Perhaps because it is inherently a little dull, the world of education policy likes to liven up its policy disputes by calling them “wars.” There are reading wars, technology wars, wars about Teach for America, and wars about pay-for-performance.
Well, it looks like it might be time for the victory parade down Fifth Avenue, because according to Dana Goldstein at The American Prospect, there is a peace treaty in the making. As Goldstein explains in her article, “The Education Wars”:
Like any successful negotiator, Randi Weingarten can sense when the time for compromise is nigh. On Nov. 17, after the Election Day dust had cleared, Weingarten, the president of both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)… gave a major speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. In attendance were a host of education-policy luminaries….“No issue should be off the table, provided it is good for children and fair for teachers,” Weingarten vowed, referencing debates within the Democratic coalition over charter schools and performance pay for teachers — innovations that teachers’ unions traditionally held at arm’s length.
The AFT is the smaller of the nation’s two teachers’ unions (the National Education Association (NEA) has 3.2 million members; the AFT has 1.4 million members) but historically the one that gets involved in policy debates. The AFT, with more minority members and greater representation in America’s urban schools, is the teacher’s union to consider with regard to closing the achievement gap—the difference between the educational achievements of America’s students.
Weingarten has announced, essentially, that the AFT will be willing to consider new issues. Traditionally, the AFT focuses on improving benefits and working conditions for teachers and school support staff, and increasing state and federal funding for schools. It did not do charter schools, and it did not do differentiated pay for teachers. Weingarten has announced that these are now things she is willing to consider.
But while Goldstein casts Weingarten’s compromise with education reformers as the future of American education, she does not indicate that anything is actually changing in American education. The Prospect article makes it sound as if these changing alliances are a matter of great import, rather than just a very routine part of policymaking. So the president of the AFT is willing to talk to school reformers. This is great for school reformers and great for unions. But any thought of this as “great” for education is misguided. While it does matter how well the AFT functions, ultimately the only thing that matters in education is how well the schools educate the students. And the piece does not address this issue at all. This is a critical mistake.
The piece fetishizes “consensus-building” without stopping to examine how consensus-building actually relates to education reform. Of course compromise is central to policymaking, but compromise on its own is neither good nor bad. Compromise is a tactic. What’s important for policy reform is whether or not the compromises advance the reform efforts. There’s been a lot of talk in the journals of opinion lately about how the rules have been redrawn now that Barack Obama is in the White House. Civil Rights leaders can negotiate with big business. Labor can negotiate with management. He kept Robert Gates on as secretary of Defense. Even Hillary’s in the cabinet. Team of Rivals and all that.
When I started Grad school (in education), early on I encountered a statistic which should be cited at the head of EVERY discussion of disparities in student "achievement": One (1) variable accounts for more than 60% of ALL variance in comparing students' achievement scores. That variable is the socio-economic status of the parents. The correlation is almost 1: ceteris paribus, the higher the socio-economic status of the family, the higher will be the students' test scores.
Most 'achievement' tests are, in effect, reading tests. Reading is a skill that is easily developed if children come at it early and often. In most (once; still, many) middle-class (and up) homes, reading is a matter of no particular remarkability because it is commonplace. Children in such homes grow up reading and being read to on a regular basis. Usually they can read well, and do basic sums, by the time they start school. Their families model appreciation for reading in the home. There usually are lots of books and magazines and a culture of literacy permeates the family life.
Kids who do not grow up immersed, for whatever reason, in this culture of literacy struggle in school and do not score (as) well on the achievement tests (which have grown from minor distractions to major determinants of a child's eventual access to the "goods" of life.
The fixation with test scores, and grades and records, is actually incomprehensible until you understand that the purpose of schooling (note, I didn't say education) is mainly to insure that as few as possible students actually escape the socio-economic niches for which they were born. The array of test data, grades, evaluations, reports and records exists primarily to provide evidence, retroactively, for decisions made about kids' 'achievements' long before they ever set foot in a classroom.
If you REALLY want to imprvoe the 'achievement' of all students, then you'd have to make certain that all children had the kinds of domestic experiences which predispose youngsters of the upper classes to their literacies. End poverty, for example.
Or, the next best thing (though distinctly a distant second place) is to use school to provide experiences at least semi-analogous to those of the well-to-do in pre-k, headstart, and kindergarten interventions. In humans, neo-natology lasts about 15 years, of which the early phase--roughly 1 to 5 years old--is crucial. Money and time spent will repay their investment, not in higher test scores, which are essentially irrelevant, but in actual literacy and numeracy.
Weingarten is a stooge for the testing establishment, as is Arne Duncan. And Goldstein is just drinking the CorpoRat Kool-aid.
#1 Posted by Woody, CJR on Thu 26 Mar 2009 at 06:05 PM
PS: We know 'what works.' It is strongly suggested in the work of Lev Vygotsky: Small, diverse--in age, ability, experience,etc--groups immersed in meaningful projects which create knowledge that is locally relevant, using (intellectual) tools developed for the purpose.
Kids "succeed" in schools where that is the basic pedagogical philosophy.
#2 Posted by Woody, CJR on Thu 26 Mar 2009 at 06:16 PM
"No one expects the UAW to revive the U.S. car market, after all." -- This is a silly concession to the ridiculous idea that unions don't have good ideas and can't be entrepreneurial or forward thinking. Harold Myerson's WaPo op ed from December pretty well lays out just how forward thinking the UAW has been through the years, and how much better the U.S. auto industry would be if the big three had listened to their ideas (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/16/AR2008121602482.html). Also see this article from David Moberg at the Prospect in Sept 2007 that demonstrates again just how much better the auto industry would be now if it had listened to the UAW's forward looking ideas (http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_labor_lessons_gm_never_learned).
So, *of course* teachers unions have good ideas to contribute to educational policy -- they represent teachers, who spend all their time working with kids and know a lot about their jobs, and whose employment would be much more satisfying if they had the tools to do their jobs better. Look at the teacher's union publications -- half of the articles are about teaching well, not just about politics and workplace matters.
But even if teachers and their organizations didn't have anything to contribute to best practices in the classroom (which is an absurb and offensive claim), it is still entirely untrue that "the only thing that matters in education is how well the schools educate the students". If we were educating our students at the highest possible level but teachers were working in sweatshop conditions, with low pay, no benefits, no job security, etc, I can't say I'd see that as a success. But that scenario is preposterous on its face -- you can't imagine a good school environment that isn't also a decent place to work. When teachers fight for their workplace rights they're also fighting to make sure that their students have a better learning environment too.
#3 Posted by Tyler Bickford, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 11:20 AM