After Transfer, Study Shows, Stephen Sawchuck at Education Week 

• What Happens When Great Teachers Get $20,000 to Work in Low-Income Schools? Results, Dana Goldstein at Slate

While both Sawchuck and Goldstein add some nuance to their reports, the headlines are ripe for perpetuating the exact problem found in the KIPP report—a rush to make claims that the study does not support once careful reviews are conducted.

We do not yet know how credible the study is, how valid the results are, or if the study and its conclusions even begin with the right questions or context. And as with all educational research, a clearer picture of the research and the implications can only be found once others begin to analyze the study.

But we just don’t have the time, it appears.

Ultimately, a rush to report in a study without seeking reviews and asking hard questions fails the education reform debate the same way having the New York Times report whatever Arne Duncan claims as if it is true.

The real problem with the perpetual failure of journalism and education reporting is that credible and smart analyses of educational research is now easily accessible online—for example, Shanker Blog, School Finance 101 (Bruce Baker), Cloaking Inequity (Julian Vasquez Heilig) and the National Education Policy Center.

If journalists must report before reviews are conducted, they should at least put these and other scholars and researchers on speed-email.

Until then, once again, journalists would be well advised to start with reports from Molnar (2001) and Yettick (2009)—apparently research many journalists neither rushed to cover or even read.

References

Molnar, A. (2001, April 11). The media and educational research: What we know vs. what the public hears. Milwaukee, WI: Center for Education Research, Analysis, and Innovation. Retrieved fromhttp://epsl.asu.edu/epru/documents/cerai-01-14.htm

Yettick, H. (2009, July 27). The research that reaches the public: Who produces the educational research mentioned in the news media? National Education Policy Center. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved fromhttp://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/research-that-reaches

Detesting and Degrading or De-Testing and De-Grading?

This was written by Paul Thomas who I had the pleasure of co-editing De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization. Paul tweets here and blogs here. This post was originally found here.

By Paul Thomas

It began with an idea, a play on words: Children (and increasingly, teachers) detest school because the current test-and-grade paradigm is degrading so why not de-test and de-grade the schools?

With that idea in mind, I contacted Joe Bower, whose stance against grades and tests I followed on Twitter, and we began discussing an idea of an edited volume addressing de-testing and de-grading our schools, a direct confrontation of the current high-stakes accountability movement. We were fortunate to invite Alfie Kohn on board for the introduction and a chapter. From there the book was developed—although we struggled through a few hiccups with publishers, landing at Peter Lang USA.

Since the volume doesn’t preview each chapter, I want to offer below some snippets from each chapter, and invite you to join the authors of this volume in our tribute to the teachers at Garfield High (Seattle, WA) for their courageous stance against MAP testing (to whom the volume is dedicated):

De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization

Joe Bower and P. L. Thomas, editors

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Roots of Grades-and-Tests, Alfie Kohn:

Most of the contributions to this book focus on problems with either grades or tests. In an article about college admissions published more than a decade ago, however, I suggested that we might as well talk about “grades-and-tests” (G&T) as a single hyphenated entity (Kohn, 2001). There are certainly differences between the two components, but the most striking research finding on the subject is that students’ G&T primarily predicts their future G&T — and little else. It doesn’t tell us much at all about their future creativity, curiosity, happiness, career success, or anything else of consequence.

In fact, the case for the fundamental similarity of grades and tests runs deeper than their limited predictive power. Both are “by their nature reductive,” as P. L. Thomas, co-editor of this volume, observes in his chapter. I would add that both emerge from — and, in turn, contribute to — our predilection for three things: quantifying, controlling, and competing. All of these are defining characteristics of our educational system but also permeate our culture more generally.

Part I: Degrading Learning, Detesting Education: The Failure of High-Stake Accountability in Education

Chapter One: NCLB’s Lost Decade for Educational Progress: What Can We Learn from this Policy Failure?, Lisa Guisbond, Monty Neill, and Bob Schaeffer (FairTest.org):


It is not too late to revisit the lessons of the past ten years and construct a federal law that provides support for equity and progress in all public schools. With that goal in mind, this report first provides an overview of the evidence on NCLB’s track record. Second, it looks at recent efforts at NCLB “reform” and what past evidence says about their likely outcomes. Finally, it points to alternative strategies that could form the basis for a reauthorized federal law that would improve all schools, particularly those serving our most needy students.

Chapter Two: High-stakes Testing Assessment: The Deus Ex Machina of Quality in Education, Fernando F. Padró:


From here on forward the discussion reflects how assessment and quality are used as proxies for each other. The discussion comes more from a higher education viewpoint than a P-12 one, but one reason for this is that higher education is facing many of the same issues and pressures; therefore, the concerns at the macro level are more similar than dissimilar. In other words, it is another way at looking at those external influences impacting education and all aspects of educational activity from early childhood until the brink of formally entering the workforce. While the focus is not always on testing and assessment, the discussion is always about testing and assessment because that is the stock in trade within the quality model that is strongly impacting education.

Chapter Three: Technocratic Groupthink Inflates the Testing Bubble, Anthony Cody:


The sooner this groupthink bubble bursts, the better off we will be. In our classrooms, we must do our best to give our students meaningful opportunities to learn, in spite of the intense pressure to raise test scores. In the public arena, we can help burst the bubble by focusing on the big picture data that shows that in spite of a decade of obsessing over data, there is no evidence that better learning results (Hout & Elliott, 2011). We can help burst the bubble by calling out the self-appointed umpires like NCTQ, the Media Bullpen, and dozens of other test-obsessed advocacy groups that are attempting to overwhelm critical discussion of these issues. And we can support efforts to give voice to other points of view, through organizations that allow parents, teachers and students to raise their voices, without the filtering effect of foundation funding.

Chapter Four: Mean Scores in a Mean World, Lawrence Baines and Rhonda Goolsby:


Today, personnel from state departments of education are about as welcome in public schools as vultures. A wake of vultures seldom attacks healthy animals, but prey upon the wounded or sick. So, when student achievement levels wane, the state sees its role not as helper, but as disciplinarian—to punish a school for allowing its students to post achievement scores below the mean. If a school is contacted by the state, the news inevitably is bad— at best, a public humiliation and at worst, a tumult of teacher and administrator firings in a takeover. Firing people, while enjoyable for select politicians, is a tactic that helps neither student nor teacher.

