Manufacturing Mice: The Current State of American Education

More and more, we find inquiry-based curricula, such as the type criticized by the National Council of Education’s A Nation at Risk (1983) as “homogenized, diluted, and diffused” (p. 23), under attack in our schools, replaced by ones purported to be rigorous (and the same) for all.

Why? Because school districts are under pressure to rewrite curriculum to follow state standards based on federal guidelines for a variety of reasons, including funding issues and public opinion based on misinformation. Not only are our students affected by a prescribed curriculum, but our teachers are mandated to deliver a curriculum that offers them little room for autonomy or creativity – the elements that make teaching a craft. In the end, real learning and real teaching suffer due to the pressure to prepare for the test. Ayers (2001) writes of the limitations of such a mentality:

“After all, standardized tests can’t measure initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking, curiosity, effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection, or a host of other valuable dispositions and attributes. What they can measure and count are isolated skills, specific facts and functions, and the least interesting and least significant aspects of learning,” (p. 112)

What we are witnessing in the classroom as a result of government dictates of standardization – and there doesn’t appear to be any change in the immediate future given President Obama’s and Education Secretary Duncan’s recent comments – is a dulling of the curriculum that is affecting both students and teachers. This is not unlike Freire’s (2001) Banking Concept of Education, where education “becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher the depositor … The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world,” (pp. 72-73).

Preparing students for testing, for choosing the best answer from a list of five, is not teaching them to think critically. If an education is not based on imparting students with critical thinking skills, the future is in peril, because “America’s capacity to survive as a democracy … rests on the kind of education that arms people with an intelligence capable of free and independent thought,” (Darling-Hammond, 1996, p. 5).

But why might that be problematic?  Bruner (1996) argues that “[e]ducation is risky, for it fuels a sense of possibility. But a failure to equip minds with the skills for understanding and feeling and acting in the cultural world is not simply scoring a pedagogical zero. It risks creating alienation, defiance, and practical incompetence. And all of these undermine the viability of a culture,” (pp. 42-43). Sadly, however, and contrary to the standard rhetoric, the goal of American education is not to equip minds with a sense of possibility or with skills for understanding and feeling and acting in a cultural world – it is quite the opposite.  The goal of American education is to intentionally – and continually – undermine itself.

The recent trend toward standardization, cultivated in earnest since the Reagan administration and the publication of A Nation At Risk, is being driven by the commodification of education and is single-handedly responsible for creating and maintaining a consumer culture that has had a ripple effect from elementary schools to universities across the country, affecting both students and teachers. Education – the process of learning – has been co-opted by an alliance of business and government interests, for the dual purposes of maintaining the government’s economic interests and propelling the private sector, all while fostering a climate of continual educational crisis that places blame on a system of its own creation to perpetuate the cycle.

Lapham (2000) notes that “[t]he United States is the only country … that grants commercial interests unfettered access to the minds of its children,” (p. 8). While some argue that corporate interests and educators have similar goals, Kohn (2002) writes, “In the final analysis, the problem with letting business interests shape our country’s educational agenda … is with their ultimate objectives. Corporations in our economic system exist to provide a financial return to the people who own them: they are in business to make a profit,” (p. 7). Moreover, Kohn (2002) argues, if it were really true that today’s businesses prized skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and teamwork, as they say they do, then corporate interests would emphasize progressive, student-driven curricula, as opposed to their current emphasis, in which “they write off innovative, progressive educational reforms as mere fads that distract us from raising test scores,” (pp. 7-8) because there is no doubt that both corporations and the government want the focus to be on test scores, not on what children should be learning and teachers should be teaching.

Berliner (2006) “found high-stakes testing programs in most states ineffective in achieving their intended purposes, and causing severe unintended negative effects as well,” (p. 949). Further, “educational testing schemes often do much more to rationalize inequality than they do to mitigate it,” (Howe, 1997, p. 92). Lapham (2000) presents the strongest argument of all against teaching a drill-and-kill curriculum based on standardized test preparation:  “To learn to read is to learn to think, possibly to discover the strength and freedom of one’s own mind. Not a discovery the consumer society wishes too many of its customers to make,” (p. 9).  And simply, currently “much of what passes for education in the United States deadens the desire for learning,” (Lapham, 2000, p. 8). We are manufacturing mice – quiet, complacent, students.

Furthermore, while the reform movement has its way with America’s students, Berliner & Biddle (1995) make the case that they are doing the same with its teachers, who are victims of the same reform movement, politically driven and supported by “misleading methods for analyzing data, distorting reports of findings, and suppressing contradictory evidence,” (p. 4) all in an attempt to unleash a corporate reform agenda.

Similar to the rhetoric bestowed on students, Spring (2008) writes that “[a]s educational goals change so do the image and training of teachers,” a concept that is no different as the rhetoric that has shifted to what he calls the “messianic vision of teachers as the saviors of society” who are preparing students for battle in a global economy” (p. 245). In fact, the mission statement for my school district reads: “Providing students a premier education to compete in a global society,” further evidence of Spring’s claim.

Ironically, while the rhetoric imposes the gold standard for teachers, and state- and district- mandated curricula have resulted in teachers losing autonomy in terms of what they are able to teach in their classrooms, they are also losing control over how they are able to teach – their instructional methods. Such teacher-proof curricula, with pre-packaged objectives, lesson plans, readings, pacing guides, and activities, “mak[e] it difficult for teachers to improvise, create, or follow up on what they think is important,” (deMarrais & LeCompte, 1999, p. 179) effectively making teachers into mice, merely technicians in the classroom who follow pre-packaged instructions instead of reflective practitioners who are professionals – they become emasculated by corporate and government interests.

Moreover, Cuban (1990) writes that “[p]ublic officials’ eagerness to reform schools has continued unabated … since World War II[, with p]olicymakers’ assumptions about the past often becoming rationales for reform” (p. 3). What’s interesting about Cuban’s assessment is that he identifies three recurring areas of focus for school reform: instruction, curriculum, and centralized/decentralized authority, noting that their very reoccurrence begs the question of whether or not the problem lies in these areas in the first place (pp. 3-5). Instead, he interprets the real source of struggle in education over value conflicts, a result of a shift in public opinion “[w]hen economic, social, and demographic changes create social turmoil” (p. 8), a problem that cannot be solved by schooling, but “dilemmas that require political negotiation and compromises among policymakers and interest groups” (p. 8).

Interestingly, though, especially to educators, Cuban opines that there can be no winner in this battle, because, “There is no solution; there are only political tradeoffs” (p. 8). This can be seen in various shifts, whether political (e.g. democratic to republican), psychological (e.g. cognitive to sociocultural), or grammatical (e.g. phonics to whole language). Because education is a focal point for the future, it invariably holds an important position for social and political reasons, though the latter half of the 20^th century brought a new innovation to education, particularly its commodification, raising its value in the market to new levels.

Critics like Hoffman (2000) point to the reform movement as one “led by politicians who are using their position of authority and power to control the actions of educators” (p. 620). Moreover, when one considers that “the feminized nature of teaching is crucial to understanding the political, economic, and ideological modes of control in the profession,” (deMarrais & LeCompte, 1999, p. 157) coupled with the fact that 71% of all teachers are women (U.S. Census, 2006), a traditionally marginalized group, the reform movement has been chipping away at teacher autonomy. What first began with state- or district- chosen texts, leaving teachers to their own devices in their classrooms in terms of instruction, has transformed with NCLB into an all-or-none proposition, where teachers are told what, how, and when to teach, undermining teacher effectiveness. One wonders if this could happen to any other profession – a male-dominated profession, for example.

As a result of market ideology, the marriage between government and business interests strongly affects literacy education in the United States in several ways. Shannon (2007) writes that Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush “each promoted market ideologies … assuming the unfettered pursuit of profit would lead business to provide efficient, effective solutions to any problem,” (p. 97).  This superseded the opinions of educators, resulting in the philosophies of well-connected individuals becoming policy, whether or not the research supported it. Hoffman et al (2002) state “policy mandates have a direct influence on the content and nature of reading programs placed in the hands of teachers and students,” noting that “textbook policy actions … are shaping a national curriculum for reading” (p. 269).

Further, Hiebert & Martin (2008) note that “[w]hile approaches to reading instruction and the materials used to support this instruction have changed over the years, what has remained constant in U.S. reading instruction in the use of prepackaged materials used by textbook companies” (p. 390). What is important here is the top-down chain between policy, content, materials, and instruction.  Policymakers dictate the content that textbook companies convert into materials that are purchased by schools for consumption by teachers and students.  Somewhere along the way, someone figured out that education could be much more lucrative than pre-mid 20^th century break-even propositions. What this means is that the instructional method in favor at any given time stands to make publishers and ancillary industries billions of dollars.

According to Lemann (1997), in the 1980s, “the idea of raising standards in public education emerged as a national cause” (p. 128). In an effort to decentralize education, the Reagan administration commissioned the National Council for Excellence in Education (1983), which produced A Nation at Risk, a report that not only identified an education crisis in the United States (p. 26), but identified only one paragraph of (vague) implications for the teaching of, interestingly, high school English (p. 33), also recommending the nationwide administration of standardized tests to measure student progress by State and local education systems to be used to diagnose and evaluate student progress (p. 36). While for the most part the results were increased graduation requirements and teacher credentialing, before the 1980s, “[t]he view in the education world [was] that politicians [had] never before tried to dictate specific teaching methods to this extent” (Lemann, 1997, p. 129). All of a sudden, issues of teacher autonomy were coming into question.

