Category Archives: Too Much Standardized Testing

New Plan to Decimate U.S. Dept. of Ed. Exposes Trump Administration’s Deficient Educational Vision

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In his newest book, Dangerous Learning, constitutional law professor Derek Black summarizes what has happened to public education in the United States during the lifetimes of most of us who are reading this post today:

“Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny fundamentally altered the way society thinks about education, not just of Black children but of all children. Laws prohibiting discrimination against students based on sex, language status, ethnicity, alienage, disability, poverty, and homelessness all grew out of the foundation Brown laid. For the past half century, the federal legal apparatus as well as several state regimes have aimed to deliver equal educational opportunity.” (Dangerous Learning, p. 275)

Happy Thanksgiving! This blog will take a short break. Look for a new post on Thursday, Dec. 4th. 

In 1979, during Jimmy Carter’s administration, Congress created the U.S. Department of Education to fulfill that mission by pulling together the federal agencies administering programs to increase educational opportunity for groups of children who had historically been marginalized.

It should, therefore, not be surprising that President Donald Trump, who has spent the year trying to stamp out every program or policy that protects equity and supports inclusion and diversity in public schools and across U.S. colleges and universities, has now implemented a plan to end the U.S. Department of Education.

Because federal law prescribes that only Congress can close a federal department or close one of the offices that Congress established within a federal department to manage particular programs, Trump began by keeping all the departments and offices but eliminating the people who do the work through the massive staff layoffs we have been watching all year long. Those layoffs, of course, constitute illegal impoundment of federal funds, and some of them have been temporary blocked by Federal District Courts. Then last Tuesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced a further effort to phase out the Department under a new plan which complies with the law because it involves mere “interagency transfers” that will house Department of Education (DOE) programs in other departments, with some DOE staff moving with the programs to run them in their new setting. Although the transfers were announced last week, the interagency agreements were signed, according to Education Week, on September 30.

Chalkbeat‘s Erica Meltzer explains: “These changes were done administratively.  Senior officials said the Economy Act gives the Education Department the authority to contract with other federal agencies.”  The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Danielle Douglas-Gabriel add: The interagency agreements amount to a work-around under which policy decisions will remain with the Education Department but the programs will be administered elsewhere. Staffers who work on the programs are expected to move to the new agency.”

Meckler and Douglas-Gabriel summarize the restructure announced last Tuesday: “Under the new agreements, the Labor Department will inherit the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, including 27 K-12 programs, and the Office of Postsecondary Education, which administers 14 programs to help students enroll in and complete college. The Education Department will move the Indian education program to the Interior Department, child care access and foreign medical education to the Department of Health and Human Services, and foreign-language education to the State Department.” “There was considerable speculation that the $15 billion program to support students with disabilities would be included in the announcement, but it was not. Other major functions of the Education Department, including its Office for Civil Rights and the federal student aid program, also were not affected by Tuesday’s changes, but a senior department official told reporters that officials are still exploring options for moving those programs elsewhere in the government.”  The Office for Civil Rights has already been decimated by the elimination of seven of its twelve regional offices and the layoff of most of its staff.

The NY Times‘ Michael Bender describes a senior official at the Education Department justifying the restructure as an attempt to “streamline bureaucracy so that ‘at the end of the day,’ it means more dollars to the classroom.” Bender quotes Secretary McMahon’s rationale: “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.” The attempt by Secretary McMahon and her staff to justify the interagency agreements as a step toward reducing the federal bureaucracy is laughable.

The Associated Press’s Colin Binkley highlights another of McMahon’s bizarre rationalizations for the restructure. McMahon resurrects the old “falling test scores” argument as though moving around federal offices will have some kind of miraculous effect on the nation’s economic inequality, which, according to research (here or here), is the primary factor causing overall disparities in students’ aggregate test scores. Binkley describes McMahon as predicting that, without federal oversight, the states are likely to use federal dollars to help the students most in need: “McMahon has increasingly pointed to what she sees as failures of the department as she argues for its demise. In its 45 years, she says, it has become a bloated bureaucracy while student outcomes continue to lag behind. She points to math and reading scores… which plummeted in the wake of pandemic restrictions. Her vision would abolish the Education Department and give states wider flexibility in how they spend money that’s now earmarked for specific purposes, including literacy and education for homeless students. That, however, would require approval from Congress.”

An extremely serious concern is what the proposed restructure says about the Trump administration’s narrow and inadequate understanding of the purpose of public education as mere workforce preparation.  Why is the Office of Primary and Secondary Education, which administers the enormous Title I grants that help promote equity in school districts serving concentrations of our nation’s poorest children, being moved to the Department of Labor?  The Washington Post‘s Meckler and Douglas-Gabriel quote a Department of Education official “who argued that education’s purpose is to prepare students for the workforce. ‘Nowhere is that better housed than the department of labor,’ she said.”  The reporters name the broader purpose of some of the programs being moved to the Department of Labor: “The K-12 grant programs that Labor stands to take on address a plethora of subjects not directly related to the workforce, such as support for children in poverty, after-school programs and aid for rural education.”  Historically, public schooling has been understood as the primary institution that forms students as the citizens of our democratic society—with workforce preparation merely one component of that mission.

The U.S. Department of Education was created to pull together the administration of federal programs that help public schools across the states serve and welcome every student and protect each student’s civil rights.  In a formal statement last week, Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick strongly opposed the new interagency agreements designed to phase out the U.S. Department of Education:

“The United States Congress created the U.S. Department of Education for very good reason. And for millions of families, particularly those raising children with disabilities or living in low-income communities, the Department’s core offices are not discretionary functions. They are foundational. They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow, and succeed on equal footing. Working alongside our early childhood educators, local school partners, and disability advocates as Co-Chair of the Bipartisan Disability Caucus, I’ve seen exactly how essential these programs are. Altering them without transparency or congressional oversight would pose real risks to the very students they were created to protect.  I will not allow it — and I urge all of my colleagues to stand with me.”

Despite Positive Election Results for Public Education in Some States, Trump’s Federal Education Agenda Remains Scary

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Public schools across our country are widespread and complex. While last week’s election bodes some frightening developments for public education at the federal level, there were also positive accomplishments: Voters in several states supported their public schools and refused to turn away from the needs of the majority of their state’s children and adolescents. Here are three examples:

  • For the Wisconsin Examiner, Baylor Spears reported: “Wisconsin voters approved 78% of school referendum funding requests across the state this week, raising taxes on themselves to grant schools over $3.4 billion for infrastructure and operations, including staff pay increases, program offerings and maintenance costs. A total of 121 school districts put funding referendum questions on the ballot….  According to the Department of Public Instruction, of the 138 referendum questions, voters approved 108.”
  • In Massachusetts, voters passed a ballot initiative to eliminate the MCAS standardized test as a high school graduation requirement. High school graduation exit exams are one of the lingering remnants of No Child Left Behind’s test-and-punish school accountability schemes. Massachusetts was one of only eight states which, until last week, continued to deny high school diplomas based on a student’s failure in one exit exam, despite that research has documented the negative results of such programs based on their propensity to promote rote curricula for struggling students; to destroy the futures of students facing learning disabilities, extreme poverty or other handicaps; to increase the high school dropout rate; and to ruin high school for many students by increasing anxiety.
  • Last week in three states, voters affirmed their state’s investment in public schools and defeated statewide private school tuition voucher programs.  Nebraska voters repealed Referendum 435 and thereby ended a 2023 state law that established universal school vouchers. Kentucky voters rejected state constitutional Amendment 2 and prevented the establishment of school privatization through vouchers. Kentucky’s constitution permits the state to fund only one system of common schools, and voters chose to protect public schools by preventing the diversion of state funds to private schools. Finally, CPR News reports that Colorado voters rejected Amendment 80, which would have, “added language stating each “K-12 child has the right to school choice” and that “parents have the right to direct the education of their children.”