Chapter Five: Degrading Literacy: How New York State Tests Knowledge, Culture, and Critical Thinking, Julie Gorlewski and David Gorlewski:


In June 1999, New York State anticipated the political and pedagogical movement that has engulfed public schools through the federal legislation entitled No Child Left Behind (USDE, 2003). The state’s education department implemented learning standards meant to drive local district curricula. In addition, the state unveiled a plan to attach the standards to mandatory assessments for students in grades 4, 8, and 11, beginning in the area of English language arts (ELA). Consequences for students and educators were significant and comprehensive. In addition to gauging individual student performance, tests at all levels were designed to measure schools’ progress towards meeting the learning standards and to rank schools according to student achievement. Scores and rankings were to be published and distributed by districts, the state education department, and media outlets; and schools with consistently inadequate scores and unacceptable levels of improvement were threatened with the designation “School Under Regents Review (SURR).” So-called SURR schools would be required to show rapid, significant improvement on standardized assessments or face state takeover (NYSED, 1999). Tests were equally high-stakes for students. In June 1999, passing the commencement level ELA examination (intended for students in grade 11) became a graduation requirement for the high school graduating class of 2000.

Chapter Six: The Aesthetics of Social Engineering: How High Stakes Testing Dehumanizes/Desensitizes Education, Morna McDermott:


Schools in America, at least since the industrial age, have been vehicles of social control. Factory model schools, designed during the industrial era, and guided by the industrial paradigm served that framework through economic, ideological, and political means. Now, just as decades ago, high-stakes testing (HST) is the weapon of choice used by education reformers to manipulate the educational system in ways that benefit their agenda to privatize public; pushing a standardized and highly regulated curriculum (to match with the required tests), increased social engineering (using and tracking student data via the HST for other purposes), and corporate profit (through the development, implementation and evaluation of the HST). One cannot deeply understand the origins or purposes of today’s high stakes tests without examining the social, political, and economic climate in which they exist. High stakes testing is the thread that ties together a larger picture of reform that includes: privatization of public education, replacing public schools with charter schools, enforcing a curriculum which “force feeds” meaningless data to already disempowered and disenfranchised communities, and uses “accountability” to turn data into big profits. Each of these issues, as they interface with testing policies and effects, will be explored in this chapter.

Chapter Seven: Standardized Testing and Boredom at an Urban Middle School, Richard Mora:


While conducting a multi-year, gender study at an urban K-8 school, I witnessed and documented the ground-level impact the push toward greater accountability in public education had on the group of 33 working-class, Latina/o students that I followed. At Romero, as I call the school, standardized test scores served as the ultimate measure of the school’s performance. As a result, entire class periods, hours at time, were dedicated to both district and statewide assessments, with teachers teaching to the test, to the practice tests, and to pre-practice tests. During these tests and the various quizzes and exams their teachers administered, the students had to sit quietly at their desks for long stretches of time, an expectation that proven difficult for most.

Additionally, during the sixth grade, the majority of students I observed had a double math period meant to prepare them for the upcoming state exam. Students found these experiences excruciatingly frustrating and repeatedly summed up their feelings with some variant of the statement, “School is so boring.”

Chapter Eight: Reconciling Student Outcomes and Community Self-Reliance in Modern School Reform Contexts, Brian Beabout and Andre Perry:


Education for African-Americans has historically been linked to the broad movement to improve their lot in life. Ceaselessly, from slavery and Jim Crow, towards full membership in American society, schooling was as much about academic learning as it was for ensuring the sustainability of the community in which the school was situated. Due to both de jure and de facto racial segregation of their communities and public schools, there have historically been high levels of self-determination in schooling for African-Americans (Anderson, 1988). The boundaries of the racial community were often undistinguishable from the geographic communities in which African-Americans lived. Racial uplift became theraison d’être in all sectors of Black society, but education offered a pragmatic focus for community development, political empowerment, and economic enfranchisement. This has meant black teachers, the visible presence of the African-American experience in the curriculum, and significant local decision-making power….

This current pervasiveness of market approaches is reflected in the reform language of state takeover, school turnaround, and reconstitution. As a consequence, since 2001, administrative control of many schools serving students of color has shifted from local educators and elected school boards to the states and the federal government who set the accountability policies and determine student and school accountability rules based on test scores. The following chapter interrogates this facially benign policy of raising student achievement with respect to the potential impact on the legacy self-determination of African-American schooling.

Chapter Nine: The Role of Assessment in Empowering/ Disempowering Students in the Critical Pedagogy Classroom, David Bolton and John Elmore:


Since the focus of teacher education at West Chester University has shifted toward teacher training, Democracy and Education, the one foundations course that students take is often where they learn critical perspectives on education. In this class, students define and examine their own philosophies and beliefs about the purpose of education in democratic society and compare, contrast, reject, and borrow from the philosophies of others. Since one of the stated goals of education at West Chester University is to create public intellectuals, it is critical that that foundations course be as empowering as possible.

Learning to think critically about assessment should be a vital part of this foundations course. If students are critically examining the purpose and content of education, i.e., instruction, then students also must learn to become critical assessors of their students. They must be given the intellectual tools to refocus the debate about assessment, so that assessment is not their master, but is a tool that will empower them as they teach their own students.

Part II: De-Grading and De-Testing in a Time of High-Stakes Education Reform

Chapter Ten: The Case Against Grades, Alfie Kohn

Chapter Eleven: Reduced to Numbers: From Concealing to Revealing Learning, Joe Bower:


Since 2006, I have worked to identify and remove things like grading that traditional school has done for so long. And when I share this with others, I receive mixed responses. Some listen intently, nodding their heads in agreement, as if deep down they have always sensed something wrong with what Seymour Papert (1988) described as School with a capital ‘S’ — which is a place that he explains as having a bureaucracy that has its own interests and is not open to what is in the best interest of the children. Unfortunately, when most people close their eyes and think of their Schooling, many have experienced no other kind of School than the one with a capital “S.” Some listen in shock and awe at how school could even function without such things as grading. The people who have a hard time comprehending how children could learn without extrinsic manipulators concern me the most. They are so invested into traditional schooling that they have never questioned its foundation. Unfortunately, some have a distrustful view of the nature of children. Meaning that they believe that without grading there would be nothing to stop children from running amok.