Fast forward to the Clinton administration. In 1994, Clinton signed Goals 2000 into law to advance national education standards and assessments, legislation that fizzled because of “history and circumstance,” according to Ravitch (1995), who writes that “under current law, the Department of Education is prohibited from supervising or directing any curriculum” (p. xvi). Furthermore, Ravitch writes of an NCTE/IRA proposal for National English standards readily panned by critics, such as the New York Times, who deemed them too ambiguous. Perhaps this was code for not measureable on a multiple-choice test, and therefore not marketable. Nevertheless, states continued with “higher standards for curriculum materials, more rigorous certification requirements for teachers, and new testing programs” (McGill-Franzen, 2000, p. 892).

As a result, disparate interpretations of standards were seen across the nation on all accounts. During this period, textbook companies began super-marketing as states such as Texas and California adopted state-wide texts, influencing offerings and purchases country-wide. Further, Michigan began teacher certification testing in the early 1990s, an attempt in raise standards for its teaching force. Lastly, this period saw increased standardized testing at the state level, though the testing was still in its infancy and nowhere near the high-stakes levels seen post-NCLB.

In 2000, the Report of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was released. Its subtitle alone, An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction, is indicative of the rhetoric surrounding government sponsored studies – and it did not disappoint. Its recommendations touting a skills-based approach, the recommendations of the flawed report impact literacy instruction across the nation to this day, a testament to the power – and danger – of policymaking. Tacked on to the end of this over 400-page report is a three-page minority dissent criticizing the commercial implications of the recommendations of the report (p. 2). Joanne Yatvin writes of the gravity of the sound bites that the public will hear out of context, lamenting that most will never sift through the hundreds of pages of the report:

“But because of these deficiencies, bad things will happen. Summaries of, and sound bites about, the Panel’s findings will be used to make policy decisions at the national, state, and local levels. Topics that were never investigated will be misconstrued as failed practices. Unanswered questions will be assumed to have been answered negatively. Unfortunately, most policymakers and ordinary citizens will not read the full reviews … Ironically, the report that Congress intended to be a boon to the teaching of reading will turn out to be a further detriment,” (p. 3).

And is was because of the NRP and its little sister, the Reading First Program mandated by No Child Left Behind, that single-method literacy instruction became mandated in many, often urban and underperforming, schools nationwide. Though common pedagogy dictates that “reading instruction effectiveness lies not with a single program or method but, rather, with a teacher who thoughtfully and analytically integrates various programs, materials, and methods as the situation demands” (Duffy & Hoffman, 1999, p. 11), both NRP and Reading First included language that expressed they were based on scientifically-based information, again code for skills-based, measureable activities, focusing on phonics instruction for decoding, not comprehension skills. This curriculum has influenced teaching across the country, forcing teachers to follow script-based reading programs, such as Open Court and Reading Mastery, owned by McGraw-Hill, whose chairman had close ties with the George W. Bush administration, undoubtedly influencing its use in school districts around the country (Kohn, 2002, p. 1).

In November 2008, the Reading First Impact Study was released, producing key findings. First, the program “produced a positive and significant impact decoding among first grade students tested in one school year” (Gamse, et al, 2008, p. vi). This statistic makes sense, because they were learning decoding skills. The next statistic is much more telling, because it better answers why we teach our children to read: “There was no relationship between reading comprehension and the number of years a students was exposed to RF” (Gamse, et al, 2008, p. vi). Of what importance is a federally mandated and funded reading program if it doesn’t affect reading comprehension at all?

I think of all of the children exposed to this program, this method, and it is a tragedy.  I think about all of the teachers who were forced to abandon best practices in order to receive government funding. And then I begin to think about those who profited from the decision – corporations. Not only are they benefitting directly from sales of textbooks, tutoring services, privatization of schools, and direct marketing to students, but in the end they are profiting from the culture that is emerging as a result of a dumbing-down of the curriculum – a so-called standards-based curriculum steeped in boredom and measured in multiple choice, delivered by technicians, mere mice in a classroom who read from scripts, emasculated from a profession once thought to be noble.

Surely, to push programs that address phoneme recognition, as the Bush administration did, merely because they focused on skills that lended themselves more easily to testing and data as opposed to more comprehensive language programs that focused on comprehension skills that are not as data-friendly, is unconscionable. Not only do these programs fill the coffers of corporations, but they create students who read without understanding, and teachers who do not really teach.  What began as rhetoric that sounded wonderful to the majority of the country – higher standards for all – has proven to be anything but that.

In 2009, the outlook seems grim. Interestingly, Ayers (2001) published his book, To Teach, the year the No Child Left Behind legislation was passed. I don’t think he anticipated the extreme fallout from that act when he was writing. At the time, when I read his book, I agreed with his view that a state or school district’s goals and objectives should not be seen as impossible barriers. Instead, as I, considered them challenges, noting that teachers tend to get overwhelmed with the long lists presented by the state, whereas if they would approach the standards from reverse, for example, what he calls “begin[ning] somewhere else,” they would realize that they are already doing much more than the standards are dictating. “The challenge is to teach well in spite of the mandates, to refuse the implied constraints and confinements and to do a good job with students anyway,” Ayers advises (2001, p. 99).

While this advice may be applicable in meeting basic standards or benchmarks, it could be problematic in schools that now expect teachers to follow a scripted curriculum, which essentially creates a classroom where teachers function as technicians, not professionals. That is, unless teachers decide to risk their employment and engage in subversive activity in their classrooms, foregoing scripted curricula in favor of addressing the standards and benchmarks using methods of their choosing, using their own pace.

But is that enough?

Darling-Hammond (1996) says, “The days of assuming that research knowledge will be put into practice by disseminating findings through journal articles, report mailings, or even bulleted synopses of study findings are long gone” (p. 8). Duffy & Hoffman (1999) “urge teachers to participate vigorously in policy debates, challenging research claims that contradict their own professional knowledge, inquiry, and practice” (p. 13).

But let’s be realistic. Teachers are already a marginalized group of people who have become further marginalized by a power elite. While ideas like Ayers’, Darling-Hammond’s, and Duffy & Hoffman’s are laudable, one could easily argue that they merely serve to perpetuate the status quo, because teachers are situating themselves as victims within a system where they are already dominated, merely employing survival tactics. Giroux (1988) argues that this is because “[t]eacher education has rarely occupied a critical space, public or political, within contemporary culture … In fact, it is reasonable to argue that teacher education programs are designed to create intellectuals who operate in the interests of the state, whose social function is primarily to sustain and legitimate the status quo,” (p. 160).

Perhaps this is why the majority of teachers are politically conservative (deMarrais & LeCompte, 1999, p. 162). Producing radical free thinkers in colleges of education and unleashing them into the system would upset the status quo and flood the system with a “language of possibility” that Giroux (1988) identifies as being absent from any current discourse about public education in the United States (p. 160). Giroux was writing well before the mandates of NCLB, however.  In 1988, he wrote that part of the problem in education was teachers being viewed as technicians, indicting both individual teachers and teacher-training institutions who perpetuated the stereotype, calling instead for “prospective teachers who are both theoreticians and practitioners, who can combine theory, imagination, and techniques,” (p. 8).

As a high school student in the mid-1980s, I recall the type of teacher about whom Giroux refers – the teacher who would sit at the front of the class, deliver a lecture from the teacher’s edition notes, provided by the textbook company, then dutifully distribute photocopied handouts, again provided by the textbook company. A technician, not a teacher. It is that model that has become the poster child for post-NCLB teachers, like an Orwellian nightmare. A teacher who is safe, non-threatening, non-thinking – a mouse.

Not only is America producing students who are non-thinking robots, but those students are the ones who are entering colleges of education across the country, eager to teach. Given the research that tells us most teachers teach using the methods their teachers used, one can only wonder how far the American education system will fall into mediocrity.

References

Ayers, W. (2001). To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Second Edition. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Berliner, D.C. (2006). Our Impoverished View of Educational Research. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 949-995.

Berliner, D.C. & Biddle, B.J. (1995). The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cuban, L. (1990). Reforming Again, Again, and Again. Educational Researcher, 19(1), 3-13.

Darling-Hammond, L. (1996). The Right to Learn and the Advancement of Teaching: Research, Policy, and Practice for Democratic Education. Educational Researcher, 26(6), 5-17.

deMarrais, K.B. & LeCompte, M.D. (1999). The Way Schools Work, 3^rd Edition.  New York: Longman.

Duffy, G. G., & Hoffman, J.V. (1999). In pursuit of an illusion: The flawed search for a perfect method. The Reading Teacher, 53(1), 10-16.

Freire, P. (2007). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (M.B. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.

Gamse, B.C., Jacob, R.T., Horst, M., Boulay, B., & Unlu, F. (2008). Reading First Impact Study Final Report Executive Summary (NCEE 2009-4039). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Gee, J.P. (1999). Critical Issues: Reading and the New Literacy Studies: Reframing the National Academy of Sciences Report on Reading. Journal of Literacy Research, 31(3), 355-374.

Giroux, H.A. (1988). Teachers As Intellectuals: Toward A Critical Pedagogy Of Learning. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey.

Goodman, K. (2004). NCLB’s pedagogy of the absurd. In K. Goodman, P. Shannon, Y. Goodman, and R. Rapoport (Eds.), Saving our schools: The case for public education (pp. 39-46). Berkeley, CA: RDR Books.