At the federal level, however, based on President-Elect Donald Trump’s comments during the recent campaign, the planks in this year’s Republican Platform, and the educational goals outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has been presented as a blueprint for the incoming president’s reform of federal education policy, many seasoned education reporters are worried not only about a possible drop in the federal investment in U.S. public schools, but also about reduced protection of students’ civil rights, and about the disruption in schools and communities if Trump pursues his promised massive deportation of immigrants.

Project 2025 proposes block granting Title I dollars to states (without targeting the funds to schools serving impoverished students) and eventually phasing out the program, block granting IDEA dollars to states without required protection of services for disabled students, and eliminating Head Start for impoverished preschoolers.  Just before the election, Education Week‘s Alyson Klein reviewed these proposals in the context of the record of the first Trump administration’s diminished support for public schooling: “Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, consolidated offices within the Education Department. And under Trump, staffing levels shrank significantly in the office of elementary and secondary education…. The office lost nearly 14 percent of its staff between the end of the Obama administration and the midpoint of the Trump administration at the start of 2019… In every budget request, Trump proposed deep cuts to the U.S. Department of Education’s bottom line, only to see them rejected by Congress.”

What about candidate Trump’s and Project 2025’s threat to abolish the U.S. Department of Education? Despite that President Trump will have a compliant Republican-majority Senate and what increasingly appears likely to be a Republican-majority House of Representatives, Education Week‘s Evie Blad is skeptical that Trump could succeed in getting rid of the Department: “Ending the agency would require approval from Congress and a great deal of political capital that Trump may want to target elsewhere, especially in the early days of his administration in which he will be under pressure to deliver promises around tax cuts and immigration. But it is possible…. Trump is likely to pursue plans to scale back and consolidate some federal programs, even if he doesn’t fully end the agency.”

Alyson Klein highlights the danger of ending the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights or even moving its responsibilities to the Justice Department. Weakening Civil Rights enforcement was a priority during Trump’s first administration: “Betsy DeVos successfully rolled back major initiatives from Barack Obama’s presidency aimed at helping certain groups of students including transgender kids and students of color. Early in 2017, DeVos rescinded Obama’s Title IX guidance on the rights of transgender students…. And the Trump administration tossed Obama guidance aimed at ensuring schools don’t unfairly discipline students of color, who face suspensions and other consequences at rates higher than their peers. Trump’s fans and critics alike expect that one of his first targets this time around will be President Joe Biden’s Title IX regulation, which expands the scope of the law’s prohibition on sex discrimination so it also applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The new regulation is already on hold in 26 states and individual schools elsewhere as the result of litigation from Republican-led states.”

Much of what President-Elect Trump has threatened—shutting down the U.S. Department of Education, weakening the federal government’s capacity for protecting students’ civil rights at school, ending Title I which has provided compensatory funding for school districts with concentrations of children living in poverty, blockgranting IDEA, and eliminating Head Start would, if enacted, erase many programs that developed in the past 70 years to bring equity and inclusion to U.S. public schools.  For The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb, a columnist for that magazine and also the Dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, reflected this week on how Tuesday’ election felt to him: “My life, like those of many Black people of my generation, was shaped not by the brutality of segregation, as my parents lives had been, but by the success of the battles of the nineteen-fifties and sixties to uproot it… I awoke on the morning after the election thinking not of the battles that supplanted segregation but of what  people must have felt at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that enshrined it. The difficult lesson in that history is that, although further progress is possible, we should not underestimate how arduous it will be to achieve, or how long it will take. We believed that we had broken with history, but it is apparent that history has, in fact, broken some part of us.”

An additional concern for educators, and one that should worry all of us, is President-Elect Trump’s threat to round up and deport undocumented immigrants. How would the disruption affect the lives of immigrant children and the public schools that serve them? In families where the parents are undocumented and the children were born here and are U.S. citizens, would families be broken up and parents and their children separated with the parents deported? If families are locked up in camps, will there be schools for the children? Chalkbeat‘s Erica Meltzer explores this challenge.  She quotes the Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli worrying that Trump’s “immigration policy may be felt in dramatic ways. ‘It’s what he’s campaigned on, it’s what he’s promised to do, and he’d have a pretty free hand to do it.’ said Petrilli, who has argued that American schools have a moral obligation as well as a legal one to educate all children who live here. ‘The chances that it’s a humanitarian disaster are quite high… Is he going to put people in camps? Will that include families? Are there going to be schools in these camps?'”

Meltzer continues, describing the worries of University of California Berkeley professor, Janelle Scott, that, “Even if enforcement is spotty, changes to federal policy have the potential to sow confusion and chaos in local communities…. Some families may keep children home from school out of fear, she said The messages that local law enforcement and school district officials send to families in this situation could make a difference.”

Cynical Politicians Try to Frighten Us with Inaccurate Stories about Teachers and Public Schools

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In the current polarized political season, the press is filled with articles spawned by desperate politicians looking to frighten voters with stories about the collapse of our society.  In this narrative of collapse, attacks on the public schools loom large.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Matt Barnum and Melissa Korn quote Donald Trump: “Our public schools have been taken over by the radical left maniacs… We will cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory.” “The former president has said he would deploy federal powers to pressure schools and universities that he considers to be too liberal. One strategy that he has described would launch civil-rights investigations of schools that have supported transgender rights and racial diversity programs.”

It doesn’t seem to matter in today’s political environment that the extremist political rhetoric about what’s happening in public schools has been shown to be inaccurate.  Here is Education Week‘s Sarah Schwartz reporting the response of the American Historical Association: “The longstanding battle over how to teach America’s past has been particularly contentious over the past few years. Conservative commentators have accused history teachers of rampant left-wing bias, ‘indoctrinating’ students into hating their country and rejecting its founding ideals… But this portrait of American classrooms as ideological incubators is largely a fiction… Instead, the research, from the American Historical Association, finds that teachers overwhelmingly say they aim to develop students’ historical thinking skills—teaching them how to think, not what to think—and value presenting multiple sides of every story… The finding echoes history teachers’ responses to attacks on their work…. (I)n interviews with AHA researchers, teachers explained that it was important for them to remain neutral and nonpartisan. ‘I am going to teach the good, the bad, and the ugly. I’m going to tell it like it is and how it happened.’ one teacher from Texas told the researchers. Another, from Illinois, said they didn’t want ‘students knowing my views.'”

As I watch today’s outbursts from members of far-right-funded parents’ rights groups like Moms for Liberty and listen to politicians, I hear people who don’t seem able to imagine what teachers do every day as they work with children and adolescents. I also notice that cynical politicians are satisfied to manipulate widespread public ignorance about the work of teachers. After all, most of us spend very little time visiting our schools and observing teachers in their classrooms. We have also been victimized for over two decades by a school evaluation scheme based solely on students’ standardized test scores without any consideration of what teachers are expected to do, their preparation, or their daily challenges. Conversations denouncing teachers don’t seem to consider what it is like for elementary school teachers to work with with and learn to know 25 or 30 young children. For high school teachers, the numbers are even more staggering: more than a hundred adolescents every day.

It is worthwhile to consult an expert who spent a career preparing teachers for their work and who wrote several books describing the skills and strategies teachers must develop in order to be able manage and nurture groups of children and adolescents day after day and to help them grow academically. Educating children is not a mere matter of packing their brains with basic facts.