Chapter Twelve: Assessment Technologies as Wounding Machines: Abjection, the Imagination and Grading, John Hoben:


For me the questions surrounding grading are incessant: Do I subtract marks for improper citation style in a paper where a young teacher talks about the death of her father with remarkable insight, wisdom and grace? What grade do I give a teacher who has the courage to write and share her struggles with breast cancer and her fears about leaving her young daughter? Or to a young man who writes about his mother’s struggles with the late stages of multiple sclerosis? Conventional grading gives no consideration to the marks these students should receive for having taught me about grace under fire, about humility and a quiet kind of perseverance instead of “sorting students like so many potatoes” (Kohn, 1994, p. 38). As a quantifying technology which presents teachers with a set of bureaucratic practices for the management of human subjects, grading is a machinery of abjection: a set of technical and administrative practices which works by “casting out” since schooling needs the threat of the wound to maintain its own internal boundaries and hierarchies. More than a simple means of disciplining students and teachers (Foucault, 1995), grading is a mode of schooling the imagination rather than allowing the imagination to radically transform schools. It does this by excluding those who do not fit prescribed models of excellence and teaching us to revile those who do not conform to dominant ways of thinking and being.

Chapter Thirteen: No Testing Week: Focusing on Creativity in the Classroom, Peter DeWitt:


When I entered college, a friend’s parents, who were both teachers, tried to persuade me from entering the field of education, which I found very sad. They were both excellent teachers but they said the profession was changing, and not for the better. I politely smiled and listened to their concerns but I continued down the same path despite their warnings. After working in an after-school program, I knew that I wanted to be an educator. I never forgot the disappointment I felt when those two retired teachers tried to talk me out of entering the profession that they spent so much time in. After seventeen years in education, first as a teacher and then a principal, I understand why they felt the way they did so long ago. However, I still maintain hope that things will get better and strongly believe it is my job as the school leader to help teachers find that love again.

I have come to a crossroads in my career. According to the movie Under the Tuscan Sun, that sounds very Oprah of me. When I began teaching I remember more seasoned teachers stating that if you stay in education long enough you will see the pendulum swing from one side to the other. It is my hope that the pendulum has swung to one very dysfunctional side long enough and will make its way to a side that is based in common sense and sound educational practices before many of us end our careers.

It seems as though policymakers in education want educators to pay attention to research, data and accountability, but they feel that they do not have to play by the same rules. Apparently research, data and accountability only matter when it tells policymakers what they want to hear. Unfortunately, the direction they have been leading education is not good for kids. It is bordering on educational malpractice. Just like the present economic issues in the U.S., education will continue to benefit only the top percentage of kids who can afford it.

Chapter Fourteen: Creating an Ungraded Classroom, Hadley Ferguson:


It is often easy to identify the beginning of an adventure; but where that journey will take you is usually a mystery. That was certainly the case with my adventure into ungrading and using portfolios for assessment. There have been many unexpected twists and turns in the road, unanticipated challenges as well as significant and rewarding successes. When I asked my administration if I could teach an ungraded class, I knew that I was stepping away from the security of my established practice and into a place where all of my skills and knowledge would have to be applied in fresh ways. A new adventure was truly starting. I asked for and was given permission to teach the only ungraded class in an otherwise school with grades. The school was in a time of transition, and teachers had been challenged to experiment with the best strategies for meeting the changing needs of 21st century students. My class, 7th grade history, became a place where learning took place within a new set of standards and expectations. While there were a wide variety of assignments and assessments, none of them was going to end in a grade.

Chapter Fifteen: “Parents Just Want to Know the Grade”: Or Do They?, Jim Webber and Maja Wilson:


Occasionally, someone has the nerve to suggest that grades are overrated, that a focus on them is detrimental, and that everyone might be happier and learn more if we de-emphasized or got rid of them completely. A widely discussed article on Inside Higher Education (Jaschik, 2010) described Cathy Davidson’s efforts to “get out of the grading business.” In her English classes at Duke University, students held regular meetings to decide if their work was acceptable or needed revision. Davidson gave no grades—only descriptive feedback. At the end of the experiment, Davidson declared, “It was spectacular….It would take a lot to get me back to a conventional form of grading ever again.” …

Still, the research accumulates: a study (Pulfrey, Buchs, & Butera, 2011) demonstrated that when students anticipate grades on papers (with or without comments), they become more likely to avoid difficult work than when they anticipate teacher comments without grades. This finding complements Ruth Butler’s (1987) study showing that grades (with or without comments) lead to lower levels of intrinsic motivation and creativity. But suggest that we act on this research—by de-emphasizing or replacing grades in the classroom—and even sympathetic teachers conjure up parent protests: “I’d be the first to get rid of grades and just do writing conferences and narrative feedback! But parents just want to see the grade!”

Chapter Sixteen: De-grading Writing Instruction in a Time of High-stakes Testing: The Power of Feedback in Workshop, P. L. Thomas:


It is now 2012, and I am at the end of my first decade as a college professor of education. After 18 years teaching high school English, a career that was deep in my heart and bones as a teacher of writing, I moved to the university in part as an act of professional and scholarly autonomy. Teaching in education courses, however, has proven to be far less fulfilling and off-kilter to my central concerns with directly addressing human literacy—fostering writers.

After being allowed to teach one section of the university’s introductory English course, I was fortunate that my university re-imagined its curriculum, replacing the two required freshman English courses with two freshman seminars designed to inspire and fuel student engagement in learning. One of the freshman seminars must be writing intensive, and the seminars are taught by professors across departments—not just the English faculty.

