A couple of months ago I visited an unusual school in Henderson, Minnesota: the New Country School. I mention it because the school illustrates two different ways public education is being challenged these days. Sixty years ago I attended a country school in Nebraska - one of thousands of one-room elementary schools that once were scattered every few miles all across the plains. New Country is also a one-room school, in some ways like those historic little wooden places of learning but otherwise quite different. For one thing, it’s a modern brick building. For another, it’s a six-year secondary school, for what we would call grades 7 through 12. Like the original country schools, it’s relatively small, but in this case that means about 150 students. And like the country school I attended, this school is governed not by a distant board of education, such as we have here in Fairfax County, but directly by a group of parents and local community members. That’s because New Country is a charter school, a new kind of public school that got its start in Minnesota only about 10 years ago.
The students at New Country spend most of their time on projects they’ve dreamed up. They don’t go from class to class every 55 minutes; they each have a work station, complete with computer, not unlike the work stations they can expect to have when they’re employed as adults. Teachers don’t give lectures and tests; they advise and critique, making sure students are using their time reasonably well and that student work is of acceptable quality.
Now, as soon as most of us hear about such a school, we may be intrigued, but we wonder, “Aren’t those kids going to miss a lot of important stuff they really need to know?” That brings me to the second way public education is being challenged, this time by their state school boards and legislatures. Like students at most schools across the United States these days, the students at New Country have to pass state tests. Fair enough. But the standards Minnesota has established are different from Virginia’s; you might say the Minnesota standards tend to emphasize learning-to-learn skills. The required tests in Minnesota measure students’ ability to read, write, calculate, and understand mathematical concepts - what most people think of when they hear about “standards.” By contrast, Virginia’s standards emphasize particular pieces of knowledge. And when I described the Virginia standards to the Minnesota educators, they said it would be difficult, if not impossible, to have such a school in Virginia. Now, I think that’s a shame, but some people obviously don’t. So one of the things I want to talk with you about is how standards-based testing is affecting schools. Before doing that, I’ll review several different ways in which regular public schools are being challenged by new forms of schooling.
To begin, maybe I should explain why I think education is an appropriate topic for a Sunday service at a Unitarian church. First, most of us are deeply concerned about social justice, and we want our church to be involved. As we all know, many aspects of the way public education is provided in this country are grossly unjust. Specifically, students in urban areas and poor rural communities don’t receive anything like the quality of education provided to students in wealthy suburbs like Fairfax County.
Incidentally, a good reason for us to talk about public education at this time is that MVUC is involved in a project with a number of other churches in the Baltimore and Washington metropolitan areas. Members of the group, known as Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice, or UUSJ, have decided after extensive consideration, to adopt public education as their first project. To find out about it, please see me or Peg Bartel, our church’s social justice coordinator.
So public education raises plenty of social justice issues. Aside from that, though, there’s the matter of what we Unitarians think about the nature of education itself. Some people see schooling as properly authoritarian and competitive. They believe it’s perfectly reasonable for government to decide what schools students should attend, what they will learn, and even how they’ll learn it. Such people tend to be suspicious of “modern” ideas and prefer tried and true methods of teaching and learning: sitting and listening to teachers, reading textbooks, doing worksheets, taking quizzes, being graded A through F. This doesn’t mean they want schools to be harsh and cruel, but they do believe coercion and threat are absolutely necessary.
I see this conception of teaching and learning as compatible with hierarchical religions in which high-ranking ecclesiastical officials decide what is right and how people should behave. My preferred approach to education is, I think, more compatible with a typically Unitarian point of view. I think people learn best when they’re trying to understand something they think is useful and important to them. The best teachers, from this perspective, are those who know how to encourage students’ natural curiosity and initiative. (I don’t want to sound too naïve here. I know that, to get kids to do what's good for them in the long run versus what may be appealing at the moment, adults have to do some prodding. The difference is one of degree and emphasis.)
I called this morning’s talk “The Challenge to Public Education.” I really should have said “challenges,” because there are many, some from outside the existing system and some from within. Determined to make schools improve, state and national politicians have in recent years supported both standardization and variation. At the same time they’ve adopted curriculum standards and state tests to get more uniformity, they’ve approved other ways to circumvent it, including charter schools and vouchers. I mentioned that the unusual Minnesota school I visited is a charter.