The late UCLA education professor, Mike Rose, prepared teachers to serve their students well in the complex environment of  the classroom. He also devoted much of his career to observing excellent teaching and writing about it. Rose was already worried about our failure to grasp what teachers do when he published Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us in 2009 and an updated edition in 2014. Rose anticipated today’s political discussion—Donald Trump deriding teachers for massive failure and Moms for Liberty and other right-wing-funded parents’ rights organizations berating teachers for “woke” pedagogy:

“Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is that we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its components and intricacies, its goals and purpose…. Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the narrow focus on test scores helps us here. Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination.” (Why School?, p 203)

Mike Rose began trying to remedy our widespread ignorance about teachers’ work in 1995, when he published Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America, a book exploring what he observed during three years of personal visits he made to watch teachers managing their classrooms in schools across the United States: “Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination. I visited schools for three and a half years, and what struck me early on—and began to define my journey—was how rarely the kind of intellectual and social richness I was finding was reflected in the public sphere… We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries… We are offered, by both entertainment and news media, depictions of schools as mediocre places, where students are vacuous and teachers are not so bright; or as violent and chaotic places, places where order has fled and civility has been lost.  It’s hard to imagine anything good in all this.” (Possible Lives, p. 1)

As he traveled and visited schools, Rose considered the factors that make teaching school such complex work and he described the practices by which good teachers were supporting young people: “As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kinds of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints—though not without times of confusion and defeat—and they had determined ways of organizing their classrooms that enabled them to honor their beliefs about teaching and learning… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.”  (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423

In a 2014 summary article based on years of observing teachers in their classrooms, Rose published the best definition I know of excellent teaching: “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”

Now decades later in 2024, there are other symptoms of widespread lack of respect for teachers.  It isn’t just that politicians rail against teachers, but across the states, legislators continue to enact budgets too meager to support adequate salaries for teachers. Public school districts across the United States continue to pay teachers less than other comparably educated professionals. This month the Economic Policy Institute published its annual report compiled by Sylvia Allegretto: Teacher Pay Rises in 2024—but Not Enough to Shrink Pay Gap with Other College Graduates. Allegretto, who conducts this annual research, is a labor economist and former co-chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley.  The trend is not new; for years Allegretto has been tracking the failure of teachers’ salaries to keep up with the pace of salaries in other professions.

Allegretto reports: “The pay penalty for teachers—the regression-adjusted gap between the weekly wages of teachers and college graduates working in other professions—grew to a record 26.6% in 2023, a significant increase from 6.1% in 1996. On average. teachers earned 73.4 cents for every dollar relative to the earnings of similar other professionals in 2023. Although teachers typically receive better benefits packages than other professionals do, this ‘benefits advantage’ is not sufficiently large to offset the growing wage penalty for teachers. The relative teacher weekly wage penalty exceeded 20% in 36 states….”

You can consult Allegretto’s bar graph to discover how salaries for teachers in your state compare to salaries in other professions.  The results are discouraging and sometimes surprising.

Tim Walz Models an Alternative to Republican Culture War Attacks on Public Schools, to School Privatization, and to the Old No Child Left Behind Approach

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I was stunned on the morning of August 2nd, when I read an Ezra Klein interview in the NY Times with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, one of the people Kamala Harris was considering as a running mate.  Governor Walz had clearly reflected upon the role of public education in American society, and he plainly explained:

“A town that small had… a public school with a government teacher that inspired me to be sitting where I am today. Those are real stories in small towns. These guys, they talk about how evil the public schools are.  For many of us, public schools were everything. That was our path. That’s the great American contribution.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has now chosen Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in her own campaign for President.  With Vice President Harris, Walz has been traveling the country for a series of rallies, where he has talked about his two decades as a high school social studies teacher, a football coach, and a teacher who cared enough about all of his students that when students at Mankato West High School set out to establish a gay-straight alliance, he volunteered to be the faculty advisor.

The concept that Walz described to Ezra Klein is explored in more depth by Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize-winning economic historian at Harvard University: “The creation of publicly funded common schools and their spread throughout much of America was the first great transformation of education in America… (T)he second great transformation… picked up its greatest steam with the diffusion of public high schools, and in the first few decades of the twentieth century these school reached even the smallest rural communities in America.” (The Race Between Education and Technology, p. 162)  Universal public education—the promise of schools that are free and available to every child and adolescent and are required by law to protect the rights and meet the needs of all students— is one of our society’s greatest accomplishments.

What does it mean that after two decades of attacks—first with No Child Left Behind’s branding schools by their test scores as “failing,” and now since 2019, with blaming schools and teachers for school closures during COVID—someone running for Vice President of the United States just casually drops a comment celebrating public schools as America’s great contribution?

Governor Walz knows, of course, that public schools are not perfect, which is why he worked with his legislature in Minnesota for all sorts of major reforms including a significant school funding increase. And just as important, he has shown he understands that broader economic inequality results in serious opportunity gaps that affect school achievement among students living where family poverty is concentrated.

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson summarize Walz’s record on public education policy as Governor of Minnesota: “Walz… fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students—including undocumented immigrants—whose families earn less than $80,000 per year.  He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them… The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years… The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K  programs, mental health and community schools.”

For Chalkbeat, Erica Meltzer analyzes what all this says about Governor Walz’s theory of support for public education in contrast to the old test-and-punish school accountability agenda that infected the Republican Bush administration and the Democratic Obama administration: “As governor, Walz focused on providing schools with more money and resources, addressing the affordability of child care and college, and working to reduce child poverty. Walz has connected these policy priorities to his time in the classroom, and Democrats increasingly have embraced them as the solution to what ails public education. The emphasis on resources and social factors outside the classroom sidesteps education issues that have divided Democrats and differs in key respects from former President Barack Obama’s tenure, when Democrats backed education reform priorities like merit pay for teachers and pushed low-performing schools to improve or face closure. It stands in even sharper contrast to Republican attacks on public schools as places where children are at risk of indoctrination… ‘It feels like an opportunity to turn the page on the way education has been discussed for the last few years,’ says Jon Valant, who heads the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. ‘Democrats have been reluctant to engage on some of these issues, and now we’ll have someone on the forefront who is very natural and compelling when he talks about it.’ ”

Consider the history of attacks on public schools.

  • After the passage of No Child Left Behind in January of 2002, the federal government required test-and-punish school reform that judged schools by their students’ test scores, expected rapid improvement in every school’s test scores, and punished the schools where scores did not quickly rise with mandatory school reconstitution, transformation into charter schools, or school closure. Test-based accountability was also imposed on teachers based on their students’ test scores.  The law declared that all students across the U.S. were to be proficient by 2014, but of course that did not happen anywhere. While we know that this strategy was a failure, its policies—all based on punishing schools and their teachers—still affect schools in many ways.
  • For years across the states, legislators have blamed teachers in school districts serving our nation’s poorest students for the schools’ lagging test scores. They have issued state report cards with “F” grades for the schools in the poorest communities. My state, Ohio, imposed state takeovers on the Youngstown, Lorain, and East Cleveland public schools. Only after the state takeovers did further damage and failed to improve test scores, did the legislature consider creating a plan that permitted the school districts to earn the right to emerge from state takeover, though some have still not made it back to local control. It has been a punitive process all the way along.
  • In more recent years, Ron DeSantis and groups like Moms for Liberty have wildly attacked teachers who they claim are thrusting a “woke” curriculum about race and human sexuality on students.
  • When nobody knew who to blame for the massive COVID disruption, lots of politicians pressed parents and everyone else to blame the teachers’ unions for school closures despite that infection was rampant and nobody had an adequate solution.
  • In the past couple of years in Ohio and a number of other states, attacks on the public schools have been used as the justification for million dollar, sometimes even billion dollar, private school tuition voucher expansions that will suck essential resources for public schools out of the states’ budgets.
  • Finally, the Heritage Foundation ‘s Project 2025 playbook for a future Trump administration would phase out federal Title I funding that helps school districts serving masses of children living in poverty. The 2024 Republican Platform, although it is less extreme, promises to implement universal school choice in every state; elevate parents’ rights; target “Critical Race Theory” and “gender indoctrination”; end teacher tenure, and adopt merit pay for teachers; and shut down the U.S. Department of Education.

Imagine what all this has done to undermine the morale of teachers, a condition exacerbated for many teachers who were under enormous pedagogic pressure when teaching online and in-person simultaneously during COVID and who are still being blamed for test score declines after COVID school closures.  Morale has been undermined as well by chronically low salaries. Last September, in an update of a series of annual reports on teachers’ salaries nationwide, the Economic Policy Institute documented: “Teacher pay has suffered a sharp decline compared with the pay of other college-educated workers.  On average, teachers made 26.4% less than other similarly educated professionals in 2022—the lowest since 1960… On average, teachers earned 73.6 cents for every dollar that other professionals made in 2022 (the most recent data available).  This is much less than the 93.9 cents on the dollar they made in 1996.”