Hoffman, J.V. (2000). The de-democratization of schools and literacy in America. The Reading Teacher, 53(8), 616-623..

Howe, K.R. (1997). Understanding Equal Educational Opportunity: Social Justice, Democracy, and Schooling. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Kohn, A. (2002). The 500-Pound Gorilla. Phi Delta Kappan, 1-11. Retrieved September 7, 2003, from www.alfiekohn.org.

Lapham, L.H.(2000). School Bells. Harper’s Magazine. 301, pp. 7-9.

Lemann, N. (1997). The reading wars. The Atlantic Monthly, 280, pp. 128-134.

National Council for Excellence in Education. (1983). A Nation at Risk. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. (2000). Report of the National Reading Panel. Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (NIH Publication No. 00-4769). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

RAND Reading Study Group. (2002). Reading for understanding: toward a research and development program in reading comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: RAND/Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education.

Ravitch, D. (1995). National Standards in American Education. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Shannon, P. (2007). Reading against democracy: The broken promises of reading instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Spring, J. (2008). American Education, 13^th Edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Union of Concerned Scientists. (2004). Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking. In K. Goodman, P. Shannon, Y. Goodman, and R. Rapoport (Eds.), Saving our schools: The case for public education (pp. 249-250). Berkeley, CA: RDR Books.

U.S. Census Bureau, Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division. (2006). Education  statistics. Retrieved June 26, 2009, from <http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/eeoindex/page_c.html?>.

Valencia, S.W. & Wixson, K.K. (2000). Policy-Oriented Research on Literacy Standards and Assessment. In M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, P.D. Pearson, and R.B. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research, Volume III (pp. 909-935). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

American Education: The More Things Change …

Given my research interests, I discovered this revealing article, published in the New York Times in 1910, about the state of American education. Undoubtedly, states’ education philosophies and priorities have not changed very much in the last 100 years. States at the bottom of the list remain so, for the most part, today. Click on the link below to see the PDF file (sorry about the yellow sticky note):

The State of American Education in 1910

Henry Giroux: Culture, Politics, and Pedagogy

This is a link to a video of Henry Giroux explaining his frustration in the high school classroom and how reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed changed his life. Giroux’s work, particularly Teachers as Intellectuals, is of great interest to me lately.

John Taylor Gatto: On Life and Education

Here is a link to a YouTube video about one of my heroes, former New York teacher John Taylor Gatto. I discovered Gatto several years ago when I read a piece he wrote that appeared in Harpers Magazine, “Against School.”  I’ve had my students read it ever since, and we’ve had wonderful discussions about it.

Noam Chomsky on Education

This is a link to a YouTube video featuring Noam Chomsky discussing democracy and education.

When Pedagogy and Policy Collide

As I sat in one of my high school classes listening to yet another uninspired teacher lecturing to equally uninspired students, I told myself that I could do better. In the doldrums of the type of moment that often sends us to the realm of the imagination, I could picture myself not lecturing at the head of a silent class, but creating a reciprocal teaching environment, drawing on my experiences and my students’ experiences, to inspire them and to make education alive and meaningful. That’s why I became a teacher.

Eleven years of full time teaching have seen those distant dreams come to fruition in my classroom beyond my wildest expectations. The love of learning is contagious, and I have seen how the enthusiasm of an instructor and the atmosphere the instructor creates can be instrumental in students developing into lifelong learners. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the classroom is that learning doesn’t happen the same way for everyone – not at the same time, the same pace, or the same level – and that is part of its aesthetic, for yes, learning – like teaching — is an art. And for the teacher artist, “[l]earning is not linear; it does not occur as a straight line, gradually inclined, formally and incrementally constructed. Learning is dynamic and explosive and a lot of it is informal; much of it builds up over time and connects suddenly” (Ayers, 2001, p. 15).

So when my students and I have been on walkabout, silently trekking through the fields and woods behind the school, notebooks in hand, early in the morning, experiencing our own private Walden, documenting the sights, sounds, and reactions, learning is happening. When students are working in groups on problem scenarios about being stranded on an island, like the boys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, they begin to understand the complexities of intergroup dynamics, gaining insight into, among many things, human behavior. But that doesn’t seem to matter much anymore. “These days, it is not fashionable to talk about education that is humane as well as rigorous, about the importance of caring for students and honoring each one’s potential,” writes Darling-Hammond (1996, p. 5).

On the contrary, these days school is very different. Shortly after No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001, the superintendent delivered an address to our faculty that surprised even the most jaded teacher, warning that it was our responsibility to prepare our students to compete in a global economy, a concept addressed by Barber (1993), who writes that “[i]n recent years it has been fashionable to define the educational crisis in terms of global competition and minimal competence, as if schools were no more than vocational institutions” (p. 43).  That same superintendent, hired from the business world, began to speak to us in the nomenclature of business, referring to customers and stakeholders, instead of students and parents. All of a sudden, a non-profit entity placed importance on maintaining for-profit activities, priding itself on a $15 million fund, while students wanted for new texts and teachers went without raises.  Suddenly, this wasn’t sounding like school, but the business model applied to education. Hoffman (2000) says, “We have swallowed the ‘business’ metaphor for schools totally … We are comfortable in the language of productivity, inputs, outputs, standards, and quality control. After all, these are measureable outcomes where resource management and efficiency are what count” (p. 618). Others might not have noticed the language, but I was squirming in my seat. We were entering a new age.

Not soon after, teachers with general credentials who had taught successfully for years were displaced by others with credentials who were considered highly qualified yet had no teaching experience. Then came data dictates, where central office demanded quantifiable scores. Walkabouts are not quantifiable. As a result, measureable common assessments were instituted several times each semester along with pacing guides. The message was: If we teacher proof the curriculum, all of the students will be on the same page on the same day and will be equally prepared for the state’s standardized tests.  Darling-Hammond (1996) notes that “[t]hese days the talk is tough: standards must be higher and more exacting, outcomes must be more measureable and comparable, accountability must be hard-edged and punitive, and sanctions must be applied almost everywhere – to students and teachers” (p. 5). As I saw the situation unfold at my school, I could not believe it was happening.

A veteran teacher reminded me that our district had been one that had been awarded by NCTE for its forward-thinking, elective-based English curriculum in the 1980s, the type of inquiry-based curriculum criticized by the National Council of Education’s A Nation at Risk (1983) as “homogenized, diluted, and diffused” (p. 23), in favor of one supposedly rigorous (and the same) for all. Why? Because the school district felt pressured to rewrite its entire curriculum to follow state standards based on federal guidelines, not only are our students affected by a prescribed curriculum, but our teachers are mandated to deliver a curriculum that offers them little room for autonomy or creativity – the elements that make teaching a craft. In the end, real learning and real teaching suffer due to the pressure to prepare for the test. Ayers (2001) writes of the limitations of such a mentality:

“After all, standardized tests can’t measure initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking, curiosity, effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection, or a host of other valuable dispositions and attributes. What they can measure and count are isolated skills, specific facts and functions, and the least interesting and least significant aspects of learning” (p. 112)”

What we are witnessing in the classroom as a result of government dictates of standardization – and there doesn’t appear to be any change in the immediate future given President Obama’s and Education Secretary Duncan’s recent comments – is a dulling of the curriculum that is affecting both students and teachers. This is not unlike Freire’s (2001) Banking Concept of Education, where education “becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher the depositor … The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world” (pp. 72-73). Preparing students for testing, for choosing the best answer from a list of five, is not teaching them to think critically. If an education is not based on imparting students with critical thinking skills, the future is in peril, because “America’s capacity to survive as a democracy … rests on the kind of education that arms people with an intelligence capable of free and independent thought” (Darling-Hammond, 1996, p. 5). But why might that be problematic?  Bruner (1996) argues that “[e]ducation is risky, for it fuels a sense of possibility. But a failure to equip minds with the skills for understanding and feeling and acting in the cultural world is not simply scoring a pedagogical zero. It risks creating alienation, defiance, and practical incompetence. And all of these undermine the viability of a culture” (pp. 42-43). So are we intentionally undermining ourselves? 

The issue is much deeper. What America is experiencing is what I like to term the commodification of education.  Education – the process of learning – has been co-opted by an alliance of business and government interests, for the dual purposes of maintaining the government’s economic interests and propelling the private sector, all while fostering a climate of continual educational crisis in the country that places blame on a system of its own creation that is intentionally underfunded to perpetuate the cycle.  The recent drive toward standardization is only further evidence of a trend that has been cultivated in earnest since the Reagan administration.  While its effects are far-reaching, this paper will focus primarily on how policymakers have shaped both literacy education and its resulting assessment.  This is what happens when pedagogy and policy collide.