Laws providing for charter schools vary from state to state, and the situation varies according to the laws. Charters aren’t strongly encouraged in Maryland or Virginia, so there aren’t very many here. Of the roughly 2,400 charter schools, California has 368, Virginia has 6. The District of Columbia, on the other hand, has quite a few - at least 30. Where they exist, an agency with the necessary authority (usually but not always the local school board) approves or disapproves the proposed charter that describes the particular program the school promises to offer. Once the charter has been granted, the school operates independently, with its own governance structure. If the school is mismanaged or fails in a big way to do what it said it would do, the chartering agency can cancel its charter.
I’ve visited charter schools in several states, including California, Arizona, Colorado, Michigan, and the District. They’re quite different from one another. Leadership High School, run by a former lawyer, is located in the same building as a downtown university in the heart of San Francisco. Henry Ford Academy, a middle school, is located in the Henry Ford museum at Greenfield Village in Detroit, so just by stepping outside their classrooms, the 400 students have easy access to everything in the museum. As a group, charter schools haven’t yet proven themselves; for example, on average their test scores are about the same as ordinary public schools. But parents of children who attend charter schools are generally much more satisfied than parents of other schools. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that parents who’ve chosen to send their students to a particular school with a clearly defined mission will be somewhat more satisfied than parents whose children attend an all-purpose school they were simply assigned to. So is the charter idea a threat to public education? It depends on your definition of “public.”
Let’s turn to vouchers, which raise the ante by using public tax money to support private schools. You probably know the arguments for both sides of this sticky issue. I’ll mention just one big problem. Advocates of vouchers like to talk about accountability. Public schools, they say, must be accountable for producing results in exchange for public support. Ironically, though, private schools are not accountable to government and are not about to be. We don’t know whether the students who left public schools in Florida and Milwaukee did better or not, because the non-public schools they went to are not required to give the same tests that the public schools are. How long will taxpayers accept having their money spent on schools that are not accountable to the public for how the money is used? Similarly, people may go along with inner-city youngsters using vouchers to attend religious schools so long as those schools are prohibited from teaching religion. But people who know those schools, including those who operate them, will tell you that’s impossible, especially if there’re no government inspections to check on it - and who wants government inspectors hanging around religious schools trying to police such a thing? In my view, then, there are some built-in contradictions that make vouchers a bad idea.
Another challenge to traditional public education I probably should mention actually doesn’t look like much of a threat at this point. I’m referring to schools run by profit-making companies. The Edison program is currently the biggest such company, running the most schools - but after having been rejected recently by parents in New York City and given an unexpectedly small piece of the pie in the huge shakeup underway in Philadelphia, Edison may eventually go bankrupt, as several smaller companies have in the last few years. The idea of trying to make a profit by operating schools may have seemed pretty questionable to some of us all along, but there are sure to be continuing variations on that theme in the years ahead, especially because in some states a substantial number of the charter schools I’ve talked about are run as private businesses. Some Edison schools, for example, are charters.
A fourth challenge, somewhat different, is both internal and external. In part it has its roots in the existing school system, but in part it’s replacing or supplementing regular schools. This one is, in my opinion, the single factor that will change traditional education the most in the years ahead. It’s so new and primitive at this point that we’re not sure even what to call it: virtual schooling, cyberschooling, distance learning, or what. I’m talking about education conducted with computers and sometimes through the internet. Electronic communication is changing things so much that we can’t foresee what our various institutions may be like in the years ahead. But when I think of all the ways computers can present material and how they can respond instantly to what we say or do, and how once a complex program has been developed it can be made available to anybody anywhere in the world at any time, I seriously doubt that we’ll continue forever to put our children in groups of 25-30 and expect them to go through the typical classroom activities that, up until now, seemed the most sensible way to get an education. I’m not saying computers can do it without teachers - far from it. Children will always need the attention of caring adults - but those adults may not always have to sit down and write “lesson plans” for how they’ll be giving “instruction.”