Press reports portray Walz as every student’s favorite teacher—the kind of model that directly confronts the disdain for schoolteachers that dominates Republican culture war rhetoric.  Education Week‘s Libby Stanford quotes Walz comparing political campaigning to teaching high school. In politics, “The biggest thing is communicating an idea.. It’s trying to get people to be involved and to look at the facts… Teaching is the same way. You’re trying to present a system of facts; you’re trying to teach students what’s the best way to think about problems to solve them in a rational way.”

The teachers I know are so grateful that Governor Tim Walz is validating what they do and standing up for public schooling at a time when our schools have been under attack for decades.  It is a surprise and a very welcome turn of events.

Neoliberal Reform Still Infects Education Policy: Good Reporting Helps Advocates Pay Attention

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Jeff Bryant’s new, in-depth report on the growth of wraparound, full-service Community Schools in Chicago is important. Bryant explains that a Community School is based on six pillars: a challenging and culturally relevant curriculum, wraparound services for addressing students’ health and well-being, high-quality teaching, student-centered school climate, community and parent engagement, and shared leadership in school governance.

Bryant quotes Chicago community organizer, public schools advocate, and director of the Journey 4 Justice Alliance, Jitu Brown: “Community Schools are an education model rooted in self-determination and equity for Black and Brown people… In the Black community,  we have historically been denied the right to engage in creating what we want for our community… Every city where charters go, there’s been a diminishment of Black people in urban spaces… Privatization has crippled Black urban communities across the country.” Bryant quotes Jitu Brown calling the explosion of charter schools “a form of education colonialism.”

Underlying Jeff Bryant’s celebration of Community Schools in Chicago is his attempt to address another urgent policy question: When a really dangerous policy scheme—neoliberal school reform based on an ideology favoring public-private partnerships and privatization—gets adopted with welcome and celebration, and then 20 years later we all realize it was a bad idea and an utter failure, how can we clean it out of public policy?  Bryant’s chosen topic for this report is the expansion of full-service Community Schools, but his article also explores a policy dilemma that has been lost in today’s widespread press coverage of the explosion of private school tuition vouchers, in reflections on the long range implications of COVID for our schools, and in masses of coverage of the culture wars.  How is it that the far-right has dominated the press with attacks on equity and inclusion and attempts to make “diversity” a dirty word?

In her fine book, Left Behind, The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, Claremont-McKenna College history professor, Lily Geismer describes the topic we so frequently forget to discuss: the long impact of neoliberal school reform conceived by the New Democrats during Bill Clinton’s administration. The idea was that bipartisan expansion of charter schools would improve the public schools through competition—all based on the evidence of standardized test scores that would supposedly show us how to reward the successful schools and get rid of the failures.

Geismer explains: “In fact, the New Democrats often argued that they were simply using new means to achieve the same liberal aims. Unlike free-market fundamentalists like Milton Friedman, the New Democrats believed that both government and corporations had a fundamental obligation to do good. They aimed to … use the resources and techniques of the market to make government more efficient and better able to serve the people. Clinton and his allies routinely referred to microenterprise, community development banking, Empowerment Zones, mixed-income housing, and charter schools as revolutionary ideas that had the power to create large-scale change. These programs, nevertheless, uniformly provided small or micro solutions to large structural or macro problems… Ultimately, the relentless selling of such market-based programs prevented Democrats from developing policies that addressed the structural forces that produced segregation and inequality and fulfilled the government’s obligations to provide for its people, especially its most vulnerable.” (Left Behind: The Democrats’ Failed Attempt to Solve Inequality, pp. 9-10)

In education, the theory became known as “portfolio school reform,” which was the driving force in dozens of urban school districts. Chicago became the quintessential experiment in portfolio school reform, and Bryant reviews that history: “That approach… began in the 1990s, according to an analysis by University of Illinois Chicago professor Pauline Lipman, when Illinois state lawmakers gave former Mayor Richard M. Daley sole authority over the district with the power to appoint the district administrator—who was rebranded district CEO—and members of the governing board in 1995.”

Bryant quotes Lipman: “Daley and his successor, Rahm Emanuel, generally filled the board with corporate executives, bankers, and investors and appointed corporate-style managers as CEOs… These mayor-appointed regimes designed a top-down accountability system that applied business methods to public schools and deployed high stakes standardized tests as a metric to close schools and create a market of privately-run charter schools.” Bryant continues: “Privately-run charter schools are brought into the district to provide market competition to the public schools, and funding ‘follows the child’ to whatever form of school a family happens to choose. Chicago’s use of the portfolio model ‘went national,’ according to Lipman, in 2002 when, under the George W. Bush administration, Congress enacted the No Child Left Behind legislation and, then again, in 2009 when the Barack Obama administration passed Race to the Top, a program conceived and led by Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who was district CEO of CPS from 2001–2008.”

Bryant realizes the expansion of full-service Community Schools, however important, isn’t enough to turn around a public schools district that has been trapped in a portfolio-charter school expansion plan for decades.  He enumerates the other steps Chicago’s activists have been pursuing that, bit by bit, are restoring public control of the schools and enabling Chicago’s public schools to better serve the needs of families and children in the city’s poorest neighborhoods:

  • In 2015, Citizens mounted a protracted hunger strike to prevent the closure of Walter H. Dyett High School.
  • In 2013, Chicago organizer Jitu Brown and the Journey for Justice Alliance joined with other national grassroots groups and labor unions to found the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools.
  • In 2014, the Chicago Teachers Union made the call for Community Schools the centerpiece of its “bargaining for the common good” rallying cry, and in 2019, that demand became part of  CTU’s  contract.
  • Dyett High School reopened in 2016 as a sustainable Community School along with 19 other Chicago Public Schools.
  • In April, 2023, Chicago teacher and CTU organizer Brandon Johnson was elected mayor of Chicago.
  • In July, 2023, Mayor Johnson replaced the majority of appointed members on the Chicago Board of Education with members who favor an equitable system of neighborhood schools.
  • In March, 2024, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker signed legislation to transition to a new, fully elected Board of Education.
  • Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Board of Education have now announced they will prioritize moving away from Student Based Budgeting, Rahm Emanuel’s system that put schools in the poorest neighborhoods on a race to the bottom and in many cases eventual closure. The priority will be to fully fund and staff all neighborhood schools—with many schools becoming Community Schools.

Bryant explains that myriad challenges remain—especially a $391 million budget deficit projected for the 2024-2025 school year: “According to a 2024 analysis by by the Chicago based Center for Tax and Budget accountability, 70 percent of the state’s school districts are getting less education funding from the state than was was mandated by the 2017 law.”

I am grateful to Jeff Bryant for this story of Chicago’s expansion of full service Community Schools. And in these times when coverage of public schools has been largely focused on the danger of vouchers, the effects of COVID, and the far-right distraction posed by the culture wars, I am also grateful that Bryant remembered to trace the history of Chicago’s long and grinding effort to reject neoliberal, portfolio school reform.

In another excellent recent report, blogger Tom Ultican explores the New Orleans Parish School District’s plan to open the first publicly operated school, the K-8, Leah Chase School, since charter school ideologues and philanthropists drove the charter school takeover of that school district after Hurricane Katrina twenty years ago. Ultican reviews the history of the neoliberal takeover of New Orleans’ public schools from the point of view of community leaders who show the impact on the city’s families and children. I hope the rest of us will continue retelling this story of Chicago, New Orleans, and other districts trapped in the struggle to get rid of poisonous federal policies, along with the policies No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the School Improvement Grants exported into state laws, and local schemes like portfolio school reform.

Corporate, test-based accountability and neoliberal schemes continue to infect education policy in myriad ways. It would be lovely if we could just scrub away their long stain on our public schools, but without persistent reporting, people will forget about the ongoing need to continue cleaning up the damage. When even small steps are accomplished, I challenge us all to take the time to report and celebrate them.

Press Reports Ranking American High Schools Mislead the Public

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Here is Stanford University sociologist Sean Reardon describing in rather technical language what his research has shown for decades about a school or school district’s standardized test scores as an accurate indicator of student demographics but not a good measure of school quality:

This blog will take a two week break.  Look for a new post on Tuesday, May 14.