Valencia & Wixson (2000) define educational policy to “include everything from new content standards or instructional frameworks to teacher certification requirements, systems of assessment, Title I allocations and requirements, and textbook adoption guidelines” (p. 909). Moreover, Cuban (1990) writes that “[p]ublic officials’ eagerness to reform schools has continued unabated … since World War II[, with p]olicymakers’ assumptions about the past often becoming rationales for reform” (p. 3). What’s interesting about Cuban’s assessment is that he identifies three recurring areas of focus for school reform: instruction, curriculum, and centralized/decentralized authority, noting that their very reoccurrence begs the question of whether or not the problem lies in these areas in the first place (pp. 3-5). Instead, he interprets the real source of struggle in education over value conflicts, a result of a shift in public opinion “[w]hen economic, social, and demographic changes create social turmoil” (p. 8), a problem that cannot be solved by schooling, but “dilemmas that require political negotiation and compromises among policymakers and interest groups” (p. 8). Interestingly, though, especially to educators, Cuban opines that there can be no winner in this battle, because, “There is no solution; there are only political tradeoffs” (p. 8). This can be seen in various shifts, whether political (e.g. democratic to republican), psychological (e.g. cognitive to sociocultural), or grammatical (e.g. phonics to whole language).  Of course, these are general examples, but depending on one’s political beliefs, philosophical beliefs, pedagogical beliefs, and so on, will depend on one’s position.  But we must also recognize that belief systems are in constant flux. Only the consideration of the current power structure, coupled with important value conflicts of the day, will determine the focus of the struggle. Because education is a focal point for the future, it invariably holds an important position for social and political reasons, though the latter half of the 20^th century brought a new innovation to education, particularly its commodification, raising its value in the market to new levels.

While critics like Hoffman (2000) point to the reform movement as one “led by politicians who are using their position of authority and power to control the actions of educators” (p. 620), I’m not certain the argument is that simple. There is no doubt that is one effect, but it can be argued that it is not the primary purpose. Shannon (2007) argues that “[Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush] each promoted market ideologies as a solution to social problems, assuming the unfettered pursuit of profit would lead business to provide efficient, effective solutions to any problem. According to this logic, business would engage in research and development to employ the latest scientific expertise, leading toward the best option to fulfill social needs” (p. 97).

As a result of market ideology, the marriage between government and business interests strongly affect literacy education in the United States in several ways. Hoffman et al (2002) state “policy mandates have a direct influence on the content and nature of reading programs placed in the hands of teachers and students,” noting that “textbook policy actions … are shaping a national curriculum for reading” (p. 269). Further, Hiebert & Martin (2008) note that “[w]hile approaches to reading instruction and the materials used to support this instruction have changed over the years, what has remained constant in U.S. reading instruction in the use of prepackaged materials used by textbook companies” (p. 390). What is important here is the top-down chain between policy, content, materials, and instruction.  Policymakers dictate the content that textbook companies convert into materials that are purchased by schools for consumption by teachers and students.  Somewhere along the way, someone figured out that education could be much more lucrative than pre-mid 20^th century break-even propositions. What this means is that the instructional method in favor at any given time stands to make publishers and ancillary industries billions of dollars. Darling-Hammond (1996) says, “The days of assuming that research knowledge will be put into practice by disseminating findings through journal articles, report mailings, or even bulleted synopses of study findings are long gone” (p. 8). Literacy education is big money, which is the reason why teachers must take an active role not only in informing themselves, but taking active positions and roles in shaping the policy that influences the process. Similarly, Duffy & Hoffman (1999) “urge teachers to participate vigorously in policy debates, challenging research claims that contradict their own professional knowledge, inquiry, and practice” (p. 13). What follows is a brief history of major policy shifts are their effect on various aspects of education, including education, literacy, teaching, and testing.

According to Lemann (1997), in the 1980s, “the idea of raising standards in public education emerged as a national cause” (p. 128). In an effort to decentralize education, the Reagan administration commissioned the National Council for Excellence in Education (1983), which produced A Nation at Risk, a report that not only identified an education crisis in the United States (p. 26), but identified only one paragraph of (vague) implications for the teaching of, interestingly, high school English (p. 33), also recommending the nationwide administration of standardized tests to measure student progress by State and local education systems to be used to diagnose and evaluate student progress (p. 36). While for the most part the results were increased graduation requirements and teacher credentialing, before the 1980s, “[t]he view in the education world [was] that politicians [had] never before tried to dictate specific teaching methods to this extent” (Lemann, 1997, p. 129).

Fast forward to the Clinton administration. In 1994, Clinton signed Goals 2000 into law to advance national education standards and assessments, legislation that fizzled because of “history and circumstance,” according to Ravitch (1995), who writes that “under current law, the Department of Education is prohibited from supervising or directing any curriculum” (p. xvi). Furthermore, Ravitch writes of an NCTE/IRA proposal for National English standards readily panned by critics, such as the New York Times, who deemed them too ambiguous. Perhaps this was code for not measureable on a multiple-choice test, and therefore not marketable. Nevertheless, states continued with “higher standards for curriculum materials, more rigorous certification requirements for teachers, and new testing programs” (McGill-Franzen, 2000, p. 892). As a result, disparate interpretations of standards were seen across the nation on all accounts.

In 2000, the Report of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was released. Its subtitle alone, An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction, is indicative of the rhetoric surrounding government sponsored studies – and it did not disappoint. Its recommendations touting a skills-based approach, the recommendations of the flawed report impact literacy instruction across the nation to this day, a testament to the power – and danger – of policymaking. Tacked on to the end of this over 400-page report is a three-page minority dissent criticizing the commercial implications of the recommendations of the report (p. 2). Joanne Yatvin writes of the gravity of the sound bites that the public will hear out of context, lamenting that most will never sift through the hundreds of pages of the report:

But because of these deficiencies, bad things will happen. Summaries of, and sound bites about, the Panel’s findings will be used to make policy decisions at the national, state, and local levels. Topics that were never investigated will be misconstrued as failed practices. Unanswered questions will be assumed to have been answered negatively. Unfortunately, most policymakers and ordinary citizens will not read the full reviews … Ironically, the report that Congress intended to be a boon to the teaching of reading will turn out to be a further detriment. (p. 3)

And is was because of the NRP and its little sister, the Reading First Program mandated by No Child Left Behind, that single-method literacy instruction became mandated in many, often urban and underperforming, schools nationwide. Though common pedagogy dictates that “reading instruction effectiveness lies not with a single program or method but, rather, with a teacher who thoughtfully and analytically integrates various programs, materials, and methods as the situation demands” (Duffy & Hoffman, 1999, p. 11), both NRP and Reading First included language that expressed they were based on scientifically-based information, again code for skills-based, measureable activities, focusing on phonics instruction for decoding, not comprehension skills.

Last November, the Reading First Impact Study was released, producing key findings. First, the program “produced a positive and significant impact on decoding skills among first grade students tested in one school year” (Gamse, et al, 2008, p. vi). This statistic makes sense, because they were learning decoding skills. The next statistic is much more telling, because it better answers why we teach our children to read: “There was no relationship between reading comprehension and the number of years a students was exposed to RF” (Gamse, et al, 2008, p. vi). Of what importance is a federally mandated and funded reading program if it doesn’t affect reading comprehension at all? I think of all of the children exposed to this program, this method, and it is a tragedy.  I think about all of the teachers who were forced to abandon best practices to receive government funding. And then I begin to think about who gained from the decision. The textbook companies. The after-school tutoring companies. All of the private companies that benefitted from policy decisions.  After all, policy does not just affect students and teachers. Yet there were people making the decisions who knew better.

Although commenting on different reports, but nevertheless ones containing disparate information, Gee (1999) observes problems with the “political climate” du jour, often claiming consensus when there is none (pp. 355-359). In response to the administration of George W. Bush and its input into policy decisions, the Union of Concerned Scientists (2004) said “an objective and impartial perspective” was often “disregarded … [w]hen scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals” (p. 249). Goodman (2004) identifies the issue of the Bush administration ordering the ERIC databases purged of “documents which do not support administration education policies,” serving to censor past, present, and future practice (p. 43). Hoffman (2000) interprets such “[c]entralization and control” as affecting literacy education in the 21^st century (p. 617). While groups like RAND, who produced the Reading Study Group in 2002, responsibly admit that there are no quick fixes to addresses the teaching of reading (xiii-xvi), others, like NRP, as seen above, take partisan positions for political reasons, because, as Shannon (2004) argues, “NCLB opens public schools to market and business forces” (p. 23).

An important aspect of the commodification of education is the ability to quantify education, even though quantifiable data – what we consider to be measureable and some might even be so bold to label scientific – is oftentimes deceptive. Rose (1989) discusses the “vast and wealthy industry of educational institutes and consultants” surrounding the drive to quantify data, asserting that “[n]umbers seduce us into thinking we know more than what we do; they give us false assurance of rigor but reveal little about the complex cognitive and emotional processes behind the tally of errors and wrong answers” (p. 200). Berliner (2006) “found high-stakes testing programs in most states ineffective in achieving their intended purposes, and causing severe unintended negative effects as well” (p. 949). Further, it is no secret that “[s]tandardized tests … distort the performance of people who are culturally or linguistically different, regardless of ability, intelligence, or achievement” (Ayers, 2001, p. 113). But nevertheless, according to Howe (1997), “testing has come to occupy a central role in proposals for school reform … More than ever, it seems, educational testing is viewed as a magical elixir for curing education’s ills” (pp. 91-92).  States such as Michigan and Illinois pay the American Testing Corporations millions of dollars each year for the right to administer the ACT to junior students – and ACT doesn’t even have to pay the $125 proctor fee to each proctor, because schools provide teachers to give the tests. Students who don’t take the test may not graduate high school.  High stakes. All paid to a private corporation.

