Someone who is a disruptor by birth and by training does not become president of the American Federation of Teachers. And building continuous, sustainable reform is not really the key to leadership of one of the country’s entrenched labor unions. The path to power there has more to do with concession on a lot of issues that might matter deeply to more principled, and more informed, activists.
As a starry-eyed profile of Randi Weingarten, the article is pretty comprehensive. As a look at the future of education reform from one of America’s leading journals of opinion, it is pretty weak. Sure, the Prospect supports Weingarten and her work at the American Federation of Teachers. But merely supporting the union doesn’t mean that the Prospect’s critical judgment needs to be subsumed to starry-eyed cheerleading.
A good piece on education reform should look at the tough issues the U.S. will need to cover in the coming years. This means not just what the unions need to give up, but also what policymakers and the public need to understand in order to see real change. Standardized testing, No Child Left Behind, alternative teacher certification, vocational programs, extended day and/or extended year schools, education funding, and the proper role of the federal, state, and local governments in education are far more important things to consider with regard to the future of education reform than what Weingarten said in her last speech. But the Prospect piece fails to address the major issues in education reform, and ultimately looks like it might feel more comfortable in something like American Educator—the magazine put out by the American Federation of Teachers.
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