“I use standardized test scores from roughly 45 million students to construct measures of the temporal structure of educational opportunity in over 11,000 school districts—almost every district in the U.S.  The data span the school years 2008-09 through 2014-15.  For each school district, I construct two measures: the average academic performance of students in grade 3 and the within-cohort growth in test scores from grade 3 to 8.  I argue that average test scores in a school district can be thought of as reflecting the average cumulative set of educational opportunities children in a community have had up to the time when they take a test.  Given this, the average scores in grade 3 can be thought of as measures of the average extent of ‘early educational opportunities’ (reflecting opportunities from birth to age 9) available to children in a school district.  Prior research suggests that these early opportunities are strongly related to the average socioeconomic resources available in children’s families in the district.  They may also depend on other characteristics of the community, including neighborhood conditions, the availability of high-quality child care and pre-school programs, and the quality of schools in grades K-3.”

Back in 2011, Reardon documented another important trend that describes aggregate test score variation across school districts. “In 1970 only 15 percent of families were in neighborhoods that we classify as either affluent (neighborhoods where median incomes were greater than 150 percent of median income in their metropolitan areas) or poor (neighborhoods where median incomes were less than 67 percent of metropolitan median income). By 2007, 31 percent of families lived in such neighborhoods,” and fewer families lived in mixed income neighborhoods.  What we have watched for fifty years across America’s metropolitan areas is school resegregation by family income. As quickly growing suburbs attract families who can afford to move farther from the central city, urban and inner ring suburban school districts enroll greater concentrations of poor children.

Unfortunately U.S News and local newspapers publish competitive high school rankings as though they are a measure or school quality.  A week ago, the Cleveland Plain Dealer treated readers to another one of these misguided reports by quoting this year’s U.S News ranking of the nation’s best high schools.  Reporter Zachary Lewis explains that that top high schools in greater Cleveland this year are in Solon and Rocky River. “Other Greater Cleveland high schools in the top 25 in Ohio are Chagrin Falls (no 7), Hudson (No. 9), Brecksville-Broadview Heights (No. 15), Kenston (No. 15), Aurora (No. 20), and Bay High School (No. 24).

Lewis continues: “Common traits among the highest-ranked schools are those whose students scored high on state assessments for math, reading and science. These schools also had strong results for underserved student performance, focusing on students who are Black, Hispanic, or from low-income households, performance on Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams, curriculum breadth and graduation rates, U.S. News said.”  There is a serious problem with this statement: none of these high schools serves many students who are Black, Hispanic, or from low-income households.

The point here is not that these are bad high schools. Each one is the comprehensive high schools that serves its suburban community. The point is that they serve wealthy, homogeneously white communities whose test scores are a mark of privilege, and that schools are far more complicated institutions than can be judged by the kinds of data—test scores, graduation data, and numbers of AP classes and AP exams passed—that are indicators of privilege.

In their book, A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire explain:  “Schools differ from other kinds of goods because they take time to understand and experience fully… Education, the quality of which is… difficult to assess, is what’s known as a ‘credence good.’ It can take months, or even years, to figure out the quality of a school… Exacerbating the issue is the fact that schools are highly complex institutions.” (A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door, (pp. 146-148)

The 2002, No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) established the idea of judging schools by comparing their aggregate standardized test scores.  Education historian Diane Ravitch describes how schools in impoverished communities were punished because NCLB’s operational strategy of comparing test scores as an indicator of school quality  “overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.”

The Harvard University expert on the appropriate use of standardized tests Daniel Koretz wrote a book to expose the problems with the NCLB testing regime and with judging schools by their test scores and related numerical indicators: “Used properly… tests are very useful for describing what students know. On their own, however, tests simply aren’t sufficient to explain why they know it…. Of course the actions of educators do affect scores, but so do many of the other factors both inside and outside of school, such as their parents’ education.  This has been well documented at least since the publication more than fifty years ago of the ‘Coleman Report,’… which found that student background and parental education had a bigger impact than schooling on student achievement.” (The Testing Charade, pp, 148-149)

Koretz explains further: “One aspect of the great inequity of the American educational system is that disadvantaged kids tend to be clustered in the same schools. The causes are complex, but the result is simple: some schools have far lower average scores…. Therefore, if one requires that all students must hit the proficient target by a certain date, these low-scoring schools will face far more demanding targets for gains than other schools do. This was not an accidental byproduct of the notion that ‘all children can learn to a high level.’ It was a deliberate and prominent part of many of the test-based accountability reforms…. Unfortunately… it seems that no one asked for evidence that these ambitious targets for gains were realistic. The specific targets were often an automatic consequence of where the Proficient standard was placed and the length of time schools were given to bring all students to that standard, which are both arbitrary.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 129-130)

Reporters often tell readers that school ratings are based on other factors besides test scores, but it turns out that many of the other factors states consider when they do the ratings are in fact based mostly on school districts’ aggregate scores. The Ohio Department of Education’s guide to understanding the state school report cards lists five areas on which the state rates public schools and school districts: Achievement, Progress, Gap Closing,  Early Literacy, and Graduation. Four of the five categories in Ohio’s system depend on a school’s or a school district’s aggregate test scores, which have for years been highly correlated with a school population’s overall family income.

Douglas Downey, a professor of sociology at The Ohio State University describes his own academic research showing that evaluating public schools based on standardized test scores is unfair to educators and misleading to the public. In a 2019 book, How Schools Really Matter: Why Our Assumption about Schools and Inequality Is Mostly Wrong, Downey explains: “It turns out that gaps in skills between advantaged and disadvantaged children are largely formed prior to kindergarten entry and then do not grow appreciably when children are in school.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 9) “Much of the ‘action’ of inequality therefore occurs very early in life… In addition to the fact that achievement gaps are primarily formed in early childhood, there is another reason to believe that schools are not as responsible for inequality as many think. It turns out that when children are in school during the nine-month academic year, achievement gaps are rather stable. Indeed, sometimes we even observe that socioeconomic gaps grow more slowly during school periods than during summers.” (How Schools Really Matter, p. 28)

Arizona State University emeritus professor and former president of the American Educational Research Association, David Berliner is blunt in his analysis: “(T)he big problems of American education are not in America’s schools… The roots of America’s educational problems are in the numbers of Americans who live in poverty. America’s educational problems are predominantly in the numbers of kids and their families who are homeless; whose families have no access to Medicaid or other medical services. These are often families to whom low-birth-weight babies are frequently born, leading to many more children needing special education… Our educational problems have their roots in families where food insecurity or hunger is a regular occurrence, or where those with increased lead levels in their bloodstream get no treatments before arriving at a school’s doorsteps. Our problems also stem from the harsh incarceration laws that break up families instead of counseling them and trying to keep them together. And our problems relate to harsh immigration policies that keep millions of families frightened to seek out better lives for themselves and their children…  Although demographics may not be destiny for an individual, it is the best predictor of a school’s outcomes—independent of that school’s teachers, administrators and curriculum.”  (Emphasis in the original.)

Plain Dealer Editorial Correctly Condemns Voucher Entitlement for the Rich But Fails to Consider Strategies to Help Ohio’s Poorest Students

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Last Friday, the Plain Dealer‘s editors correctly condemned what the Ohio Legislature did in last summer’s two-year state budget, when it raised the income eligibility cap on Ohio’s largest private school voucher program and thereby diverted hundreds of millions of our tax dollars into a massive private school tuition entitlement for wealthy and middle-income families.

The newspaper’s editors quote a statement from the Ohio House Republican leadership: “This program is designed to safeguard lower-income families and offers options beyond traditional public schools.  By expanding access to vouchers, Ohio ensures parents can make the best decisions for their children’s education.”  The Plain Dealer’s editors, however, confront the truth. Our legislature expanded vouchers for wealthy families but did nothing for the poor.  The legislators grew the program by raising the income eligibility cap to enable families up to 450% of poverty to qualify for a full voucher and families with even higher incomes to qualify for a partial voucher.

