But the idea — let alone the adoption of — a national curriculum appears as a sharp break with the foundation of the American Republic, the commitment to “state’s rights,” to decentralization and a relatively weak central government.

Thus begins the introduction of my forthcoming book, Testing for Tyranny: The Political Significance of a National Curriculum and Testing Regime in the United States.

At present, the push to implement the so-called Common Core Standards (not federal, not national, as Diane Ravitch would have it, but “common,” and so the choice of language is significant) represents a turning point in American history. There are many questions that must be answered about this initiative, the most important one being this: Whose standards are they? Whose interests do they serve?

This question is being posed from a variety of perspectives. For example, a Tea Party activist noted this:

The National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers (collectively, NGA Center/CCSSO), as the owners of the Common Core State Standards (College- and Career-Readiness Standards and K-12 Standards in English Language Arts and Math), grant this license to the Licensee identified below, subject to the terms set forth herein. The Common Core State Standards are protected by copyright and/or other applicable law, and any use of the Common Core State Standards other than as authorized under this License is prohibited.

And so:

As a parent, where will you go if you feel a change should be made to the ELA or math content to be taught to the students in your neighborhood and community schools? To the school? the local school board? to the state education dept or the state school board? to the federal government? Sorry, it is out their hands. They no longer have control over the content for ELA and math that is to be taught to the students in the states that have adopted the CCSS.

This line of questioning might help explain the choice of language and the administrative mechanisms used to push the standards.  If they were national, this notion of ownership would seem counter productive (who owns the American Flag)? If they were federal, clearly they are in the control of the federal government, owned by it, but presumably on behalf of the people as a whole.. But they are merely “common” — ushered in and controlled by an “association” of associations that is neither federally constituted nor bound to a state, a “public/private partnership” of government leaders and business interests; an entity that does not report to a legislature or even a defined constituency.

And now the Schlechty Center releases, Whose Standards Are They?

Offering a broad minded and thoughtful presentation of standards and their role in education, the paper is particularly significant for the guidance it provides school personnel in organizing discussions about the Common Core Standards in their schools and communities.  It offers a concrete guide for evaluating the Common Core Standards, affirming the right of communities to have a say over the nature and function of the education provided to their youth.

Asking the “who decides” question is by far the most important question to ask when examining the Common Core initiative. Discussions narrowly fixated on implementation, or even concerns about whether national standards and tests will improve education, serve to veil consideration of how contemporary education reform (such as the Common Core) serves to re-articulate governing arrangements such that the vast majority — parents, teachers, administrators, local school boards, and youth — are excluded from involvement in decisions that directly affect their lives, and their future.

Related Posts:

• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part II – The Political Significance of Assessment Governance
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part 1 – Danger, Will Robinson, Irrational Discourse Ahead!
• “Best Urban School District in America” Blocks Access to Websites Critical of “Education Reform”
• Bruce Baker: Smart Guy (Gates) makes my list of “Dumbest Stuff I’ve Ever Read!”
• Detroit Free Press: MEAP may be replaced by national online test

I am sure many have read your May 2, 2011 Open Letter to teachers. I am impressed with its rhetorical slight of hand, how it gently yet forcefully pushes — with all apparent conviction — what more and more of the research community and the public is rejecting.

I presume that it is this broad and growing opposition to Race to the Top (the nearly $5 billion in discretionary monies given to the U.S. Department of Education by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) that caused you to publish your Open Letter. But I do not believe that your rhetoric, however clever, can erase from consciousness the fact that Race to the Top is anti-democratic — imposed through bribery using taxpayer money. It is an open agenda for privatization and the elimination of any last vestiges of democratic governance of and purpose for schooling. Wall Street and various monopolies are attempting total control through for-profit charters, anti-worker legislation, publishing and testing companies, private foundations, and of course, a national curriculum and privately managed testing regime aimed at workers compliance.