This curriculum change has afforded me a unique opportunity to teach a writing-intensive freshman seminar each fall at the university level, where I have the autonomy to implement writing workshop and, most significantly, to de-grade the feedback process of my students crafting their essays. In that context, this chapter opens with a brief discussion of how the writing curriculum has suffered a failed history in K-12 education—almost completely disconnected from the research and craft of composition as a field. Then, I detail my own evolution as a teacher of writing from my high school years as a teacher and into my recent experiences with de-grading the writing classroom for freshmen. I also examine how K-12 teachers of writing are both inhibited in best practices for composition because of the accountability era as well as how those teacher should and can reclaim the teaching of writing for all children.

Chapter Seventeen: One Week, Many Thoughts, Brian Rhode:


Have you ever had the pleasure of watching a school bloom? I have. I watched the walls around me burst into color, like flower petals extending themselves to the great warmth of the spring sun. Splashes of primary shades crawled throughout the school thoroughfares in which I spend my days as a professional. The entrances to classrooms became bustling hives of activity and the productivity was evidenced in the variety of posters, pictures and projects that emerged. Suddenly my small elementary school in upstate NY resembled a field of flowers in the full throws of its spring awakening!

I am certain many of you are asking what possibly ignited such a school-wide explosion of creativity. Quite simply, it was the result of a week without testing. My principal, Dr. Peter DeWitt, had the idea back in the fall of 2011 to give us, as a staff, a much-needed break from the relentless drive of standardized assessment based instruction. As a veteran of the classroom himself, he recognized a way to re-invigorate his teachers by endorsing a respite from the type of instruction that seems to stand in a starkly antagonistic position to the attitudes and beliefs that typically bring people into teaching.

Conclusion: Striving Towards Authentic Teaching for Social Justice, Lisa William-White:


What does it mean to prepare emergent teachers in an era where we bear witness to anti-immigrant discourses and policies; where we see (or even know) scores of people who live in poverty (Measuring Child Poverty, 2012); or where there is widespread bullying of children and youth in schools and communities (From Teasing to Torment, 2005)? What doespreparation mean in a country where we have championed education reform since the 1950s; where we extol the importance of literacy andcritical thinking; and yet, we further prescribewhat constitutes appropriate knowledge, including what content teachers must teach (Common Core State Standards Initiative n.d.)? And, what does this all mean in an era of education deform (Pinar, 2012) – a time of shrinking state budgets, eroding of educational enrichment opportunities for children and youth, rising tuition costs in universities, and where democratic learning spaces in higher education are further undermined by business models for educational decision making?

Poverty and Testing in Education

This was written by Paul Thomas. Paul blogs here and tweets here. This post was originally found here.

by Paul Thomas

Part I: Poverty

Jim Taylor has entered the poverty and education debate by asking US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and billionaire/education entrepreneur Bill Gates a direct question:

“I really don’t understand you two, the US Secretary of Education and the world’s second richest man and noted philanthropist. How can you possibly say that public education can be reformed without eliminating poverty?”

Taylor’s discussion comes to an important element in the debate when he addresses Gates: “Because without understanding the causes of problems, we can’t find solutions,” explains Taylor, adding. “You’re obviously trying to solve public education’s version of the classic ‘chicken or egg’ conundrum.”

Here, recognizing the education/poverty debate as a chick-or-egg problem is the crux of how this debate is missing the most important questions about poverty—and as a result, insuring that Duncan and Gates are winning the argument by perpetuating the argument.

The essential questions about poverty and education should not focus on whether we should address poverty to improve education (where I stand, based on the evidenceand the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.) or whether we should reform education as a mechanism to alleviate poverty (the tenant of the “no excuses” ideology promoted by Duncan and Gates); the essential question about poverty is: Who creates and allows poverty to exist in the wealthiest and most powerful country in recorded history?

As a basic point of logic, any organized entity—a society, a business, a school—has characteristics that are either created or tolerated by those in power controlling that organization. All entities are by their nature conservative—functioning to maintain the entity itself. In other words, institutions resist change, particularly radical change that threatens the hierarchy of power.

In the US, then, poverty exists in the wider society and performs a corrosive influence in the education system (among all of our social institutions) because the ruling elite—political and corporate leaders—need poverty to maintain their elite status at the top of the hierarchy of power.

While the perpetual narratives promoted by the political and corporate elite through the media elite have allowed this point of logic to be masked and ignored in American society, we must face the reality that people with power drive the realities of those without power. Yes, the cultural narratives driven by the elite suggest that people trapped in poverty are somehow in control of that poverty—either creating it themselves due to their own sloth, that they somehow deserve their station in life, or failing to rise above that poverty (and this suggestion allows the source of poverty to be ignored) from their own failure to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps.

But that narrative has no basis in evidence—except that those without power do have control of that which creates the conditions that, ironically, benefit the elite. The powerful must allow those without power to have some autonomy—as parents with children—in order to create the illusion of autonomy to keep revolt at bay; this is why the political and corporate elite use the word “choice” and perpetuate the myth that all classes in America have the same access to choice.

Poverty as Necessary for Current Hierarchies of Power

How does poverty benefit the powerful in the US?

• US cultural narratives depend on Utopian elements of democracy, meritocracy, and individual freedom. Those ideals form the basis for most of the cultural narratives expressed by the political and corporate elite in the US Poverty works as the Other in those narratives—that which we must all reject, that which we must strive to avoid. If the Utopian goals, including eliminating poverty, is ever achieved, however, the tension between the working-/middle- class and those in poverty would be eliminated as well, exposing the artificial perch upon which the ruling elite sit. The necessity of poverty works both to keep us from attaining the Utopian goals and to make the Utopian goals attractive.

• Poverty contributes to the crisis motif that keeps the majority of any society distracted from the minority elite benefiting disproportionately from the labor of the majority. Crises large and small—from Nazis, Communists, and Terrorists to crime to teen pregnancy to the achievement gap and the drop-out crisis—create the perception that the average person cannot possibly keep these crises under control (crises that would plunge otherwise decent people into the abyss of poverty) and, thus, needs the leadership of the elite. The majority of average people can only be carried to the promised land of Utopian peace and equality by the sheer force of personality held by only a few; these ruling elite are the only defense against the perpetual crises threatening the ideals we hold sacred (see Part II for how we identify those elite).