There are, however, two serious problems with the editors’ assumptions and their suggestions for the program’s reform:

First, the editors seem to assume that in the state budget, the legislature capped the growth of expenditures on the new vouchers.

The editors quote reporter Laura Hancock’s article last week on the fact that already most of the money the legislature planned to spend this year on the voucher expansion is nearly gone:  “‘The legislature budgeted $397.8 million for EdChoice-Expansion this year,’ Hancock reports. ‘As of Feb. 26, the state had spent $387.5 million.'” While the newspaper’s editors seem to assume the legislature capped the amount to be spent on the EdChoice-Expansion for the current year, in reality the amount of $397.8 million was more like an estimate.  The voucher funds come out of the school foundation budget, and if there is an overrun in the cost of the vouchers, it will come from the same part of the budget that is needed for funding the state’s public schools. It will also likely imperil enactment of the third step in the phase-in of the Fair School Funding Plan, the state’s new public school funding formula.

When legislators set up the Fair School Funding Plan in the FY 2022-2023 state budget, they chose not to set up the new formula by passing separate enabling legislation. Instead legislators left the new formula’s funding and full enactment up to the will of future legislators to fund each of the next two steps in upcoming state budgets. Many public school educators and parents now worry that legislators will prioritize the rapidly growing universal voucher program at the expense of fully funding of the final phase of the new public school funding formula in the FY 2026-2027 state budget.

Second, the Plain Dealer‘s editors suggest that there is a solution to the legislature’s mistake in creating a program that entitles primarily wealthy families tax dollars for paying private school tuition.  The editors propose that the legislature, “should rewrite the rules to guarantee that this money goes to children in underperforming schools, possibly relying on the state report cards to set the standard.” The newspaper’s editorial board deserves criticism for once again branding the schools in communities where poverty is concentrated as “failing” schools.

Experts will tell you that there is a long and comprehensive compendium of research demonstrating that standardized test scores DO NOT primarily reflect the quality of a district’s public schools. And more important, test scores do not present any picture of what is happening in anybody’s schools.  They don’t tell us anything about how teachers work with students. Neither do they describe a school’s strategies for school discipline; nor do they reflect the richness of the curriculum. Years of research instead clearly show that, when individual students’ standardized test scores are aggregated by school district, the rankings correlate with the family and neighborhood income of the community itself.

A school district’s test scores are primarily a measure of privilege. We have known for years that No Child Left Behind’s focus on test score achievement gaps embodies an inaccurate understanding the factors that shape opportunity in children’s lives. In September, 2022, in an article for Commonwealth Magazine, Jack Schneider, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and Joel Boyd, the superintendent of the Lowell Public Schools explain: “As research indicates, test scores are highly indicative of the inequalities that afflict our communities, and are not a valid basis for determinations about overall school performance… Scholars have repeatedly shown (that) the leading predictors of student standardized test scores are demographic variables like family income and parental educational attainment.”

I wonder why the Plain Dealer‘s editors didn’t highlight the likely future competition for state funding between the Fair School Funding Plan’s full phase-in and the future explosive growth in EdChoice vouchers instead of suggesting that future voucher eligibility should be tied to public school district ratings on the state school district report card. Why not propose at least that the legislature set a hard cap on the future growth of school vouchers? And why not emphasize the urgent need to protect funding for the public school districts serving concentrations of poor children? Experts all agree that school districts serving masses of poor children need extra funding for services like more school social workers, smaller classes, and programs for English learners and disabled students as well as curricular enhancements and the arts.

Until the Fair School Funding Plan has been fully established and fully funded, the new formula won’t have the capacity to achieve its two primary purposes: prescribing the adequate provision of state funding and distributing state funding for equity across the state’s 610 school districts. While Ohio’s exurbs can more easily add extras for the students in their school districts by passing local property tax operating levies, for as long as I can remember the state has neglected to fulfill its responsibility to our state’s poorest urban and rural public school districts. One of the elements that has not yet been fully phased in, for example, is additional Disadvantaged Pupil Impact Aid (DPIA), a state funding stream  that allocates money for support services needed in public school districts serving concentrations of poor children. In a report at the end of 2022, school funding experts Howard Fleeter and Greg Browning documented that in Ohio: “(F)rom 2001 through 2021 total state aid for economically disadvantaged students has increased by 23.3%… while the number of economically disadvantaged students has increased by 57.5%….”

I commend the Plain Dealer’s editorial board for denouncing Ohio’s wildly expanded EdChoice vouchers, which now divert hundreds of millions of state tax dollars to reimburse upper-income parents for the tuition they are paying to the private schools where their children are already enrolled.  However, I wish the editors had explained what the massive loss to the state’s school foundation budget will mean for the 1.6 million students enrolled in Ohio’s 610 public school districts, and especially for the public schools in Ohio’s poorest communities.

Ohio’s recently expanded EdChoice vouchers epitomize the flaws identified in the 2023 book, The School Voucher Illusion, an authoritative analysis from Teachers College Press of widespread voucher expansion across the states:  “As currently structured, voucher policies in the United States are unlikely to help the students they claim to support. Instead, these policies have often served as a facade for the far less popular reality of funding relatively advantaged (and largely White) families, many of whom already attended—or would attend—private schools without subsidies. Although vouchers are presented as helping parents choose schools, often the arrangements permit the private schools to do the choosing… Advocacy that began with a focus on equity must not become a justification for increasing inequity. Today’s voucher policies have, by design, created growing financial commitments of taxpayer money to serve a constituency of the relatively advantaged that is redefining their subsidies as rights—often in jurisdictions where neighborhood public schools do not have the resources they need.” (The School Voucher Illusion: Exposing the Pretense of Equity, p. 290)

School Ratings and Rankings Cause Educational Redlining and Resegregation

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Here is the lead in a story in the Washington City Paper (Washington, D.C.) that describes not only  how public school ratings and rankings work in the nation’s capital but also their impact in every public school district in the United States.  Read this carefully:

“Before the pandemic shut down D.C. schools, each public school, like each student, got a report card. Every fall the school report card included a STAR rating, from one through five. The rating was based on a formula designed and used by the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), D.C.’s education agency. Federal law requires OSSE to identify the ‘bottom 5 percent’ of District schools, so that they can receive additional funding. In effect, OSSE’s STAR Framework ratings used a measurement of need to indicate a measurement of quality.  And as a measurement of quality, the formula failed.” (Emphasis is mine.)

The author of the commentary is Ruth Wattenberg, who formerly served on the Washington, D.C. State Board of Education (SBOE). She explains that the 2015 federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act—the version that replaced the 2002, No Child Left Behind Act—requires all states to assign school ratings which are said to be a measure of need for the bottom 5 percent of “struggling” schools. However, in a place like Washington, D.C. with universal school choice, while ESSA requires states to rate schools to target the bottom scorers for improvement, parents use the ratings as an advertisement for the best schools in the system—perhaps the only evidence some parents consider as they choose a school for their children.

The ratings are always understood by the general public as a measure of school quality.

In a large city school district, when parents choose a school according to the ratings, these measures help resegregate the school district by income and race. Wattenberg explains: “In D.C., where families can choose to send their kids to any public school in the district, this flawed rating system is especially consequential. ‘Many kids have left their neighborhood schools’ because of the ratings, says Sheila Carr… grandparent of current D.C. students… A small exodus can trigger budget, staffing, and program cuts that have the potential to drive more families away from a particular school, triggering yet more cuts.  A decade ago Carr remembers, this meant multiple school closings. Although DCPS (D.C. Public Schools) has avoided more closures recently, enrollments at some schools are way down. Anacostia High School enrolls just 287 students.”

Across metropolitan areas where numerous suburban school districts surround the central city, the ratings redline the poorer and most segregated school districts and encourage anybody who can afford it to seek the the school districts with the highest ratings: the homogeneously white and wealthy exurban school districts.