Given this reality, I think it is very important to examine how your letter makes its case. And while others have spoken to what is wrong with what you say, and what is wrong with what you propose, I want to focus on something that might be missed, possibly even by you: your letter’s appeal to your personal convictions and beliefs as a basis for legitimating government action.

Your letter constitutes a public sharing of your personal conviction about teaching and the teaching profession. The theory of action appears to be this: teachers believe that you are ill-willed, and have wrong-headed ideas about education. To counter, you are disclosing yourself, and we educators are to be comforted by your stated respect for teachers, and your commitment to fair evaluation systems that you believe will raise the prestige of the profession. You confess, for example, to believing that teachers actually work hard (Well, now, you must be an ally!). And you suggest, although you never really openly say so, that you oppose teaching to the test and the narrowing of curriculum that follows. I should expose the trickery in pretending to address concerns with a curriculum narrowed only to tested subjects with a plan for more frequent testing in all subjects (that is, a national curriculum and series of tests developed by CEOs of corporations, private foundations and publishing and testing companies, with no role for the public). But this is not what I find most striking.

What I find most striking is how you position your personal beliefs and experiences as criteria for the legitimacy of government action. To quote a former president of the United States, you are “the decider,” and you decide based on your beliefs. We the subjects are called upon to accept government action on account of the public expression of your beliefs.

For example, you state: “I have a deep and genuine appreciation for the work you do.” Are the completely invalid pay-per-test-score schemes being imposed in state after state as a result of your Race to the Top competition (referenced in your letter as “sophisticated assessments that measure individual student growth”) somehow now acceptable because the Holy Education Executive has uttered his genuine appreciation for the work teachers do?

Does the fact that you believe “that most teachers did not enter the profession for the money” justify pay and healthcare cuts, layoffs and terminations for those who’s students don’t show enough growth on the “sophisticated assessments” you believe in? After all, you believe the key to reform is building “an accountability system based on data we trust” — so as long as the “data” are trustworthy test hell for parents, students and educators is acceptable? If we don’t go along with “in data we trust” will Senator McCarthy rise from the dead to demand our testimony? (“Mr. Garrison, are you, or have you ever been, or have you ever been associated with, a critic of standardized testing and merit pay for teachers?”)

Equally impressive is how you position yourself as the great leader who has these personal relationships with people — “I am here to help,” you offer (if it were that simple, we could just respond, “thanks, but no thanks!”). You assert, as if it is a settled matter: “We understand that the surest way to [help America’s children] is to make sure that the 3.2 million teachers in America’s classrooms are the very best they can be.” This master lie deserves its own book, but the fact of the matter is the majority of people in America understand that poverty is a very serious and rapidly growing problem. But poverty is brazenly ignored by you and most education reformers. If you want to “help America’s children,” eliminate poverty (and I guarantee the test scores will go up too, without any test prep!).

Like the Royal Wedding which celebrated the grossest forms of inequality, you’re governing strategy is reminiscent of a period of history humanity has fought hard to leave behind: the despotic rule of kings and their royal families. During those times, the beliefs of royalty were all that mattered, and royalty were the only public officially recognized.

So, Mr. Duncan, at the end of the day, I don’t care what you believe. In a democracy, the government must represent the will of the people, not impose its beliefs on them. No one wants a patronizing government that figures its role as “helping.” Any reform that disempowers, any reform that doesn’t help realize social equality, will fail, as the corporate reforms you defend in your letter already have.

Related Posts:

• ARRA Education Funds and the Crisis of Legitimacy
• Secretary Arne Duncan Testifies Before the House Education and Labor Committee
• Mayor Bing Says Eliminating Democratic Control of Schools (“Change”) is Necessary; Ducan’s “Race to Wreck Education” Funds Used as Wedge Against Detroit Voters
• Educational Provisions of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
• Clifford Adelman’s “White Noise of Accountability”

Well, let’s examine the first paragraph of the Executive Summary (since that is how far I got before I had to say something before my brain exploded):

Authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), the Race to the Top Assessment Program provides funding to consortia of States to develop assessments that are valid, support and inform instruction, provide accurate information about what students know and can do, and measure student achievement against standards designed to ensure that all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace. These assessments are intended to play a critical role in educational systems; provide administrators, educators, parents, and students with the data and information needed to continuously improve teaching and learning; and help meet the President’s goal of restoring, by 2020, the nation’s position as the world leader in college graduates.