• Along with Utopian promises and the refrain of crisis, the ruling elite need the pervasive atmosphere of fear—whether real or fabricated—in order to occupy the time and energy of the majority. [1] Poverty becomes not just a condition to be feared, but also those people to be feared. The cultural narratives—in contrast to the evidence—about poverty and people living in poverty connect poverty and crime, poverty and drug abuse, poverty and domestic violence, poverty and unattractiveness, and most of all, poverty and the failure of the individual to grasp the golden gift of personal freedom afforded by the United States.

Just as we rarely consider the sources of poverty—who controls the conditions of our society—we rarely examine the conditions we are conditioned to associate with poverty and people living in poverty. Are the wealthy without crime? Without drug abuse? Without deceptions of all kinds? Of course not, but the consequences for these acts by someone living in privilege is dramatically different than the consequences for those trapped in poverty.

The ruling elite have created a culture where we see the consequences of poverty, but mask the realities of privilege.

Winners always believe the rules of the game to be fair, and winners need losers in order to maintain the status of “winner.” The US, then, is a democracy only as a masking narrative that maintains the necessary tension among classes—the majority working-/middle- class fearful of slipping into poverty, and so consumed by that fear that they are too busy and fearful to consider who controls their lives: “those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives.” [2]

In the narrow debate about poverty and education, we are being manipulated once again by the ruling elite, within which Duncan and Gates function, to focus on the chicken-and-egg problem of poverty/education so that we fail to examine the ruling elite creating and tolerating poverty for their own benefit. By creating the debate they want, they are winning once again.

And that success derives in large part from their successful propaganda campaign about the value of testing.

Part II: Testing

Now that I have suggested shifting the discourse about poverty and education away from the chick-and-egg problem to the role of sustaining and tolerating poverty for the benefit of the ruing elite, let’s look at the central role testing plays in maintaining the status quo of power in the US And let’s build that consideration on a couple pillars of evidence.

First, despite decades committed to the science of objective, valid, and reliable standardized testing, outcomes from standardized tests remain most strongly correlated with the socio-economic status of the students. As well, standardized tests also remain biased instruments.

Next, more recently during the thirty-year accountability era, the overwhelming evidence shows that standards, testing, and accountability do not produce the outcomes that proponents have claimed.

Thus, just as the poverty/education question should address who creates and allows poverty and why, the current and historical testing obsession should be challenged in terms of who is benefiting from our faith in testing and why.

The Meritocracy Myth, Science, and the Rise of New Gods

The history of power, who sits at the top and why, is one of creating leverage for the few at the expense of the many. To achieve that, often those at the top have resorted to explicit and wide-scale violence as well as fostering the perception that anyone at the top has been chosen, often by the gods or God, to lead—power is taken or deserved.

“God chose me” and “God told me” remain powerful in many cultures, but in a secular culture with an ambiguous attitude toward violence (keep the streets of certain neighborhoods here crime-free, but war in other countries is freedom fighting) such as the US, the ruling elite needed a secular god—thus, the rise of science, objectivity, and testing:

“[A] correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications, and rules; from which it extends it effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.” [1]

As I noted above, testing remains a reflection of the inequity gap in society and the high-stakes testing movement has not reformed education or society, so the rising call for even more testing of students, testing based on a national curriculum and used to control teachers, must have a purpose other than the Utopian claims by the political and corporate elite who are most invested in the rising testing-culture in the US.

That purpose, as with the persistence of poverty, is to maintain the status quo of a hierarchy of power and to give that hierarchy the appearance of objectivity, of science.

Standards, testing, and accountability are the new gods of the political and corporate elite.

Schools in the US are designed primarily to coerce children to be compliant, to be docile; much of what we say and consider about education is related to discipline—classroom management is often central to teacher preparation and much of what happens during any school day:

“The exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism that coerces by means of observation; an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce effects of power in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible.” [2]

In education reform, the surveillance of students, and now the surveillance of teachers, is not covert, but in plain view in the form of tests, that allow that surveillance to be disembodied from those students and teachers—and thus appearing to be impersonal—and examined as if objective and a reflection of merit.

Testing as surveillance in order to create compliance is central to maintaining hierarchies of power both within schools (where a premium is placed on docility of students and teachers) and society, where well-trained and compliant voters and workers sustain the positions of those in power:

“[T]he art of punishing, in the regime of disciplinary power, is aimed neither at expiation, nor precisely at repression. . . .It differentiates individuals from one another, in terms of the following overall rule: that the rule be made to function as a minimal threshold, as an average to be respected, or as an optimum toward which one must move. It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value the abilities, the level, the ‘nature’ of individuals. . . .The perpetual penalty that traverses all points and supervises every instant in the disciplinary institution compares, differentiates, hierachizes, homogenizes, excludes. In short, it normalizes.” [3]

The political and corporate elite in the US have risen to their status of privilege within the “scientifico-legal complex” that both created that elite and is then perpetuated by that elite. As I noted in Part I, the winners always believe the rules of the game to be fair and will work to maintain the rules that have produced their privilege

The Expanded Test Culture—“The Age of Infinite Examination”

Foucault has recognized the central place for testing within the power dynamic that produces a hierarchy of authority:

“The examination combines the techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of normalizing judgment. It is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes possible to qualify, to classify, and to punish.” [4]

Thus, as the rise of corporate paradigms to replace democratic paradigms has occurred in the US over the last century, we can observe a rise in the prominence of testing along with how those tests are used. From the early decades of the twentieth century, testing in the US has gradually increased and expanded in its role for labeling and sorting students. In the twenty-first century, testing is now being wedged into a parallel use to control teachers.

Those in power persist in both cases—testing to control students and testing to control teachers—to claim that tests are a mechanism for achieving Utopian goals of democracy, meritocracy, and individual freedom, but in both cases, those claims are masks for implementing tests as the agent of powerful gods (science, objectivity, accountability) to justify the current hierarchy of power—not the change society or education: “[T]he age of the ‘examining’ school marked the beginnings of a pedagogy that functions as science.” [5]

Foucault, in fact, identifies three ways that testing works to reinforce power dynamics, as opposed to providing data for education reform driven by a pursuit of social justice.