Across the states, legislatures and departments of education have developed their own rating systems to comply with the federal mandate, but these systems almost always feature each district’s aggregate standardized test scores, which have been documented to reflect primarily family income.  Wattenberg explains the research she and her colleagues explored as they set out to redesign their rating system: “One expert showed us how high-poverty schools disproportionately got low ratings, even when test scores reported that their students had learned more than average. Education researcher and D.C. public school parent Betsy Wolf concluded that ‘our accountability system measures family income more than it measures school quality.’ Based on these findings, the SBOE resolved in 2022 that the rating system was ‘fundamentally flawed’ and recommended eliminating it… Education and poverty expert Sean Reardon says that average test scores ‘are the results of all the opportunities kids have had to learn their whole lives, at home, in the neighborhood, in preschool and in the school year.  So it’s misleading to attribute average test scores solely to the school where they take the test.'”

Apparently in Washington, D.C. the board came up with a new system that is not likely to be much better: “At the SBOE’s early January meeting, some parents’ hopes of pushing to revamp the report cards faded. OSSE surfaced its new report card, and, instead of labeling schools with stars, the new proposal assigns each school a number, one to 100, called an ‘accountability score.’ The number will still be highlighted on each school’s online profile and on the central School Report Card, where it will be among the first and primary impressions of a school that parents will see.  The formula that produces the new accountability score, while slightly revised and less toxic, is still biased against low-income schools. It is still the same formula OSSE uses to identify the neediest schools for the U.S. Department of Education.”

Wattenberg adds: “Less biased data on school quality measures educational practices and conditions known to promote student learning, such as teacher retention and the extent to which a school offers instruction on a variety of subjects, including social studies, science, and the arts, rather than an overly narrow focus on math and reading (which is what end-of-year tests focus on). Survey data showing student perceptions, such as the extent to which students feel academically challenged and supported is also an effective metric.”

From a parent’s point of view, the new summative grade tells no more about the teachers or the curriculum or students’ experiences at school.  It is really no different than the five star rating system Wattenberg remembers in Washington, D.C.’s previous system.  Here in Ohio, where I live, we have a five star system, which is no better than the A, B, C, D, F system we had before we got the new five stars.  In Washington, DC,  the new 1-100 rating number Wattenberg describes being earned by each school will only cue up competative parents to go for the highest rated schools in a giant competition. Most people choosing a school on the basis of the ratings will not be able to discern how the metric balances all the variables in each school or whether the rating really say anything about what is happening at the school.

Having attended school in a small Montana town, where we all went to the same middle school and high school, and having parented two children who attended our neighborhood elementary and middle school and came together at our community’s only high school here in a Cleveland, Ohio inner suburb, I prefer the old and more radical solution to the whole problem of school choice driven by metrics published in the newspaper or school report cards. In fact, for the majority of families in the United States, neighborhood schools are still the norm. A system of neighborhood schools embodies the idea that parents’ responsibility is to help their children embrace the opportunities at the school where they are assigned.

As parents when my children were in elementary school, we used the PTA meetings as places to strategize about how we could better support innovations and special programs to make school more fun and challenging for all the students.  A district-wide school support agency in our community provides a tutoring program for students who need extra help, and there is a community supported, district-wide music camp for a week in June when the high school orchestra director and his staff, along with a raft of graduates from the high school music program, help students from across the middle schools to prepare for joining the high school band and orchestra.  People from across the school district turn out for the concert that culminates the summer music camp.

This kind of community involvement connects parents with the community’s public schools in a qualitative way.  When people engage personally with a school, the teachers and the students, parents can learn so much more about a school than any metric can expose.

At the very least, it is time for the U.S. Department of Education to stop demanding that states rate and rank their public schools.  Wattenberg is correct that the ratings—a measurement of need—are misinterpreted by the press and misunderstood by the public as a measurement of quality.

Who Redefined Teaching as the Production of High Test Scores and Who Taught Us to Believe in the Myth of the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations?

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The history that happens in our lifetimes is sometimes the most obscure.  We live it without thinking about it, and it hasn’t yet been recorded or analyzed by historians who help us sift out the important details and trace what has happened.  Fortunately today, public policy experts have been exploring parts of the last half century’s history of public education to help us see what we may have missed while living through these years.

Last April, James Harvey took us back 40 years to 1983, when Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education released A Nation at Risk, which blamed American public schools for our nation’s declining economic competitiveness. According to the commission’s report, “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”

Secretary of Education Terrell Bell appointed James Harvey, who was chief of staff to the National Institute of Education, the Department’s research arm, to help choose the members of the Commission. Harvey writes that as senior staff to the Commission, he, “developed two successive white papers reflecting on what we had heard from experts on the complexities of the school ‘system’ in the United States. The essence of the two lengthy papers was that American schools had accomplished great things for the United States and were now faced with the joint challenges of (1) successfully educating a more diverse and lower-income population through high school, and (2) improving standards or we risked becoming mired in mediocrity.”  However, “(v)irtually every reference to the accomplishments of American schools and the challenges of diversity and poverty disappeared from the succeeding drafts.”

Harvey describes one member of the Commission who presented a new draft document blaming public schools for the nation’s economic problems. Harvey reports that the commission rewrote the report to prove that thesis: “There were at least three problems with what the commission finally produced. First, it settled on its conclusions and then selected evidence to support them. Second, its argument was based on shockingly shoddy logic. And third, it proposed a curricular response that ignored the complexity of American life and the economic and racial divisions within the United States…

As a result, reports Harvey, we became an achievement-test-obsessed society in order to demand that our schools be held accountable.  What followed was the Clinton era’s Goals 2000, Bush’s No Child Left Behind, Obama’s Race to the Top and all the punitive policies that constitute what remains our test-and-punish education culture.

Richard Rothstein is another expert who has helped us become more aware of the public education history many of us have lived through in the past half century. Rothstein wrote The Color of Law, the definitive history of how public policy contributed to the racial segregation of housing across the United States and how housing segregation turned into school segregation. Two weeks ago for the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics Blog, Rothstein examined how a 1968 book, Robert Rosenthal’s Pygmalion in the Classroom, has shaped what has come to be a key premise of the common knowledge about public schools to this day.

Rosenthal and a school principal, Lenore Jacobson, conducted an experiment they described as concluding that teachers’ expectations for each student shaped and predicted which students would be successful, independent of what was recorded as their IQ. “Some psychologists were skeptical, believing that the experimental design was not sufficiently rigorous to support such a revolutionary conclusion.” Rosenthal and Jacobson’s experiment was conducted on first and second grade students, but Rothstein reports, “Even the reported results were ambiguous. Teacher expectations had no similar impact on children in grades three through six.  Similar experiments elsewhere did not confirm the results even for first and second graders. Nevertheless, the book was very influential.”

Rothstein summarizes the impact of the book on public policy: “(I)gnoring how scanty the evidence was, education policymakers concluded from their research that the Black-white gap in test scores at all grade levels resulted from teachers of Black children not expecting their pupils to do well. And that, they reasoned, should be an easy problem to solve—holding teachers accountable for results would force them to abandon the racial stereotypes that were keeping children behind… The accountability movement grew in intensity during the Bill Clinton administration… In 2000, Bush was elected president; his campaign promised to demolish teachers’ ‘soft bigotry of low expectations.'” What followed was No Child Left Behind and a regime of testing every child every year from third through eighth grade and punishing schools whose scores did not quickly rise.

Rothstein remembers his conversation with a Congressional staffer at the time: “She predicted that within two years, the publication of test scores would so embarrass teachers that they would work harder, with the result that racial differences in academic achievement would evaporate entirely. Nothing of that sort has happened… Enthusiasm for charter schools escalated from a belief that operators could choose teachers with higher expectations, yet charter schools have not done any better (and in many cases worse) in closing the gap, once the sector’s ability to select students less likely to fail (and expel students who do) is taken into account.”

“Certainly,” Rothstein explains, “there are teachers with low expectations and harmful racial stereotypes, and it would be beneficial if those who can’t be trained to improve were removed from the profession.”  He adds: “Concentrating disadvantaged pupils in poorly resourced schools in poorly resourced and segregated neighborhoods (can) overwhelm instructional and support staffs.” As he looks back, however, Rothstein considers the impact of Pygmalion in the Classroom: “No book in the second half of the 20th century did more, unintentionally perhaps, to undermine support for public education and thus diminish educational opportunities for so many children, especially Black and Hispanic children, to this day. The book and its aftermath put the onus solely on teacher performance when it came to student achievement, disregarding so many critically important socioeconomic factors—at the top of the list, residential segregation.”