The various challenges I’ve talked about so far are all gnawing at the edges of the existing system of public schools. So far they’re more of a nuisance than anything else. The vast majority of kids still go to regular schools. But each year there are just a few more alternatives for parents to consider, including various combinations. About a million parents, for example, are teaching their children at home, in some cases with support from an agency that may or may not be recognized as a charter school, which may or may not communicate with the child by means of computers. It’s confusing, and it undoubtedly will get more so.
But there’s a very different kind of challenge to schools, this one from the very agencies that govern them. I’m referring to state standards enforced by required state tests. Virginia’s Standards of Learning, generally known as SOLs, is a prime example. For those who aren’t familiar with the SOL program, I’ll provide a little background. In the mid 1990s, selected teachers from across Virginia were brought together to decide what every student needed to know. By that time, most national subject matter organizations -- the teacher groups for mathematics, science, English, and so on -- had been at work for several years writing such statements, described as national “standards.” The process began with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, which published the first set of “standards” in 1989. Soon all the other subject matter groups were writing standards, some with funding from the federal government. But along the line, there was a major upset. The movement got its start during the first Bush administration and was pushed by Diane Ravitch, the conservative educational historian who was then in charge of what is known as the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, or OERI. But with the election of a democratic president, who followed up with his Goals 2000 program, which enraged conservatives in many states, including Virginia, the national Congress cancelled plans to have official national standards. The CEO of IBM stepped in at that point and invited the governors to a national summit where it was agreed that states should assume the leadership of the standards movement.
Virginia was a leader in this “states rights” movement, which allowed an ultraconservative state board of education appointed by then-governor George Allen to demand standards that were in accord with board members’ political and educational philosophies. With some changes in board membership and with changing circumstances, the program is today slightly less doctrinaire than when it was conceived, but it still demands more conformity than I think is healthy.
For the last several years I’ve been loosely associated with a group called Parents Across Virginia United to Reform SOLs. They have a website and occasionally distribute witty and perceptive commentaries written by their leader, a feisty mother from Bedford named Mickey Van Derwerker. I’ll mention a few things that people like Mickey are concerned about.
First, the current preoccupation of politicians with schools they call “failing” or (slightly more polite) “low performing” makes it appear that the inadequate conditions in some schools, especially those in urban inner cities, are exclusively the fault of the schools themselves, or more specifically, the people who work in the schools. That ignores everything we know about the interrelationships among the community, the family, and the school. It’s no coincidence that, when states and large districts start publishing test scores and naming inadequate schools, they inevitably identify the schools in the poorest neighborhoods. Of course most such schools have a lot of problems and need to improve in many ways, but shaming and blaming is not the answer. And even if schools were much, much better, they could not by themselves overcome entirely the effects of the poverty, ignorance, crime, and neglect that surround them. If Americans really want to improve the lives of the children in those neighborhoods, we have to pay attention to broader social and economic conditions, rather than being distracted by promises that it can be done on the cheap with testing and penalties.
A related concern is the notion accepted almost as a truism these days that all of our children must have a purely academic education. We all know that for individuals and families, more education generally pays off. But in one of the passages I read earlier [from “Out of Balance” published by the Spenser Foundation] I quoted economist Richard Rothstein, who argues convincingly that higher school standards will not necessarily make the United States more competitive in the world or repair the shamefully inequitable distribution of income in this country. Other factors, he points out, have much more to do with that, such things as the salaries employers are willing to pay for various jobs and the drop in union membership. Rothstein cites figures disproving the claims we’ve all heard that the vast majority of future jobs will require advanced mathematics and technology. According to the sensible numbers he gives, it’s just not true.
So what? Well, the conservative minority of elite thinkers who a few years ago used to argue that schools should teach only the standard academic subjects and that every child should take a college preparatory curriculum have now won their case! For example, it’s become accepted doctrine that every student will have to pass algebra to get a high school diploma - and so on and so on. Now, this is complicated. I certainly think schooling should be intellectually exciting and I want students to learn to use their minds well. But that’s quite different from insisting that every student should have to master today’s equivalent of the saber-tooth curriculum [refers to a reading from The Saber-Tooth Curriculum by Harold Benjamin. Rothstein, a thoughtful and capable economist, says the obvious when he points out that people with college educations earn more than high school graduates only so long as everybody doesn’t have a bachelors degree. If everybody had four years of college, it wouldn’t mean anything. And we would still need hundreds of thousands of people to drive trucks and clean hotel rooms. So what exactly is the goal of this push to make everybody above average?