First, testing of individual students and using test data to identify individual teacher quality create a focus on the individual that reinforces discipline:

“In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen. Their visibility assures the hold of the power that is exercised over them. It is the fact of their being constantly seen. . .that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection. And the examination is the technique by which power. . .holds them in a mechanism of objectification.” [6]

This use of testing resonates in President Obama’s first term as Secretary Duncan simultaneously criticizes the misuse of testing in No Child Left Behind and calls for an expansion of testing (more years of a student’s education, more areas of content, and more directly tied to individual teachers), resulting in: “We are entering the age of infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.” [7]

Next, testing has provided a central goal of sustaining the hierarchy of power—“the calculation of gaps between individuals, their distribution in a given ‘population.’” [8] Testing, in effect, does not provide data for addressing the equity/achievement gap, testing has created those gaps, labeled those gaps, and marginalized those below the codified level of standard.

What tends to be ignored in the testing debate is that some people with authority determine what is taught, how that content is taught, what is tested, and how that testing is conducted. In short, all testing is biased and ultimately arbitrary in the context of who has authority.

And finally, once the gaps are created and labeled through the stratifying of students and teachers:

“[I]t is the individual as he[/she] may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his[/her] very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.” [9]

Poverty and Testing—Tools of the Privileged

Within the perpetual education and education reform debates, the topics of poverty and testing are central themes, but we too often are missing the key elements that should be addressed in the dynamic that exists between poverty and testing.

Yes, standardized tests remain primarily reflections of social inequity that those tests make possible, labeled as “achievement gaps.”

But the central evidence we should acknowledge is that the increased focus on testing coming from the political and corporate elite is proof that those in privilege are dedicated to maintaining poverty as central to their hierarchy of authority.

Standards, testing, accountability, science, and objectivity are the new gods that the ruling class uses to keep the working-/middle-class in a state of “perpetual anxiety,” fearing the crisis de jure and the specter of slipping into poverty—realities that insure the momentum of the status quo.

References

Part I:

[1] Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader. Ed. P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books. See Foucault’s discussion of “perpetual anxiety” (p. 144) in “The Birth of the Asylum” from Madness and Civilization.

[2] Ibid., p. 177.

Part II:

[1] Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader. Ed. P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 170.

[2] Ibid., p. 189.

[3] Ibid., p. 195.

[4] Ibid., p. 197.

[5] Ibid., p. 198.

[6] Ibid., p. 199.

[7] Ibid., p. 200.

[8] Ibid., p. 202.

[9] Ibid., p. 203.

De-testing and De-grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization

I am excited to announce a very cool book. It's being printed now. I'll let you know when it's available for purchase.

PURCHASE IT HERE

De-Testing and De-Grading Schools: Authentic Alternatives to Accountability and Standardization
Joe Bower and P. L. Thomas, editors

Introduction and chapter by Alfie Kohn

Peter Lang USA
Counterpoints Series

From the back cover:

A century of education and education reform along with the last three decades of high-stakes testing and accountability reveals a disturbing paradox: Education has a steadfast commitment to testing and grading despite decades of research, theory and philosophy that reveal the corrosive consequences of both testing and grading within an education system designed to support human agency and democratic principles.

This edited volume brings together a collection of essays that confront the failure of testing and grading and then offers practical and detailed examinations of implementing, at the macro and micro levels of education, teaching and learning free of the weight of testing and grading. The book explores the historical failure of testing and grading; the theoretical and philosophical arguments against testing and grading; the negative influence of testing and grading on social justice, race, class, and gender; and the role of testing and grading in perpetuating a deficit perspective of children, learning, race, and class.

The chapters fall under two borad sections: Part I: "Degrading Learning, Detesting Education: The Failure of High-Stakes Accountability in Education" includes essays on the historical, theoretical, and philosophical arguments against testing and grading; Part II: "De-Grading and De-Testing in a Time of High-Stakes Education Reform" presents practical experiments in de-testing and de-grading classrooms for authentic learning experiences.

What REALLY determines student performance

Paul Thomas, Associate Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. Follow him on twitter here and read his blog here. This post first appeared at Truthout here.

by Paul Thomas

"After several decades of rigorous effort, it is fair to say that the majority of our attention in political science has been given to interstate war and civil war," explains Christian Davenport, adding:

"I would say that it would be interesting to count the number of articles over the last five years on terrorism and compare it to the number of articles on repression but regardless, I stand by the claim that most of our attention has been focused on those activities that challenge political authorities. Actually, it's probably not even close. 

"Why is this the case? Why do governments get a pass? Well, it's not because of the actual number of deaths associated with different forms of violence.... 

"I would argue that scholars, especially those in political science, who study challenges to governments do so because this is what governments want us to study. In many ways the targets of political scientists' gaze has been shaped by those whom we examine. This is what governments and foundations pay for — mostly."

While this is a powerful and much needed commentary on the inadequate and disproportionate critical work in political science, I believe the exact same charge can be leveled at the current education reform debate.

Why do the power elite—from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to corporate charter chains (KIPP) to self-promoting edu-celebrities (Michelle Rhee) and to billionaire education hobbyists (Bill Gates)—overwhelming champion "no excuses" ideologies behind their claims about public schools and needed education reform?

Primarily because the "no excuses" mantra focuses the public and political gaze where the powerful want it—on the families, children, and institutions overburdened by poverty andnot on the powerful who have the resources and influence to shape the inequity upon which they feed.

No Excuses: "Tragic and Unacceptable" Distraction

The "no excuses" ideology triggers deep-seated commitments in the U.S. to myths about rugged individualism and the Puritan work ethic. Americans not only believe we should aspire to a meritocracy, but also trust we live in a meritocracy.

Thus, those in power claim that all children should be succeeding in public schools and then follow up by saying children trapped in poverty should simply try harder (often conceding twice as hard) and that school failure is primarily the fault of the "adults" not trying hard enough as well:

"'These schools are failing, and failing persistently,' [SC Superintendent of Education Mick Zais] said. 'And it's not the students who are failing in these schools. It's the adults on the boards, in the districts and in the schools who are failing the children.'"

Like the dynamic posed by Davenport about political science research, the power elite using the "no excuses" mantra to focus the public on families, children, teachers, and schools trapped in poverty gives the powerful a pass. The "no excuses" ideology places the burden of poverty on the people, children, and schools experiencing poverty—suggesting and sometimes directly stating that the people, children, and institutions trapped in poverty are the cause-agents of the poverty (notably because of lack of effort, a failure to take advantage of the opportunities in the meritocracy that doesn't exist).