For those students who attend schools that for some reason don’t achieve AYP– and those reasons are myriad – NCLB has provisions to pay for after school tutoring – provided by private companies, such as Sylvan Learning Centers, a company that provides almost 75% of SES in the State of Michigan alone. Shannon (2004) cites a Wall Street Journal article by June Kronholz that reported that in one year alone, Sylvan Learning Centers expected to tutor 20,000 students because of NCLB mandates, receiving $40-$80 per child of taxpayer money, noting that this is an area where the conservative privatization agenda has become the most visible, begging the question: “How can the cost of public schooling be significantly reduced while creating markets for new businesses?” (p. 24). Richmond (2009) writes the state of Nevada has spent over $20 million on after school tutoring programs on reading and mathematics mandated my NCLB to improve students’ test scores. Literacy tutoring, focused exclusively on phonics-based instruction, “has had no effect on Clark County student achievement in reading,” according to results released last week after a five-year study by George Washington University. What is ironic in this age of standardized testing and increased requirements is that all 58 schools supporting the 30,000 students of military personnel on the country’s military bases are exempt from testing and other criteria mandated by No Child Left Behind (Rapoport, 2004, p. 251). It is curious that the government does not hold its own employees to its standards. Perhaps Halliburton has already taken all of their budget, leaving none for ACT or Sylvan.

In writing and reading, I have asked many more questions than I can answer. What is common is that I go to my classroom every day, in spite of the mandates, in spite of the increasing class sizes, in spite of the obstacles that are put before me. Sometimes my students ask me why I don’t get a job somewhere else, where I could make more money. It’s then that I crack a smile and think about that bored high school girl sitting in a history class in 1985. “Because I can do better than that,” I say. And in spite of the pacing guides and the common assessments and the examinations, we gather up our journals, put on our jackets, and go out to the woods to look and listen and learn.

References

Ayers, W. (2001). To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Second Edition. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Barber, B.R. (1993). America skips school. Harper’s Magazine, 287, pp. 39-46.

Berliner, D.C. (2006). Our Impoverished View of Educational Research. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 949-995.

Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cuban, L. (1990). Reforming Again, Again, and Again. Educational Researcher, 19(1), 3-13.

Darling-Hammond, L. (1996). The Right to Learn and the Advancement of Teaching: Research, Policy, and Practice for Democratic Education. Educational Researcher, 26(6), 5-17.

Duffy, G. G., & Hoffman, J.V. (1999). In pursuit of an illusion: The flawed search for a perfect method. The Reading Teacher, 53(1), 10-16.

Freire, P. (2007). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (M.B. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.

Gamse, B.C., Jacob, R.T., Horst, M., Boulay, B., & Unlu, F. (2008). Reading First Impact Study Final Report Executive Summary (NCEE 2009-4039). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education.

Gee, J.P. (1999). Critical Issues: Reading and the New Literacy Studies: Reframing the National Academy of Sciences Report on Reading. Journal of Literacy Research, 31(3), 355-374.

Goodman, K. (2004). NCLB’s pedagogy of the absurd. In K. Goodman, P. Shannon, Y. Goodman, and R. Rapoport (Eds.), Saving our schools: The case for public education (pp. 39-46). Berkeley, CA: RDR Books.

Hiebert, E.H. & Martin, L.A. (2008). Home Storybook Reading in Primary or Second Language With Preschool Children: Evidence of Equal Effectiveness for Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(2), 103-130.

Hoffman, J.V. (2000). The de-democratization of schools and literacy in America. The Reading Teacher, 53(8), 616-623.

Hoffman, J.F., Sailors, M., Patterson, E.U., & CIERA (2002). Decodable Texts for Beginning Reading Instruction: The Year 2000 Basals. Journal of Literacy Research, 34(3), 269-298).

Howe, K.R. (1997). Understanding Equal Educational Opportunity: Social Justice, Democracy, and Schooling. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Lemann, N. (1997). The reading wars. The Atlantic Monthly, 280, pp. 128-134.

 

McGill-Franzen, A. (2000). Policy and Instruction: What Is the Relationship? In M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, P.D. Pearson, and R.B. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research, Volume III (pp. 889-908). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

National Council for Excellence in Education. (1983). A Nation at Risk. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

RAND Reading Study Group. (2002). Reading for understanding: toward a research and development program in reading comprehension. Santa Monica, CA: RAND/Office of Educational Research and Improvement, U.S. Department of Education.

Rapoport, R. (2004). Where No Child Left Behind is not the law of the land. In K. Goodman, P. Shannon, Y. Goodman, and R. Rapoport (Eds.), Saving our schools: The case for public education (p. 251). Berkeley, CA: RDR Books.

Ravitch, D. (1995). National Standards in American Education. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

Richmond, E. (2009, April 24) Tutoring program not hitting its marks. Las Vegas Sun. Retrieved May 2, 2009, from www.lasvegassun.com

Rose, M. (1989). The Politics of Remediation. In Lives on the Boundary (pp. 167-204). New York, NY: Penguin.

Shannon, P. (2004). What’s the problem for which No Child Left Behind is the solution? In K. Goodman, P. Shannon, Y. Goodman, and R. Rapoport (Eds.), Saving our schools: The case for public education (pp. 12-26). Berkeley, CA: RDR Books.

Shannon, P. (2007). Reading against democracy: The broken promises of reading instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Union of Concerned Scientists. (2004). Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking. In K. Goodman, P. Shannon, Y. Goodman, and R. Rapoport (Eds.), Saving our schools: The case for public education (pp. 249-250). Berkeley, CA: RDR Books.

Valencia, S.W. & Wixson, K.K. (2000). Policy-Oriented Research on Literacy Standards and Assessment. In M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, P.D. Pearson, and R.B. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of Reading Research, Volume III (pp. 909-935). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Commodification of Education

Oppression and the Commodification of Education in the Era of Standardized Testing: Looking Through Kenneth Howe’s Lens of Equal Educational Opportunity

Kenneth Howe’s (1997) ideas about equal educational opportunity as they apply to American public education are imbedded in a belief system he defines using three distinct theories of social justice that serve as a framework for three competing interpretations of equal educational opportunity. This essay will summarize how Howe contextualizes equal educational opportunity within a framework of social justice before applying his ideas to the issue of standardized testing in American education. Howe interprets the standardized testing that has emerged from education reform as punitive. As such, he stresses the importance of moving beyond Gutmann’s (1999) concept of nonrepression in favor of nonoppression, “to protect groups that are threatened with marginalization and exclusion from meaningful participation” (p. 67), which is what is happening as a result of the culture of standardized testing, defining oppression using Iris Marian Young’s five forms (p. 70). Implicit in Howe’s argument about testing, however, is the notion that the business model not only continues to drive education, but has raised the stakes to new heights, where education, a field that in previous centuries was one with civic intent, has become a vehicle for economic utility, resulting in a widespread and continuing gap in knowledge and power that is rendering a majority of the American population captive.

Howe identifies “three theories of distributive justice within the liberal democratic tradition” (p. 23) that shape the way that we think about education in American society: libertarianism, utilitarianism, and liberal-egalitarianism. While libertarianism espouses freedom and liberty, Howe finds its tenets problematic, particularly concerning its beliefs regarding free market economies, which inherently results in unequal distributions of goods and wealth, creating great disparities between the haves and the have-nots, an untenable situation when applied to education (p. 23). Furthermore, Howe is flabbergasted both by the libertarian notion that the circumstances people are born into ultimately do not affect their life chances, as well as the lack of sense of social responsibility libertarians have for others in the larger society (p. 24), again, beliefs that conflict with what he later develops as a theory of equal educational opportunity.

Just as Howe finds fault with libertarian beliefs, he is equally disappointed with utilitarian ones. As an educational belief system, utilitarianism has been slowly gaining momentum for the last hundred years – since every state mandated compulsory elementary education at the beginning of the 20^th century. Howe defines the economy-based “meritocratic utilitarianism” as one in which “government ought to distribute resources in order to achieve desirable results” (p. 25).  What is key here, however, has nothing to do with education for any type of democratic ideal – participants in the democracy are not being educated to become contributing members of a society who can think and question.  Instead, the sole purpose of education for those who subscribe to the ideas of utilitarianism is to equip students with the skills they need to become contributing members of the workforce. That is not to say that a utilitarian perspective does not allow for attempting to “level the playing field,” unlike libertarians, for they believe that the more workers who are trained and equipped to enter the workforce, the better the benefit to corporate America, and the more the power elite will prosper. While it was common to hear the mantra of Reaganomics that a rising tide raises all boats, and a populace raised not to think readily subscribed to the belief of what was good for the wealthy would eventually trickle down to them, history has now shown us that this was a charade.  Utilitarianism views the necessity of citizens as functioning in useful capacities in society – but this usefulness is not to be confused with contributing, for example, to the body aesthetic. There is no room for the creativity of artists, dancers, writers, or musicians unless corporate entities are able to profit from their exploitation. But who determines who – or what — is useful? What happens when an individual is not useful to the society’s corporate interests? One can easily make the argument that our prisons are filled because having them in such a state not only serves to house those deemed unsuitable in the utilitarian society, but also provides a function for an entire prison industry. Howe writes that such a belief system is problematic and that utilitarianism “fails to provide an adequate foundation on which to ground the principle of equality of educational opportunity” (p. 26).

In the end, Howe positions himself in what he calls an alternative philosophy, liberal-egalitarianism, a view he calls the “participatory educational ideal” (p. 26). He argues that liberal-egalitarianism surpasses the inadequacies of libertarianism and utilitarianism in four basic ways: it values the good of the individual, the good of the group, is need-based, and is results-based (Howe, p. 26). Because of these factors, Howe says the philosophy is interventionist in nature, but only as the concerns apply to education in society, not other areas, which differentiates it from philosophies that might be considered broader attempts at addressing societal stresses, or what some may deem socialist policies (Howe, pp. 26-27).