The inescapable fact is: some kids will fail the tests. If they didn’t, everyone, including you and me, would think the tests must be too easy. Now, I realize that the tests are an incentive for some students to work harder, and that the sharpened focus on low scoring schools is having some positive effects. But even the people who publish the tests admit that you can’t measure whether students have mastered several years worth of complex standards with a 40-item multiple-choice test. You can devise a test that some students will pass and some will not, and the test results will have some relationship to how well students are doing otherwise. But the results won’t tell you whether students can do what the standards say they’re supposed to be able to do. They only show which students are sharp enough to pick the right answer from among four “distractors” all close enough to seem plausible. In other words, all such tests are partly a kind of intelligence test. I said some people would fail and some would not. And we all know who’ll be the ones who fail: the marginal kids who most need a useful education and encouragement from understanding teachers.
Last fall, parents in Virginia and other states who had been protesting state testing suddenly had a much bigger problem when the U. S. Congress adopted the Bush legislation ironically called No Child Left Behind. Some aspects of that legislation - and some aspects of the whole testing and accountability movement - are well meaning. But when you try to write strong rules that supposedly will improve things everywhere you’ve got problems, especially when the final result is not a single coherent plan but a hodge-podge cobbled together in the usual political process of wheeling and dealing.
Among other things, the law requires every state to have a testing program like Texas already has, in which, elementary students are tested every year in mathematics and reading. That means that states like Virginia must add lots more tests to the tests they’ve already been giving. In other words, federal law now requires all states to do more of what most states were already doing anyhow. Worst of all, states are now required, as Virginia and most other states also were already doing, to declare which schools are not making Adequate Yearly Progress and take specific actions to bring about improvement. We’re going to be hearing a lot, as time goes on, about AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) and what that should mean. Because we now have national legislation that requires what most testing experts and statisticians will tell you is statistically crazy: find all the schools that are doing least well (meaning almost always that they have a lot of poor and minority students), set a date by which all of them must be at an acceptable level and divide the amount they must improve by the number of years you’ve arbitrarily set, which tells you how much each school has to get better each year. (In the case of No Child Left Behind, or NCLB, the magic year is 2014.) That is, 12 years from now, every school will be doing just fine.
When the legislation was being hatched, consultants to Congress checked a few records and found out that if the wording in the bill wasn’t changed, every single school in Texas and North Carolina, which were being described as examples of how things should be done, would be declared failing. Some changes were made, but right now, states are frantically trying to determine how to implement the law’s first-year requirements. You probably read the recent story in The Washington Post reporting that 40 percent of the schools in Michigan are in trouble - but good news, none of the schools in Arkansas. State officials are complaining that the higher their standards, the more they’re being punished. I’m glad to hear them beginning to acknowledge that the results of their little contest in recent years to see who could set the highest standards was, in fact, unrealistic. This first year, 8,652 schools have been identified as failing. And that’s just the first year. In the future, things can only get worse.
All this reminds me of the national education goals set in the 1980s and 90s at the urging of both the first George Bush and Bill Clinton, which promised that by the year 2000 all kinds of wonderful things would have been achieved, including that the United States would be “first in the world” in mathematics and science. Obviously, none of those goals was accomplished. In fact, there was never a chance they would be, even if the federal government adopted extraordinary measures, which it decidedly did not. But at the dawn of the new millennium you probably didn’t hear much about it, because the politicians involved had moved on to other matters.
I wish I could now suggest a few simple things that would solve all this, but the truth is that the problems of public education can’t be simplified so easily. The first step for me would be for state and national governments to stop trying to run schools from afar and let people at the local level sort things out for themselves. Just a few years ago we Americans used to pride ourselves on “local control” of education, and we still give lip service to that idea. I’m the first to admit that local control is not the whole answer, but it would be a start. In brief, I think we need less standardization and more variation, and that inevitably means more parent choice. In the meantime, all I can advise in a few words is: get the facts, think for yourself, and let your voice be heard.