Wow! If you’re not struck by the incompetence, read it again. OK, wow!

First, validity of these new assessments is presented as a criteria that is somehow separate from providing “accurate information about what students know and can do”. Would you consider it possible to have a valid assessment that cannot provide information about what students know and can do in some domain (assuming for a moment developing such assessments is a straightforward and problem-free endeavor)?

More troubling is this gem: “measure student achievement against standards designed to ensure that all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace.” Measurement is not the same as comparison. And the phrase “measure student achievement against” is inept and awkward. Of course one might counter that the sentence means to convey that college and career standards should be used to measure student achievement prior to college, or that these standards should be used to validate measures of achievement. But such re-renderings do little to help. By way of some spell developed by Voldemort, this measurement spiral will ensure “all students gain the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in college and the workplace”. Can standards ensure things like this?

Oh, it’s actually quite easy, like, when, uh, the standard measure of weight is used to ensure everyone loses weight! If only obese youth had access to more bathroom scales!

And wouldn’t it be great if schools prepared everyone for college and the workplace? That won’t be a challenge, because all colleges and degree programs are essentially the same, and we all work (those of us who have the will to get a job in this free market utopia) in “the workplace.” I think it is well established, using scientifically based methods, that all workplaces are essentially the same and require the same skills. The psychological literature is bursting with studies demonstrating how easily skills transfer from one domain to the next…that’s why CEOs have proven to be such effective educators.

And, I’m really happy that the Obama administration wants to provide parents with “data and information needed to continuously improve teaching”. Hell, since they, and many teachers, will be out of work, they might as well do something for their country…

Related Posts:

• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part II – The Political Significance of Assessment Governance
• The Common Core: Whose Standards Are They?
• Bruce Baker: Smart Guy (Gates) makes my list of “Dumbest Stuff I’ve Ever Read!”
• Detroit Free Press: MEAP may be replaced by national online test
• Maryland First State to Bar Schools Releasing Tests to Military

When you argue for social change you inevitably come up against the claims of “realism” — we can’t change this or that because to do so would be “unrealistic.” This is the argument typically favored by the incrementalists: “since we can’t change society as a whole,” they say, “let’s change little things, like the means we use to assess the quality of our public schools or the students entering college.”

My first response is this: the society is changing, and to deny that it is changing, and always changes, is unrealistic! Standardized tests are one tool being used to institutionalize and justify various changes — to curriculum, governance, and to the working conditions of teachers. The political and economic arrangements that were the conditions for the emergence of public education in the United States have been dramatically altered, and so, there is pressure on these institutions to “change” — this pressure is not simply coming from the Manhattan Institute and the Fordham Foundation … it is coming from history itself. Public schools have not been able to “equalize the conditions of man.” But to continue to apply standards of that past era, conditions that gave rise to standardized tests and their flawed assumptions, is unrealistic, and requires everyone to think creatively about alternatives. Incremental change can lead to qualitative change if the incremental change hits at what is key. So, the realism argument misses all this.

More generally, I think the realism argument needs to be to interrogated. What is established as possible (“realistic”) is itself a power play; the statement has multiple meanings. Asking for permission — “is it possible to take the day off”– is different from making an analysis of what the conditions as they exist right now make possible. For example, it is possible to eliminate hunger, in that enough food for all humans can be produced right now. Why this does not occur is mainly a political question. I say: Why limit discussion of alternatives with such talk of “realism”? Why be forced to choose between incremental and fundamental change? Why assume they are necessarily in contradiction with one another? It is only the incremental in place of or against the fundamental that I object to. So, again, I would not advocate right this minute eliminating standardized tests altogether, but I would advocate, as an incremental step, eliminating the use of tests for high stakes purposes. I oppose current merit pay schemes; I don’t oppose discussions about accountability; I do oppose discussions about accountability absent discussions about rights, for responsibilities and rights go hand in hand. I would also advocate that educators think broadly and openly debate standards for education — what kind of society do we want and what kind of education will support that aim? Without that orientation, discussions of the “incremental” will become stale, facile and uninspired. So, the big picture discussion is key to identifying what steps should be taken right now.