Under the umbrella of these three philosophies, Howe develops an argument that begins with three interpretations of equal educational opportunity that become the basis for his discussion of what he perceives to be major issues of equality in American education in formulating his radical liberal framework: formal, compensatory, and participatory interpretations.  Here, a formal interpretation “identifies equality of educational opportunity with the formal structure of educational institutions. In its purest form, it requires only the absence of formal barriers to participation based on morally irrelevant criteria such as race and gender” (pp. 27-28). The problem with a formal interpretation, according to Howe, is that it is insensitive to social issues such as socioeconomic or language status, and has no inherent sense of social responsibility. A second interpretation of equal education opportunity is the compensatory model, whose “goal is to help shape desirable educational careers by compensating for characteristics of individuals that disadvantage them in educational institutions” (Howe, p. 29). Although this interpretation appears noble in principle, several aspects of it are troubling according to Howe and others. Not only does it assume a deficit model, but in doing so, it “diverts attention from the underlying structural sources of inequality associated with social class and, in the process, serves to legitimate and perpetuate vast inequality” (Howe, p. 29). Essentially, the compensatory model tells us that the status quo is okay – just as long as we throw a little money at it to try to rectify the issue, which is not the way to bring about long-lasting, systemic change. While Howe argues that the compensatory view is better than the formal view, it is its embrace of the status quo that makes him uneasy (p. 31). As a result of his philosophical dissatisfaction with both the formal and compensatory interpretations, whose belief systems are evident in aspects of both libertarianism and utilitarianism, it is no surprise that he embraces the participatory interpretation of equal opportunity, an idea established in Amy Gutmann’s Democratic Education (p. 42). The participatory interpretation of equal educational opportunity, like the liberal-egalitarian philosophy under whose auspices it falls, values not only the importance of the self-worth of the individual, but also the importance of maintaining a group identity, “because maintaining one’s group identity, and having what flows from it respected and taken seriously, is inextricably bound up with self-respect” (Howe, p. 31). Moreover, Howe also recognizes that any given society invariably consists of subdivided groups and acknowledges that any formal implementation of his framework “require[] establishing new rules and procedures that guarantee all groups are generally recognized” (p. 69). While Howe finds the participatory interpretation the most plausible one, he by no means finds it flawless. In a perfect world, for example, issues of race, gender, or disability – considerations that should be morally irrelevant – would not matter.  Sadly, in our world, they are issues that surface, and, Howe says, “the participatory interpretation exacerbates the problem because it opens the ideal to negotiation” (p. 32) in effect bringing issues to the surface for address – some might argue that this is better than burying them and pretending they don’t exist, advocating for the power of positive dialogue over subversive subtext.

As Howe applies his ideas about equal educational opportunity to the issue of testing, his primary concern lies in fairness. Given how he begins the chapter, with a quotation discussing the purposes of examinations in the Chinese educational system (p. 91), it is evident that Howe is positioning his argument about educational testing as the function of a utilitarian system that must determine the skills and usefulness of its constituency in order to drive the economy to feed business interests and government greed. Even when he discusses the two views that exist in educational testing – technicist and consequentialist – only to later state the differences between them as little more than nuance (p. 99), indicates that his real message about testing is that it is inherently unfair on many levels. It is clear that Howe views the state of educational testing in the United States as falling under a formal interpretation of equal educational opportunity, as testing is mandated by law, yet, at the same time, while proponents argue it to be a cure-all that “raises the bar” in order to help all students achieve, critics assert that testing does little more than exacerbate already grave problems facing struggling students and schools, thereby unsuccessfully functioning in the compensatory capacity in which it may have been intended (pp. 100-101). Nevertheless, with the current focus on standards and assessment, there is no doubt that testing, textbook, and tutoring companies are becoming richer, while the students who need help the most are being left further and further behind. Howe connects this to his idea of a participatory ideal. With government and business dictating a curriculum of mindless testing and rote memorization, what is being left behind, on both the political and personal levels, is the inculcation of the basic tenets of the importance of being a member in a democratic society. Miraculously, social studies does not appear on standardized tests, so students are not learning what it means to participate in their society. Similarly, students are not being taught to think critically, because tests require rote memorization. Howe asserts, “U.S. public education is indeed in serious trouble” (p. 107).  This doesn’t mean that Howe is against testing, but what he is against is “educational assessment only when it is practiced in a way that is blind to the requirements of equality of educational opportunity” (p. 107).

Furthermore, if we are to have equal educational opportunity in testing, we must have testing that is demonstrates nonoppressive, according to Howe. According to the criteria established by Iris Marion Young’s Five Forms of Oppression, cited in Howe (p. 70), the culture of testing that has taken over the educational landscape in the United States is wholeheartedly oppressive.  First, it is exploitive.  Education is now big business – for profit.  “The testing industry already consumes millions and millions of educational dollars,” writes Bill Ayers (2001, p. 117). Similarly, there is also a growing tutoring industry created through the No Child Left Behind Legislation.  One web site, EducationIndustry.org, is aimed at prospective business owners – no education experience necessary — to suck them into the education industry, because education, just like everything else in the United States, is not about our children, it’s about making a dollar. Just the idea that education has become an industry is indicative of the transformation from its origins. We now see the business model applied to education – the commodification of education. Similarly, a recent visit to a Sylvan Learning Center web site revealed that it will work with SLM Financial, a subsidiary of Sallie Mae, to help parents struggling financially to finance their K-12 student’s tutoring needs to prepare them for testing. Moreover, the Michigan Department of Education is required under No Child Left Behind to provide Supplemental Education Service Providers – tutors – to students whose school districts fail under the act. Interestingly, it has allowed tutoring centers, like Sylvan, to prosper. Is it coincidence that Sylvan Learning Centers represent the largest block of SES providers on MDE’s 7-page list, with 25 of the 112 available choices for parents in the state, no doubt partly because of their corporate identity and slick marketing provided to franchise owners? Companies are operating not for the benefit of students, but to exploit them and their families in order to make a dollar, and the government is facilitating the process.

The drive to standardize testing is also resulting in the marginalization of our students. Howe writes, “[E]ducational testing works to disadvantage various minority groups as well as girls and women” (p. 92). In addition, “Standardized tests … distort the performance of people who are culturally or linguistically different, regardless of ability, intelligence, or achievement” (Ayers, 2001, p. 112). Standardized tests are constructed in such a way that students’ voices are not meant to be heard or respected – they are being judged by a nameless, faceless other that negates their value as both individuals and members of a larger society.

To further argue that standardized testing qualifies as an oppressive activity, it also results in feelings of powerlessness for those who engage in it, as they are unable to participate in the authorization process because their voices do not matter. Kozol (1991) conveys the powerlessness of students engaged in the drill-and-kill testing routine of an inner city high school: “They have learned that education is a brittle, abstract ritual to ready them for an examination … They know how to pass the tests … I call it failure by design” (p. 143). For students not to become agents in their own learning, they have lost power and have lost hope.

Of the five forms of oppression, cultural imperialism is the one that is most prevalent, and perhaps the most applicable applied to the issue of testing, and Howe has a difficult time acknowledging that this can even be rectified, especially given the difficulty of eliminating predictive bias – particularly bias in favor of White males – from tests (p. 96).  He notes, “All it can do to improve predictions of who will perform well given the criteria of performance associated with those who have historically enjoyed advantages within unjust institutional arrangements” (p. 96).  I think Howe recognizes that eliminated bias goes well beyond any arguments in education, which is why this form of oppression, cultural imperialism, is one of the most frequently occurring. Cultural imperialism is a deficit assumption model, assuming that the status quo – the way we’ve always done things – is okay.  Applied to testing, it assumes that we should keep on testing as we’ve always tested, because any other ways of doing so would disrupt the system too greatly. Critics like David Berliner (2006) argue that we need to look at other factors influencing student test performance before making any determinations about things like, say, curriculum (p. 950). Similarly, Ayers (2001) finds the nature of standardized tests – the way we’ve always constructed them – to be problematic, as they are constructed to ensure that only half of all students could fall above the fifty percent mark (p. 112). Even worse, elitists like Charles Murray (2008) assume that some students can never achieve, reinforcing the notion that achievement will always fall neatly into a bell curve distribution (p. 21).

 Finally, because standardized testing in the United States subscribes to a White male, predominantly middle class world view, students who are other are expected to conform and compromise their experiences and beliefs as part of a government mandated system, which falls under Young’s definition of violence, “a form of oppression associated with the attitudes and practices that cultural imperialism sanctions” (Howe, p. 70). Rose (1989) laments the difficulties students have in a system that, for utilitarian purposes, requires them to be measured by instruments that indicate inconclusive, if not false, information about students who do not fit into the standard. Rose writes,

[W]hat you couldn’t represent with a ratio or a chart – what was messy and social and complex – was simply harder to talk about and much harder to get acknowledged … Numbers seduce us into thinking we know more than we do; they give the false assurance of rigor but reveal little about the complex cognitive and emotional processes behind the tally of errors and wrong answers. What goes on behind the mistakes simply escapes the measurers (Rose, 1989, p. 200).

It is this focus on quantitative data that has become pervasive in education in the United States, to the exclusion of the qualitative data that serves to more accurately define all of our students, not only those who are favored by the composition of the dominant system and the victims of the oppression both Howe and Young identify.