Academic research over the more than two decades since Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act has confirmed Rothstein’s conclusion. Here is Daniel Koretz, the Harvard University expert on the appropriate use of standardized tests: “Used properly… tests are very useful for describing what students know. On their own, however, tests simply aren’t sufficient to explain why they know it…. Of course the actions of educators do affect scores, but so do many of the other factors both inside and outside of school, such as their parents’ education.  This has been well documented at least since the publication more than fifty years ago of the ‘Coleman Report,’… which found that student background and parental education had a bigger impact than schooling on student achievement.” (The Testing Charade, pp, 148-149)

Koretz explains further: “One aspect of the great inequity of the American educational system is that disadvantaged kids tend to be clustered in the same schools. The causes are complex, but the result is simple: some schools have far lower average scores…. Therefore, if one requires that all students must hit the proficient target by a certain date, these low-scoring schools will face far more demanding targets for gains than other schools do. This was not an accidental byproduct of the notion that ‘all children can learn to a high level.’ It was a deliberate and prominent part of many of the test-based accountability reforms…. Unfortunately… it seems that no one asked for evidence that these ambitious targets for gains were realistic. The specific targets were often an automatic consequence of where the Proficient standard was placed and the length of time schools were given to bring all students to that standard, which are both arbitrary.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 129-130)

Just last year, in The Education Myth, John Shelton, a professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, reached the same conclusion about the essential flaw in No Child Left Behind: “At root, the very premise of the bill—that punishing schools for the scores of their students would improve the school’s performance—was simply flawed, particularly when school districts did not have the ability to raise students out of poverty or alleviate the trauma of racism.”  (The Education Myth, pp. 173)

It is important to consider the various ideas that have converged to shape today’s public policy. We can now see more clearly how No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on school accountability blocked our society’s addressing systemic racism and child poverty as primary barriers for too many American children.  We can also see that these are the same obstacles many state legislatures continue to ignore when they underfund the school districts serving concentrations of our society’s poorest children.

There remains, however, another serious consequence stemming from the school accountability movement and from Pygmalion in the Classroom and the idea of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” as it was institutionalized in No Child Left Behind.  Our society has learned from the politicians who launched these reforms to put the children and their experience of schooling aside when we think about education.  Instead we have complacently allowed No Child Left Behind to redefine schoolteachers’ primary job as the production of high test scores.

As a result, many people and many of the state legislators who allocate dollars for public education too easily blame and scapegoat the schoolteachers and the schools and school districts unable to raise test scores upon command.  We continue to watch school districts themselves ignore poverty and systemic racism as they close or punish the schools in the poorest neighborhoods, and we continue to watch state legislatures take over “failing” schools or school districts and install so-called turnaround experts. The polls show that most parents are grateful to their child’s own teacher, someone they know personally, but when people think about teachers in general, too many have learned from several generations of school reform to blame the teachers and look down on the so-called “failing” schools that can’t seem to produce high test scores.

Why I Am Looking Forward to Next Weekend’s Network for Public Education Conference

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Many of us will be traveling to Washington, D.C. next weekend for the 10th Anniversary Conference of the Network for Public Education. We will have an opportunity to greet friends and colleagues, listen to experts examine today’s attack on public schooling, and strategize about confronting the opponents of our society’s historic system of free and universal public education.

As well-funded interests like Moms for Liberty try to invade local school boards, as the Heritage Foundation, EdChoice, the Bradley Foundation, Koch and Walton money, and Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children support a school voucher revolution across the state legislatures, and as state legislators in many places obsess over test scores without grasping the human work teachers and students must accomplish together, we will gather to strategize about strengthening support for the public schools that remain the central institution in most American towns and neighborhoods.

There will be keynotes from Gloria Ladson-Billings, former chair of urban education at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Becky Pringle, President of the NEA; Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT; Diane Ravitch, and several other prominent speakers. Participants will also be able to choose from among more than 40 workshops:

  • sessions exploring strategies and messaging to fight school privatization—including reports from Indiana, Florida and Arizona on vouchers; sessions on problems with charter schools in Pennsylvania and Texas; and a workshop on constitutional issues around religions charter school;
  • workshops addressing the need to overcome far-right attempts to hijack school boards including the fake grassroots parents’ groups funded by far-right philanthropy; reports on advocates working in a number of communities to engage parents as local school board advocates; and several Florida school board members sharing their experiences as their school boards were taken over and politicized;
  • discussions exploring the long impact of test-and-punish school reform including workshops examining state takeovers in several districts including this year’s state seizure of the Houston, Texas Public Schools; and a session about efforts to rid the Denver Public Schools of Portfolio School Reform;
  • conversations helping advocates support the retention and recruitment of teachers in these difficult times when, after COVID, many have blamed teachers for test scores and discipline problems, and when teachers’ autonomy has been undermined and their salaries remain low;
  • sessions to develop skills for coalition building, one of them from California stressing the need to build joint parent-teachers union coalitions; another from Wisconsin on statewide parent organizing; and other workshops emphasizing coalition building with communities of faith to preserve the Constitutional protections for religious liberty;
  • conversations helping advocates better frame and articulate an agenda to undermine racism, protect a diverse curriculum, and focus on students’ needs;
  • workshops celebrating full-service, wraparound Community Schools and strategizing to expand the number of Community Schools; and
  • discussions of specific issues: support for early childhood education, the need to protect student privacy, and the danger of outsourcing the work of education support professionals to private contractors.

As a blogger and an Ohio resident who worries about the diversion of public school funding to our state’s new universal vouchers, however, I am also looking for some broader help than any one of these specific workshops can provide.  While it is possible to identify the forces unraveling support for public education, I struggle to find adequate language to articulate why the public schools we have taken for granted for generations are so important. I will be grateful at this conference to listen as experts name the essential role of the public schools in our diverse, democratic society. I will be listening as presenters and advocates emphasize these core principles.

Here are three examples of people writing about or speaking about what public schooling can accomplish.  First from the late political theorist Benjamin Barber is a rather complex but also important declaration about school privatization as an expression of radical individualism in contrast with public education as an institution in which the public can protect citizens’ rights: “Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics. It puts us back in the state of nature where we possess a natural right to get whatever we can on our own, but at the same time lose any real ability to secure that to which we have a right. Private choices rest on individual power… personal skills… and personal luck.  Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all… With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Second, William Ayers updates John Dewey’s 1899 declaration in The School and Society: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children.” Here is how, in an essay in the 2022, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, Ayers defines the kind of public education that every American child today ought to have: “Every child has the right to a free, high-quality education. A decent, generously staffed school facility must be in easy reach for every family. This is easy to envision: What the most privileged parents have for their public school children right now—small class sizes, fully trained and well compensated teachers, physics and chemistry labs, sports teams, physical education and athletic fields and gymnasiums, after-school and summer programs, generous arts programs that include music, theater, and fine arts—is the baseline for what we want for all children.” (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, p. 315)

Third, Jitu Brown, the Chicago community organizer who now leads the national Journey4Justice Alliance, will be a presenter again at this year’s Network for Public Education conference. My notes from one of the earlier conferences quote Brown rephrasing in another way Dewey’s formulation about what public schooling must accomplish: “We want the choice of a world class neighborhood school within safe walking distance of our homes. We want an end to school closings, turnarounds, phase-outs, and charter expansion.”

I am looking forward to next week’s conference.  In addition to all the practical strategy sessions and great keynotes, I hope we will actively be sharing our continued confidence in the foundational values represented by our American system of public schools—publicly funded, universally available and accessible, and guaranteed by law to meet each child’s needs and protect all children’s rights. School privatization cannot move our society closer to these goals. Although we will need to work doggedly to ensure greater equality of opportunity and to continue to improve our public schools, they remain the optimal educational institution for the investment of our efforts and tax dollars.