Charmed by Choice: Undermining Public Education

The assault on public education is not just an agenda pursued by some Americans. In Canada, there are those who would like to dismantle our public education system, and in Alberta they are the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose Party.

Of course they don't come out and say they want to destroy public education -- instead they sell their privatization agenda by talking about the freedom to choose.

It's quite ingenius really -- I mean who in their right mind would object to having more choice? This assault on public education is phrased very carefully so to make it very difficult to oppose -- because if you do oppose it, the quick response might be "what's wrong with you, you don't want choice?"

At this point, it's important to remember that when something looks too good to be true, it's usually not what it appears -- and when it comes to those who are selling choice as a means to authentically improve public education, they are either neglectfully ignorant, willfully blind or outright lying.

Pedro Noguera explains why school choice is not what it seems in his guest post for NBC's Education Nation:

The problem with using vouchers as a means to expand access to quality schools for poor children is that it is based on the premise that parents are the one's who do the choosing. The truth of the matter is that schools are the ones who choose and not parents. 

When a low-income parent shows up at a private school, especially an elite school with few poor children of color, there is no guarantee that their child will be chosen for admission - even if the parent has a voucher. This is particularly true if the child has learning disabilities, behavior problems or doesn't speak English very well. As we've seen with many charter schools, such children are often under-served because they are harder to serve and possession of a voucher won't change that. Many private schools maintain quality through selective admissions and vouchers won't change that either. 

Moreover, choice assumes that a parent has access to information on the choices available and transportation. Neither of these can be assumed. Many parents choose a school based on how close it is to their home or work, rather than the school's reputation. Many are unwilling to send their children to schools in neighborhoods far from their homes, particularly if transportation is not provided. 

The idea that vouchers would solve the lack of access to quality schools in poor, inner city neighborhoods is based on the belief that the free market is a better regulator of goods and services than the government. While this idea sounds good in theory, it's not borne out by the facts. 

In most inner city communities in the United States, the free market is not effective at providing healthy food at affordable prices, banking services or safe, affordable housing. That's because the poor in the inner city constitute a "captured market" and suppliers of goods and services are typically able to get away with low-quality products because community members have few available alternatives. 

Systems of school choice only work when there are lots of good choices available and a means for parents to exercise their choices. This can only be done when government insures quality by holding schools accountable for the quality of education they provide. Of course, our policymakers have largely failed to do this because they've focused on accountability as measured by student test scores, rather than concentrating on insuring that all schools have the resources and support systems in place to meet the needs of the students they serve, and holding themselves accountable if they don't.

Today more than ever, we need public education to educate all children to a standard that at one time may have been reserved for the elite. This means we can no longer afford to ignore the challenge of educating those who are difficult to educate.

In his publication Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform, Marc Tucker tackles education funding:

Two decades ago and more, elementary and secondary education in most of the provinces was funded much the way it is funded in the United States, with each locality raising much of the money locally, with the provinces providing additional sums intended to moderate the disparities in per student funding that such a system inevitably produces.  But, about 20 years ago, this began to change.  Conservative governments, in response to complaints from citizens about skyrocketing local tax rates, initiated a move to steadily reduce reliance on local taxes and to increase the portion of the total budget paid for by the province.  In the biggest provinces now, little if any of the money for public education is raised locally.  All or almost all comes from the province.  Not surprisingly, the gross inequities that came with raising money locally are gone, too, and Canada, like the top performing countries elsewhere, is moving toward a funding system intended to promote high achievement among all students, which means putting more money behind hard to educate children than children who are easier to educate.

Vouchers and choice tend to benefit those who have already "won the lottery" and often alienates and marginalizes those who can least afford it. Competition and the free market is for the strong. Public education is for all. See the problem?

In some US states, there is a movement underway called the "Parent Trigger" which is being sold as a way to empower parents in reforming and improving their children's schools. However, upon closer inspection this is no more than another fraudulent ploy with a charming name whose objective is to undermine public education. Diane Ravitch writes:

In early 2010, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of California, the state legislature passed the "Parent Empowerment Act." This law is commonly known as the Parent Trigger. It allows a majority of parents in a low-performing school to sign a petition that leads to various sanctions for the school: firing all or some of the staff, turning the school over to charter management, or closing the school. These are similar to the options in the U.S. Department of Education's School Improvement Grant program. All of them are punitive, none is supportive of changing the school for the better, and none has a shred of evidence to show that it will improve the school. Neither the Parent Trigger nor the federal SIG program offers any constructive alternatives to unhappy parents, only ways to punish the school for low scores.