Given Howe’s position, the evidence is convincing that the current culture of standardized testing that exists is the United States as a result of ongoing attempts at education reform is yet another example that equality of educational opportunity does not exist in the public schooling system.  Moreover, its mandate in light of the No Child Left Behind legislation initiated by the Bush administration and seeming continuation of the same testing policies by the Obama administration have and will continue to exacerbate inequality in education. Our students are pawns in what has become the commodification of education — a system that has resulted in the emergence of an education industry that is centered around the creation of skewed quantitative data, serving to benefit testing corporations, textbook companies, and for-profit tutoring companies.  And the students who are most affected, the non-White, non-middle class, non-male other, continue to suffer the effects of unequal educational opportunity.

           

References

Ayers, W. (2001). To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher, Second Edition. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Berliner, D.C. (2006). Our Impoverished View of Educational Research. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 949-995.

Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic Education: With a New Preface and Epilogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Howe, K. R. (1997). Understanding equal educational opportunity: Social justice, democracy, and schooling. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Kozol, R. (1991). Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Murray, C. (2008). Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. New York, NY: Crown Forum.

Rose, M. (1989). The Politics of Remediation. In Lives on the Boundary (pp. 167-204). New York, NY: Penguin. 

Requiring Grammar, Punctuation and Usage for (some) Teachers?

Last week, on April 2nd, Representative Bob Genetski introduced House Bill 4761 (2009) calling for future elementary and secondary teachers to take a grammar, punctuation, and usage class as part of their teacher certification.  While research in the teaching of grammar and writing has changed over the years, with current models calling for authentic grammar instruction in the context of teaching writing, the majority of this scholarship focuses K-12 students, who are essentially still learning the basics of language.  Though most would agree that teaching grammar, punctuation, and usage out of context to emergent learners can be disastrous — think of students forever stuck in drill-and-kill exercises — once students are studying at the university level, a required course such as this would not be detrimental. In fact, if structured properly, university students would widely benefit from the knowledge of how the language works.

The language of proposed HB 4761 (2009) reads as follows:

A bill to amend 1976 PA 451, entitled ”The revised school code,” (MCL 380.1 to 380.1852) by adding section 1531i.

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF MICHIGAN ENACT:

SEC. 1531I. BEGINNING JANUARY 1, 2010, THE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION SHALL NOT ISSUE AN INITIAL ELEMENTARY LEVEL TEACHING CERTIFICATE, OR AN INITIAL SECONDARY LEVEL TEACHING CERTIFICATE WITH SUBJECT AREA ENDORSEMENT IN ANY SUBJECT OTHER THAN MATHEMATICS OR SCIENCE, TO A PERSON UNLESS THE PERSON PRESENTS EVIDENCE SATISFACTORY TO THE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION THAT HE OR SHE HAS SUCCESSFULLY COMPLETED A COURSE APPROVED BY THE DEPARTMENT IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE GRAMMAR, PUNCTUATION, AND USAGE. THIS REQUIREMENT IS IN ADDITION TO ALL OTHER REQUIREMENTS PROVIDED BY LAW.

(Note that HB 4761 is sponsored by Reps. Genetski, Roy Schmidt, Haines, Opsommer, Ball, DeShazor, Kurtz, LeBlanc, Proos, Tyler, Pearce, Pavlov, Daley, Lund, Knollenberg, Rick Jones, Moss, Meltzer, Walsh and Slezak and referred to the Committee on Education.)

After reading and mulling over this proposed legislation, I sent the following email to the bill’s sponsor, Representative Bob Genetski (R):

Dear Representative Genetski,

Though you do not represent my district, as a current high school English teacher I read your proposal with great interest, but I don’t believe it goes far enough.

In efforts to train my colleagues in Writing Across the Curriculum techniques, the most common complaint I hear comes from teachers in math and science — people who would be exempt from the bill in the form it is currently written — is that they feel uncomfortable dealing with writing in their classrooms because they are math and science teachers. It is this cohort of teachers that would benefit from such a class the most.

Furthermore, as I assume you realize given your previous position as an educator, mandating a course in grammar and usage doesn’t go far enough. All teachers, no matter the grade or discipline, must be comfortable with writing and be able to teach it. As the stakes for education in this country increase, our students need to be adept at thinking critically, and being able to write well is one way for them to engage in this activity. Every person who wishes to earn teacher certification in Michigan must have coursework in teaching and assessing writing, much like they are required to take content area reading classes.

For that reason, I do not understand why you wish to exempt math and science teachers from your bill. Current math requirements dictate that students must be able to articulate their thinking in writing to answer problems, so math teachers need this type of training. Similarly, science teachers also teach writing, in the form of producing lab reports, etc. Granted, these are different types of writing than types typically taught in an English classroom, but, nevertheless, they are important types of writing that need to be taught by math and science teachers who are comfortable as writers.

As your bill winds its way through the legislative process, I ask that you consider these concerns.

Sincerely,

Brigitte Knudson

Michigan’s Schools: More of the Same

While just about everyone agrees that the American education system is in need of an overhaul, there is much disagreement about how to do it.  The $100-plus billion the Obama administration included for education in the stimulus package is a good start, but Arne Duncan needs to think long and hard about how to begin to implement change in a system that has remained stagnant for a century.

My hope is that the national response will be swift and comprehensive.   While NCLB focuses on testing to measure progress, the language emerging from the Obama administration indicates the need for more holistic assessments that serve to measure not only in a variety of ways beyond standardized multiple choice tests, but over time, an element of reporting that has been noticeably absent. 

Beyond assessment, however, our infrastructure needs support.  Children do not receive equal educational opportunity in dilapidated buildings with substandard materials.  Children do not receive equal educational opportunity when they do not receive instruction from highly qualified professionals.  There is much work to be done.

A headline in today’s Detroit Free Press reads: “State ponders school-review system.”  Sadly, the newly proposed system continues to “rely heavily on test scores” to determine school success.  The state, once again, is trading apples for apples in a feeble attempt at change.  Currently, Michigan education officials plan to replace its current school grading system – an A to F scale – with one that focuses on three-tiers – accredited, interim accredited, or unaccredited – where evaluations are tied to student performance on state-mandated examinations.  When will people realize that assessment is only one small piece of the puzzle?  And who what was the thinking behind the idea that in order to be accredited schools must have 60% or more of its students proficient in all but one subject?  What about the other 40%? How does such a philosophy bode for the future?  

What this means is more testing for students in K-8, and more at stake for the high school students who are evaluated one time, in the junior year, with the monstrous MME, whose key component is the ACT+Writing – a college preparedness indicator, not a curriculum evaluation instrument.  Perhaps this means that the commodification of education will continue in Michigan, with testing-mania branching out to include 9^th through 12^th grade students.

Let’s move forward, not backward.  Let’s fix our schools, not penalize the ones that need our help the most.  Accreditation is not the key.  We already know which schools struggle.  What we need is a real plan that goes well beyond changing surface criteria.  But it’s much easier to focus on the superfluous than address systemic change.  And much less costly.  When will the state realize that investing in its future is the only way to stem its disintegration?

On Democracy and Education

The thinking behind Amy Gutmann’s Democratic Education does not reside in prescription, but rather recognizes both nuance and complexity.  As a result, she not only presents a philosophy of education that embraces political controversy, but does so within a context that promotes dialogue as a means to achieve “social progress” through how we educate our children (p. 5).  She suggests “[t]he primary aim of a democratic theory of education is not to offer solutions to all of the problems plaguing our educational institutions, but to consider ways of resolving those problems that are compatible with a commitment to democratic values” (p. 11). 

To that end, while acknowledging tensions that are evident in educational philosophy, her argument is that “all educable children [must] learn enough to participate effectively in the democratic process” (p. 170).  In doing so, the goal of public education she espouses should serve to “cultivate the skills and virtues of deliberation” (p. xiii), so that, as she states in the preface to the first edition, we teach children “enough to participate intelligently as adults in the political processes that shape their society,” promoting “a common standard that is compatible with diversity.”  Her model assumes a shared responsibility for education, where parents, education professionals, and governmental entities contribute to “cultivating moral character” (p. 42).  At the same time, she also writes “[a] democratic state of education recognizes that educational authority must be shared among parents, citizens, and professional educators even though such sharing does not guarantee that power will be wedded to knowledge” (p. 42).  This is in keeping with the idea that democracy is not a process so much as an ideal that we strive to achieve and maintain.

Further, Gutmann’s idea that a democratic theory of education must be compatible with diversity reflects her view that “its principles and conclusions are compatible with our commitment to share the rights and the obligations of citizenship with people who do not share our complete conception of the good life” (p. 47). Key to this idea are the importance of both critical inquiry – teaching students to be curious and free thinkers – and political access – where students are equipped by their education and authorized by political structures to share in ruling.  Gutmann says that “[c]hildren must learn not just to behave in accordance with authority, but to think critically about authority if they are to live up to the democratic ideal of sharing political sovereignty as citizens” (p. 51), arguing that “[e]ducation in character and in moral reasoning are therefore both necessary” (p. 51). In the preface to the first edition of the text, Gutmann asserts that “[d]emocratic societies must therefore prevent majorities (as well as minorities) from repressing critical inquiry or restricting political access”.  But critical inquiry and political access are not possible in a system that is exclusionary or discriminatory, as these practices negate the ideal of a democratic education.  When applied to primary schooling, she argues that the social purpose of nondiscrimination becomes one of nonexclusion in that “no educable child may be excluded from an education adequate to participating in the processes that structure choice among good lives” (p. 127).  However, she recognizes the system is not perfect, because it cannot guarantee that parents won’t pass on their prejudices to children or that education can remain a neutral prospect (p. 42). At the same time, Gutmann says this standard is ”necessary but not sufficient” (p. 127), because we need a more fully developed plan in place to fully implement non-discriminatory practices that considers not only the allocation of resources, but also the distribution of those resources as well as the distribution of students within schools (p. 127-128).  It is here that she sees the ideal of equal educational opportunity as the most popular – and promising – standard in education (p. 128).