"[R]egardless of what you think about the current mix of government programs, educational outcomes are too tightly linked to parents' economic status," explains Trina Shanks, adding:

"Many children start out school eager to learn and wanting to achieve. But as it seems that no one cares about their efforts and their basic needs are not being met with each passing grade, they start to become less engaged in school and search for other ways to survive. This is tragic and unacceptable."

Inequity, Not Merit, Reigns in U.S. Society and Schools

Recent studies have unmasked the tremendous disadvantages children from impoverished communities face. The truth is that achievement and the likelihood anyone can rise above her/his station at birth are powerfully linked to the coincidence of any child's community.

U.S. society is tremendously inequitable, and our public schools' primary failure is that due to bureaucratic policies schools more often than not reflect and perpetuate that inequity.

Shanks has shown that the future of a child living in poverty is a function of that child's race and class, not effort:

"Even children with proven academic ability fall behind if they grow up in families that are poor. By the age of 3, one study showed, poor children already have half the vocabulary of higher-income children. Another study showed that children in high-risk social and economic environments can start in the top 25% academically at the age of 4 but fall to the bottom by the time they are in high school. 

"In a similar example, only 29% of the highest-achieving eighth-graders complete college if they come from low-income families. 

"In contrast, 30% of the lowest-achieving eighth-graders and 74% of the highest-achieving eighth-graders complete college if they come from high-income families. Until we get to a point where ability and effort predictably lead to greater educational attainment and improved outcomes, many kids will stop trying because the obstacles become too daunting."

Shanks' Diverging Pathways: How Wealth Shapes Opportunity for Children details the same patterns of race-based inequity:

"Racial disparities in households with young children are dramatic 

• In 2007, 32% of white households with young children were income-poor and 14.2% had no assets. In sharp contrast, 69% of Latino and 71% of blacks were income-poor, and 40% had no assets. 

Racial disparities in child outcomes start early and grow over time 

• At nine months, all children start out with fairly similar scores on a standard child development test, but by two years of age, racial disparities emerge. 

The wealth gap widened for households with children 

• Between 1994 and 2007, the wealth gap between white and black households with children increased by $22,000 -almost doubling from $25,000 to $47,000.
• In 2007, black households with children held only 4% of the wealth of white households.
• From 2005 to 2007, black households living with zero or negative net worth (debt) grew from 35% to 39% while it stayed constant at 15% for white households. 

Maternal education matters, but alone cannot eliminate racial wealth disparities 

• For every dollar of wealth owned by a white mother with a bachelor's degree or higher in 1994 a black mother owned 64 cents. By 2007, it had fallen to 13 cents. 

• The wealth gap between white and black mothers with a bachelor's degree or higher grew five times larger between 1994 and 2007 to an astonishing $128,000."

Davenport argues that as long as scholars look where government wants, "...we end up knowing much less about governments and repressive action than we do revolutionaries and revolution, protesters and protest, rebels and rebellion, and terrorists and terrorism."

And thus, we sit in the same predicament in terms of how those in power are framing the education quality and education reform debate.

As long as we allow those in power to focus our gaze on people, children, and schools trapped in poverty, "we end up knowing much less" about the powerful people and institutions who create and tolerate that inequity.

As Shanks expressed, that is "tragic and unacceptable," and I would add inexcusable.

Ignoring Poverty in the US

Here's a book on my to read list. Here's the description of Paul Thomas's book Ignoring Poverty in the U.S:

Ignoring Poverty in the U.S.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Education examines the divide between a commitment to public education and our cultural myths and more powerful commitment to consumerism and corporate America. The book addresses poverty in the context of the following: the historical and conflicting purposes in public education—how schools became positivistic/behavioral in our quest to produce workers for industry; the accountability era—how A Nation at Risk through NCLB have served corporate interest in dismantling public education and dissolving teachers unions; the media and misinformation about education; charter schools as political/corporate compromise masking poverty; demonizing schools and scapegoating teachers—from misusing the SAT to VAM evaluations of teachers; rethinking the purpose of schools—shifting from schools as social saviors to addressing poverty so that public education can fulfill its purpose of empowering everyone in a democracy; and reframing how we view people living in poverty—rejecting deficit views of people living in poverty and students struggling in school under the weight of lives in poverty.

This work is intended to confront the growing misinformation about the interplay among poverty, public schools, and what schools can accomplish while political and corporate leadership push agendas aimed at replacing public education with alternatives such as charter schools. The audience for the publication includes educators, educational reformers, politicians, and any member of the wider public interested in public education.

Time as Capital: Rise of the Frantic Class

This was written by Paul Thomas who is Associate Professor of Education (Furman University). He taught high school English in rural South Carolina. Follow him on twitter here and read his blog here.  This post first appeared at Daily Kos.

by Paul Thomas

Imagine a world where time is capital.

This is the dystopian future of 2161 brought to film by Andrew Niccol's In Time (2011)—triggering some powerful parallels to Logan's Run (both the original novel from 1967 and thefilm adaptation in 1976).

Both Logan's Run and In Time expose the human condition in terms of age and mortality—in the first, life ends at 30, and in the latter, people stop aging at 25, but at a price, which involves time.

Science fiction (SF) as a genre presents us with allegory in the form of other worlds, as Margaret Atwood argues, and speculations, but the most engaging aspect of SF for me as a fan and teacher is when SF unmasks universal and contemporary realities by presenting those other worlds.

One of the recurring messages of SF is the crippling inequity that continues to plague human societies, such as the haunting and sparse Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” that forces reader to admit privilege exists on the backs of the innocent and oppressed.

The world of In Time presents an apparent meritocracy in which all people are given life until 25, when they stop aging but an embedded clock starts ticking forcing everyone to earn time in order to live. This deal with the devil positions all labor as literally necessary to live and puts banks at the center of who survives.