Supporters of the Parent Trigger say it empowers parents, especially poor parents, and gives them a tool with which to change their school. They say that it enhances not only parent power, but school choice.

Throwing educational funding to the competitive free market via school vouchers and selling it as the freedom to choose may allow politicians to look good but it offers a hollow promise to the families that can least afford to compete. It's sadly ironic that education reforms built around choice, competition and parent empowerment tend to victimize the very people they profess to be supporting.

"Overhauling" teacher preparation

I've said before that if we talked even half as much about making good teachers as we do about firing the bad ones, I think we could make a difference, and in the United States there is momentum for overhauling teacher education and preparation. Education Week explains a recent development:

Momentum appears to be gathering behind a U.S. Department of Education plan to hold teacher education programs accountable for the achievement of students taught by their graduates.

At an event hosted here Friday by the think tank Education Sector, a diverse group of stakeholders, including Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association, and Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, spoke in favor of the initiative, which was first outlined in the Obama administration’s fiscal 2012 budget request. ("New Rules for Ed. Prep Are Mulled," March 9, 2011.)

"It’s a really important piece to change the system and to build this profession," said Mr. Van Roekel. "We agree no student should have a teacher who is not well prepared. We agree every candidate must meet rigorous standards. We have to combine meaningful input with meaningful output [data]."

The NEA has generally been wary of value-added test score data. Mr. Van Roekel said that its use in general continues to give him pause, but it shows promise for being used in the aggregate to help teacher preparation programs improve.

Through a negotiated rulemaking process, the Education Department wants to streamline and rewrite the reporting requirements contained in Title II of the Higher Education Act. Colleges of education participating in student financial aid currently must report information on candidates’ pass rates on licensure exams and identify low-performing programs.

Among other steps, the Education Department would require education schools to report on three new measures: how much their graduates help students learn; whether teacher-candidates are placed in high-needs subjects and areas; and whether school administrators are satisfied with the quality of program graduates.

Louisiana, North Carolina, and Tennessee already link teacher education graduates to student records, while 11 states and the District of Columbia have committed to similar initiatives through the federal Race to the Top program.

I'm all for improving and overhauling teacher preparation in order to improve the teachers that work with our children so that they are experts on how children learn, but not like this. This kind of overhaul is just another way of doing more of the same -- that is, using test scores to not only track students, but now track teachers. When people say "how are we going to hold teachers accountable" what they really mean is "how are we going to punish teachers". Tracking students, and now teachers, via their test scores actually helps legitimate these punishments by offering a new way to derive them. The stick used to be hidden in the carrot, now it's hidden in the data.

Marc Tucker, the president and chief executive officer of the National Center on Education and author of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform:

We contrast the strategies that appear to be driving the policy agendas of the most successful countries with the strategies that appear to be driving the current agenda for education reform in the United States. We conclude that the strategies driving the best performing systems are rarely found in the United States, and, conversely, that the education strategies now most popular in the United States are conspicuous by their absence in the countries with the most successful education systems.

"Overhauling" teacher education by marrying student test scores to teacher records is being sold as a daring departure from the status quo when really it is a tactic taken from same same strategies that have been strangling the life out of classrooms for decades. The accountability mantra behind this kind of teacher preparation reform goes something like this: High test scores indicate good teaching because good teachers have high test scores.

I think Alfie Kohn summarizes this kind of teacher preparation overhaul nicely in his post What Passes for School Reform: "Value-Added" Teacher Evaluation and Other Absurdities:

A productive discussion about who's a good teacher (and why) is less likely to take place when the people with the power get to enforce what becomes the definition of quality by default: high scores on bad tests.

I don't expect the founder of a computer empire like Bill Gates, or a lawyer like Joel Klein, or a newspaper editor to understand the art of helping children to understand ideas, or of constructing tasks to assess that process. I just expect them to have the humility, the simple decency, not to impose their ignorance on the rest of us with the force of law.

To fight back, an awful lot of teachers who have been celebrated for their students' high scores -- those teachers who can't be accused of sour grapes -- will have to stand up and say, "Thanks, but let's be honest. All of us who work in schools know that you can't tell how good a teacher is on the basis of his or her kids' test results. In fact, by being forced to think about those results, my colleagues and I are held back from being as good as we can be. By singling me out for commendation -- and holding other teachers up to ridicule -- you've lowered the quality of schooling for all kids."

If you aren't disturbed enough by how data (test scores) are driving education reform and teacher evaluation, I suggest you read the dangers of building a plane in the air.