The process-based model for teaching democratic deliberation, then, can best be conceptualized as a continuum where children are taught the concepts of democratic deliberation by adults who, in turn, participate in democratic deliberation to make decisions about education that, in turn, will subsequently affect more children.  Similarly, within that model, the participatory function of adults is to maintain what Gutmann refers to as the complete democratic standard, comprised of two standards, non-discrimination and non-exclusion.  In this participatory model that is governed by both respect and tolerance, adults participate in the democratic process that not only establishes the threshold for engagement – the lowest point of entry into the democratic process – but is also inclusive of engaging in, as well as authorizing, the process. We become part of the system we have been taught to nurture and uphold, keeping the process, yet recognizing and reveling in continuing debate. In order to do this, she maintains that a democratic theory of education should focus on “conscious social reproduction” (p. 14), in other words, “citizens are or should be empowered to influence the education that in turn shapes the political values, attitudes, and modes of behavior of future citizens” (p. 14). 

To this effect, a democratic society that considers among its most fundamental rights liberty and justice for all – equal opportunity – it is imperative that any actions regarding education be based on a “principled understanding of our educational purposes” (p. 4).  Such an assumption includes not only “who should have authority to make decisions about education” (p. 11), but also “what the moral boundaries of authority are” (p. 11).  So, while “educational authority must be shared among parents, citizens, and professional educators” (p. 42), the boundaries of what and how morality should be taught should be a negotiation between parents, educational professionals, and the government (p. 42). While Gutmann explores several paths for teaching morality, citing psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s three moral principles of authority, association, and principles (pp. 60-63), she thinks schools should teach a morality of association, where morality is taught within a concept of knowing – that people have a tendency to exhibit moral behavior when they can apply it to a situation with a person they know, as opposed to a nameless face.  It is within this context, though, that Gutmann asserts it is the responsibility of teachers, parents, or community members to challenge errant beliefs.  For example, teachers cannot permit racist rhetoric in a classroom to go unchallenged on the basis of freedom of speech, because it infringes on others’ rights to the mandatory principles underlying a democratic education: liberty, justice, and equality.

Although Gutmann’s revised text was published in 1999, its theoretical framework arguing the purpose of education and its participants seems at odds with both the back to basics movement that began in the 1980s as well as the mandates established by 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act, legislation enacted to perpetuate beliefs grounded in back to basics ideology. While she maintains that we need “a principled understanding of our educational purposes” in order to make policy determinations (Gutmann, p. 4), she also warns against simplistic solutions to complex problems. Given her endorsement of the importance of establishing a dialogue regarding educational concerns, Gutmann refers to the back to basics movement as the “least common denominator for agreeing on a national agenda for education” (p. 4), noting that such a stance is problematic in that it focuses on a standard of agreement – basic education for all children – a position that, by default, prevents us from addressing much more controversial – and relevant – issues that hinder school improvement, such as racial integration and educational equality.

The process of the federal government establishing that states submit to federal mandates by providing testing data in order to receive funding, and then those states, in turn, requiring local school districts to prepare students for testing by suggesting criteria for curriculum, which, in turn, requires local schools to align their curriculum with what the state will be testing – is a bastardization of the interaction among interested parties in a system of democratic education, where what is taught, how it is taught, and how it is assessed becomes a result of government dictates, a top-down model that is anything but democratic.  This is problematic in several ways.  First, according to the preface of the first edition of Gutmann’s text, “[w]e all learn about education from experience, but we do not all learn the same things”.  Such a belief means that, depending on the negotiation of all interested parties, students will learn, though not necessarily in the lock-step method that is being dictated in many school districts across the state and country. 

Moreover, the idea that the educational philosophy representing the back to basics views of those in power during the last administration when NCLB was enacted further distorts Gutmann’s idea that a particular agenda, whether held by the majority or minority in power, cannot be used to repress our critical inquiry. Hoffman (2000) notes, “The reform movement is being led by politicians who are using their positions of authority and power to control the actions of educators” (p. 620). He cites state-mandated standardized tests, prescribed curricula and methods of instruction, federally-mandated initiatives that fund research contingent upon adherence to its own politically-motivated research, among others, that “create the illusion of democracy, [though] they are not democratic” (p. 620).

What is happening in many American schools, including mine, is that we are operating under what Gutmann would identify as a cause-effect model, as opposed to the process model she deems is more in line with a democratic theory of education. The current emphasis on testing in our schools, essentially providing data to the state that is sent to the federal government to maintain funding, has caused the state to rewrite K-12 curriculum, resulting in school districts rewriting their curriculum to match the state’s expectations so students are better prepared for success on state-wide assessments. 

These changes have resulted in a transformation in the way we educate our students, and it is all based on the dictates of a few.  Even though we understand that “human learning … is best when it is participatory, proactive, communal, collaborative, and given over to constructing meanings rather than receiving them (Bruner, 1996, p. 84), NCLB’s mandates have perpetuated what Freire (2007) calls the Banking Concept of Education, where, to prepare for standardized testing, students “record[], memoriz[e], and repeat[]” without understanding meaning (p. 71).  This focus obliterates the notion that education is a shared process, as Gutmann argues, and instead turns students “into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher” (Freire, 2007, p. 72). In addition, Hoffman (2000) contends that “[schools] enculturate the young toward the values, beliefs, skills, and understandings that will preserve existing structures. But our schools can also, under the best of circumstances, challenge us to examine our own society, reflect on its strengths and weaknesses, and set our sights on improvements. This is what a democracy demands if it is to thrive, not just survive” (p. 616). Because of the integrated nature of the process Gutmann illustrates, if current foci are not changed, their negative impact could become embedded in our educational system, a negative spiral in perpetuity.  On the other hand, however, a shift from current trends could also spiral, providing a much needed change.

In addition to upsetting the shared power inherent in Gutmann’s view of a democratic education, schools that focus on testing and teaching to the test prevent students from developing critical thinking skills. Hoffman says that not only has the “critical reading of texts [] taken a backseat to ‘teaching the basics’ in the reform movement, … [but the] texts themselves have become a primary control mechanism in the de-democratization of schools, teaching, and learning” (pp. 616-617).  In this system, as Freire asserts, “The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world” (p. 73).  If an inner city student’s school, facing punitive measures as a result of NCLB, decides to eliminate recess, electives, and other aspects of what is important in a liberal education, that student is unfairly penalized because of who she is or where she lives.  Suddenly, as Kozol (2005) writes, early preparation for testing has resulted in  “hundreds of thousands of children who have made what urban districts often claim to be dramatic gains in elementary school … [who] are sitting in [secondary] subject-matter classes where they cannot comprehend the texts and cannot set down their ideas in sentences expected of most fourth and fifth grade students in the suburbs” (p. 281).  Ensuring that students are prepared for the test, to the exclusion of learning to think critically, does not represent equal educational opportunity and does not benefit our students. 

Furthermore, an educational system that subscribes to such an ideology has forgotten what education should comprise.  Benjamin Barber (1993) says, “We have forgotten that the ‘public’ in public schools means not just paid for by the public but procreative of the very idea of a public. Public schools are how a public – a citizenry – is forged and how young, selfish individuals turn into conscientious, community-minded citizens” (p. 44). Our current culture of education has thrown all of this away in the name of so-called empiricism – measuring so-called progress using flawed instruments that require students only choose the correct answer from a list.  Democracy is not choosing from a list, but debating the elements that require consideration for that list.  “Certainly there will be no liberty, no equality, no social justice without democracy,” Barber points out, “and there will be no democracy without citizens and the schools that forge civic identity and democratic responsibility” (p. 46).  The list is being dictated to our students, and ones who do not measure up are eventually eliminated from participating in the process, victims of unequal educational opportunity. And for all of us, high-stakes standardized testing “… in the proliferation of reductionist curricula for reading, in the silencing of professional dialogue and debate, in the marginalizing of minority positions and people, in a muting of the voices in the texts our students are expected to read, and in a stern control over the ‘correct’ interpretations of these already bland texts” (Hoffman, p. 617), is a danger to democracy.

As we continue to struggle with issues of education at the dawn of a new administration, and are hesitant to get too excited at the possibilities of democratic reform, we must stay true to the ideals of a democratic education, remembering that “[t]he education crisis … stems from a dearth of democracy: an absence of democratic will and a consequent refusal to take our children, our schools, and our future seriously” (Barber, p. 45).  To use the (unfortunate) nomenclature of the day, in a democratic system of education, we are all stakeholders, and as such, we must strive to ensure the system allows the freedom of debate and negotiation so that another generation is not lost in a prescriptive struggle for dominance and power.

 

References

Barber, B.R. (1993). America skips school. Harper’s Magazine, 287, pp. 39-46.

Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Freire, P. (2007). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (M.B. Ramos, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.

Gutmann, A. (1999). Democratic Education: With a New Preface and Epilogue. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Hoffman, J.V. (2000). The de-democratization of schools and literacy in America. The Reading Teacher, 53(8), 616-623.

Kozol, J. (2005). The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press.