Related Posts:

• Are Tests Measures of Test Taking Ability?
• Review of “A Measure of Failure: The Political Origins of Standardized Testing”
• The Common Core: Whose Standards Are They?
• Clever rhetoric won’t save your undemocratic reform from failure: An open letter to Arne Duncan on the occasion of teacher appreciation week
• Bruce Baker: Smart Guy (Gates) makes my list of “Dumbest Stuff I’ve Ever Read!”

Sternberg suggests this is how students see school:

It’s drudgery. We sit alone at our desks and silently answer lots of questions that our teachers tell us look like the ones we will see on the state tests. We’re not interested in what we’re doing. We hurry up to finish first, and if we’re done before the rest of our classmates, we get to sit quietly and take out a book or do other work. We follow the rules and speak out only when called upon. We leave for a break only when the teacher tells us it’s time to do so, or when the buzzer signals the end of the class. To get a good grade, we do what the teacher wants us to do. Our sole focus is to do well on the state tests. Quiet, discipline, and following the rules are valued.

Sternberg contrasts this dour picture with happy descriptions of “the culture of thriving, cutting-edge business environments”. She locates much of the difficulty “with an overreliance on narrow measures of achievement based on standardized tests. Such tests do not measure the skills and competencies needed to thrive in today’s world—teamwork, collaboration, creativity, and innovation.”

Most significant is her observation that “a much-respected private school in [...] Connecticut is running an advertisement to attract families that says, ‘Your child will develop into a person, not a test score.’” Put in the context of a general attack on that which is public — public participation, public space, public healthcare, public education — I cannot see this kind of development as an accident. Quality public schools were created in the nineteenth century in order to, among other things, attract children from wealthy families. Now, we observe the opposite trend. Public schools are being transformed by venture capitalists into charter work camps for working class and minority students (all in the name of helping them). Wealthy parents will most likely not choose such environments for their children, and suburban districts come under pressure to “perform” their support for public schools will likely wane.

Sternberg continues by highlighting the danger of “incentivising” (to use Ducan’s word) education. She writes:

One approach to improving education advanced in the federal government’s Race to the Top agenda is a teacher pay-for-performance system. It, too, no matter the intent, will end up being based on student test scores. Individual teacher evaluations and eventual compensation will be linked directly to student performance on standardized tests—a method that has little or no scientific backing and significant drawbacks.

She tells the following story in order to highlight that we in fact know such incentive systems do not serve to raise the level of education. She continues:

Consider the pitfalls of giving students tangible rewards to perform well—problems to which I can personally attest.

In 1972, when I began teaching as a mathematics resource specialist in San Jose, Calif., I was required to coordinate an individualized math program, kindergarten through grade 6, that included an elaborate system of rewards. The program was divided into specific objectives, and as each child mastered four of these, he or she was rewarded with a certificate of achievement. After mastering 16 objectives, the student received a small trophy. At each successive set of four objectives, students were awarded increasingly fancy certificates and trophies until they completed all the program objectives and received a trophy three feet high.

This system caused students to rush through their math in order to earn the rewards. When asked what they had learned, they would respond with the number of objectives they had finished, not with the content of the math they had learned. And what happened when these students went to junior high? They refused to do math. Parents begged the school system to extend the award system to the junior high level. They said that their children had “loved” math in elementary school, but wouldn’t do it in junior high without the awards. What had been a well-meaning attempt to motivate students undermined, in the long run, students’ motivation to learn.

