Dropout Nation's RiShawn Biddle on anti-intellectualism in our debate over education reform:
For all the taxpayer-funded doctorates and graduate degrees that are found among the defenders of traditional public education, there is little going on among them other than closed-minded, sclerotic thinking. This lack of intellectual vigor — the ability to see the value of new concepts, the lack of understanding of economics and technology, and the rabid opposition to anyone outside of education arguing for reform — is one reason why American public education is mired in the kind of mediocrity that has fostered the nation’s education crisis.
And from Terry M. Moe and Paul T. Hill writing in Education Week on government, markets and the mixed model of education reform:
Stereotypes are alive and well in American education reform, and nowhere is this more evident than when school choice is being discussed. All too often, choice is characterized by its detractors as a “free market” solution that would “privatize” education. And all too often, this depiction is reinforced by its more libertarian supporters, who do indeed see choice in these terms and are stridently opposed to a government-run education system. The framing suggests an unbridgeable chasm. On the one side, markets. On the other side, government.
As is often true of stereotypes, this kind of either-or framing is not helpful. A more productive way to think about school choice—and about American education reform in general—is not in terms of markets vs. government, but rather in terms of markets and government.
Most barriers to innovation in education occur at the state and local level, Tom Vander Ark writes today at edReformer, but there are a few at the federal level. They include:
1. NCLB picked criterion-referenced testing over growth models; that probably set back competency-based learning a bit. Growth models are being approved state by state.
2. The feds retain the historical bias/restrictions against private enterprise; e.g., excluding private enterprise from stimulus funding (compared to massive private investment in energy).
3. Input-oriented programmatic funding (exacerbated at the state level)
4. Inadequate Investigator driven research funding rather than DARPA-like strategic funding
Also, RiShawn Biddle has some good historical context on the role federal funding has played in education.
After listening recently to RiShawn Biddle's podcast calling on civil rights leaders to change their approach to education reform, I was reminded of an unpublished column written by one Florida legend in the civil rights movement, the Rev. H.K. Matthews. Matthews shared the commentary with me and others after several civil rights groups last summer demanded that President Obama reconsider the core elements of his education agenda, which included the expansion of charter schools and the closure of consistently low-performing schools. These iconic groups, which included the NAACP and the National Urban League, had good intentions in presenting their education policy framework, but Matthews found their arguments irrelevant today. Their call for equal opportunity, he wrote, was "limited by some familiar boundaries of generations past -- those of neighborhood and family income."
Matthews, whose story is chronicled in the biography Victory After the Fall, marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Ala., and was jailed 35 times for his many protests of segregated lunch counters in northwest Florida. In recent years, he has joined the call for more educational options for poor families, an effort he called "a natural extension of the civil rights movement." In this column, which has never seen publication until now, he asks his brethren to erase the lines we have drawn in the past:
The African-American leaders who convened in Washington last week [July] to call educational quality the “civil rights battle of this generation” have it at least half right. Unfortunately, their call for equal opportunity seems limited by some familiar boundaries of generations past-- those of neighborhood and family income.
As President Obama put it: “What’s not working for black kids and Hispanic kids and Native American kids across this country is the status quo … What’s not working is what we’ve been doing for decades now.” (more…)
Outgoing New York schools chancellor Joel Klein is right to identify that low-income families deserve to have the best educational options available to them, but he frames the argument for school choice in a way that stops short of advocating for equal opportunities for our most disadvantaged families.
In the Wall Street Journal today, Klein reflects on his tenure running the nation's largest school system and explains how his embrace of charter schools was especially controversial in a district where, he wrote, "bureaucrats, unions and politicians had their way." He writes, "the debate shouldn't be about whether a school is a traditional or charter public school. It should be about whether it's high-performing, period."
Allow us to take his argument a step further, in two ways. First, charter is not the only alternative for underprivileged children. Second, we should take special care when labeling any school as high- or low-performing, because the variation within schools is typically greater than between schools. An International Baccalaureate school is high-performing based on standardized test performance and many other measures, but is not necessarily the best fit for all students. (more…)