The Frantic Distraction of Surviving

Americans' faith in a meritocracy is often expressed in claims of the U.S. being a post-racial society as well as a classless society. Like the Hunger Games trilogy, In Time highlights class distinctions as people are segregated in Time Zones. Eventually, the narrative brings together the two main characters, Will Salas from the ghetto and Sylvia Weis from the affluent zone, New Greenwich.

Due to both personal tragedy and a huge gift of time from a stranger, Will confronts the norms of this dystopia while being hunted by a Timekeeper, Raymond Leon. One scene, I think, deserves closer consideration.

When Will travels from the ghetto through several Time Zones (incrementally costing him more and more time) to New Greenwich, he steps out of the cab and immediately begins jogging, a habit common in the ghettos since almost everyone is living, literally, from paycheck to paycheck (or under the weight of time loans, loan sharks, or pawn shops) until he notices that in New Greenwich people are eerily casual. This distinction comes up again when he is eating breakfast and the waitress notices that he isn't from New Greenwich because he does everything fast.

People in the ghettos, what can reasonably be called the working class and the working poor, lead lives that are so frantic that no one has the time to confront the inequity of the society, and because of the segregated society, these frantic workers have little insight into the lives of privilege, casual lives, that Will witnesses for himself and the viewer.

Also worth closer consideration is the role of the Timekeeper, Leon, who presents a truly complex character who functions under a code of ethics that is perfectly ethical within the norms of the culture, but ultimately self-defeating and dehumanizing. Timekeepers enforce the laws, primarily couched in time as capital, but because of their close proximity to crime, they carry with them only small quantities of time, thus leading frantic lives very similar to the working class/poor they help keep both in line and frantic.

Ultimately, Will exposes truths that challenge the norms of this society, truths that are in fact just as relevant to the world we now inhabit:

• Will discovers that time is not a limited commodity; there is plenty of capital, but the privileged create scarcity to keep the masses frantic, and distracted.

• Timekeepers as a police force are unmasked as not seekers of justice (Leon admits this directly), but as agents of the privileged.

• The moving target of the free market is exposed as not so much "free" but an arbitrary mechanism that puts most people in a life like caged gerbils on running wheels. Interest rates and prices incrementally increase daily as the workers accumulate time. The system is designed to keep workers trapped in their roles as workers.

• And privilege, as Le Guin's story shows, is always at the expense of others, captured by this exchange from In Time:

Sylvia Weis: Will, if you get a lot of time, are you really gonna give it away? 

Will Salas: I've only ever had a day. How much do you need? How can you live with yourself watching people die right next to you? 

Sylvia Weis: You don't watch. You close your eyes. I can help you get all the time you want.

In effect, while the details may be exaggerated, the lessons learned by Will are disturbingly relevant to contemporary Americans, as much as how it informs us as workers as it highlights that education reform is more concerned with producing workers than proving all children with equity, liberation, and autonomy.

Frantic Students, Frantic Workers: The Rise of the Frantic Class

The frantic state of being among the working class and working poor of In Time is a perceptive dramatization of the American worker, increasingly stripped of rights as unions are dismantled and the essentials of human dignity (income, health care, retirement) are further tied to being employed.

But the allegorical messages of In Time also speak to how and why current education reform claims and policies are designed to appease corporate needs for frantic workers.

One characterization of U.S. public education today is well represented in this dystopian world—frantic.

Current corporate education reform is built on implementing national standards designed to continue the historical call to incrementally increase both expectations and outcomes (the target for success in education has always been a moving target) so that students, teachers, and schools are always under duress, always falling short, always so frantic that no one can pause to question, challenge, or do anything other than comply.

Imagine a world where time is capital, where all of any person's time is spent compiling time, a fruitless cycle of acquisition, of seeking to comply with the mandates none of the masses have chosen for herself/himself.

But you don't have to imagine this.

This frantic world of In Time is the frantic existence of the American worker, and this frantic world is being fed by the corporate takeover of public schools where accountability, standards, and testing have reduced teachers and students to gerbils on running wheels.

In 2012, workers, students, and teachers are the frantic class; like Will, we don't have time:

Will Salas: I don't have time. I don't have time to worry about how it happened. It is what it is. We're genetically engineered to stop aging at 25. The trouble is, we live only one more year, unless we can get more time. Time is now the currency. We earn it and spend it. The rich can live forever. And the rest of us? I just want to wake up with more time on my hand than hours in the day.

The rising frantic class is necessary for the privileged few, the 1% controlling both manufactured austerity and the perpetually moving targets of success.

While universal public education was created to feed the promise of the American Dream, the current corporate takeover of public schools is driving the American Nightmare of the frantic class.

We don't need a movie to see that.

Standardized testing is like tobacco

Paul Thomas writes some remarkable posts for the Daily Kos. In his his post The Education Games: Reform as Doublespeak, he writes about how we should frame the debate around standardized testing.

High-stakes standardized tests. The doublespeak around high-stakes standardized testing is one of the most powerful weapons used today by Duncan. The Obama administration has produced mountains of evidence that claiming to reject and decrease testing is a cloak for the inevitability of more testing and more corrosive accountability for teachers. But that debate is masking a deeper problem with confronting high-stakes standardized tests: Many educators are quick to reject the high-stakes element while adding that standardized testing is being misused. And here is where educators are failing the debate. 

The high-stakes problem is the secondary problem with standardized testing. Yes, high-stakes create inexcusable outcomes related to testing: teaching to the test, reducing all course content to what-is-tested-is-what-is-taught, reducing teacher quality to test scores, reducing student learning to test scores, and cheating. But rejecting or even calling for removing the high-stakes ignores that standardized tests are flawed themselves. Standardized tests remain primarily linked to the race, social class, and gender of students; standardized tests label and sort children overwhelmingly based on the coincidence of those children's homes. 

The standardized testing debate is the cigarette debate, not the alcohol debate. Alcohol can be consumed safely and even with health benefits; thus, the alcohol debate is about the use of alcohol, not alcohol itself. Cigarettes are another story; there is no healthy consumption of cigarettes so that debate is about the inherent danger of tobacco. 

Educators must expose the double-speak calling for less testing while increasing the testing and the stakes for students and teachers, but we must not allow that charge to trump the need to identify standardized testing as cancerous, to state clearly there is no safe level of standardized testing.