This was a pay-for-performance system. It relied on external motivators, and in reality killed students’ intrinsic motivation. It also killed the joy of learning math, eliminating any pleasure the kids might have found in solving problems, by adhering to the misguided notion that to love math, children had to be lured with a tangible reward.

Years of research about “token economies” were borne out by this outcome. If those who chose the rewards program had only heeded the research findings, they could have predicted these dismal results.

Sadly, education leaders today are making the same mistake. In their quest to “race to the top,” they either do not know the preponderance of research findings about token economies and motivation, or they choose to ignore it.

Can’t we learn from the worst of our business environments—from the mega-banks that regularly use the pay-for-performance model? They created people and institutions so motivated by external rewards that they lost sight completely of their moral compass. Do we really want to emulate that model? Do we want to pay our students to take Advanced Placement exams and score well on them? Or do we want youngsters to choose to take classes and do well in them because they are pursuing their passions and interests?

Related Posts:

• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part II – The Political Significance of Assessment Governance
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part 1 – Danger, Will Robinson, Irrational Discourse Ahead!
• Hess on Federal Jargon & the Jargon of Venture Capitalism and Wall Street Dictate
• Remarks by the President on the “Education To Innovate” Campaign
• Remarks by the President on Strengthening America’s Education System

* * *

When ASCD asked me to write on the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers’ (CCSSO) draft English/Language Arts core standards, I agreed with delight—but also with a less pleasant sense of duty. I imagine very few people enjoy perusing pregovernmental documents, after all. However, I felt that as a language arts teacher at the gateway of American secondary education, I had better bite the bullet and read the document. I was not prepared to find a text that would make me nod, laugh, frown, think, and—literally—weep. Perhaps these varied responses are the best reflection of my primary concern about the standards: the massive unevenness of the document itself.

First, let me say what the document is not. It is not a core curriculum, reading list, or jingoistic treatise on appropriate K–12 language arts content. In fact, only four sentences in, the document explicitly states that states, districts, and parents (parents! How about that?) will be making “many important decisions about curriculum.” No doubt, given the high-energy tussle over national standards, the need at least to pay lip-service to the republican nature of American schooling was uppermost in the authors’ minds.

[...]

The document does its finest work when it outlines standards for the treatment and generation of information, argument, and evidence. I counted 37 standards that explicitly addressed these topics, or about 65 percent of the standards. Reading them, I couldn’t help but think of the fear-driven rancor surrounding the current health care reform efforts here in the United States. It might be different today if our schools emphasized rhetorical analysis and logic. There is nothing more democratic than equipping our students with the tools necessary to participate in civil, informed debate.

Why do I bring up democracy? Because a lack of democracy is also the overwhelming central flaw in the proposed standards. Given our national image as a democratic beacon, this problem cannot be overstated.

Narrow Definition of Readiness

Let’s begin with the dominating rhetoric of the document: that the standards are geared specifically for “college and career readiness.” Sample sources for the standards, listed in the back of the document, are apparently aligned to this vision. Some interesting percentages out of those approximately 70 citations:

• Corporations or corporate-related partnerships: 18, or 26 percent
• College preparatory companies: 13, or 19 percent
• Peer-reviewed educational research: 4, or 0.06 percent

I think this speaks for itself. The sources are not only morally questionable and not truly evidence-based, but it also does not appear to be a democratic sampling of either the communicative needs of our diverse workforce or those of various institutions of higher learning.

Another nondemocratic idea in these standards is that the highest aspiration of all students in our country should be either higher education or a job in business. I use the term “business” advisedly. A close look at the standards’ language reveals that despite the repeated phrase “career-ready,” the burden of career sources, explanations, and examples embedded in the standards text is overwhelmingly based on a hierarchical business model. The communicative needs of alternative careers that are either not business-based or do not require a college degree—farming, art of all kinds, skilled labor, nonprofit social work, or even teaching—are not similarly addressed. We can only presume that the CCSSO does not think these careers are worth addressing.

We have an even larger problem with the standards if their implicit educational reasoning is true. Let’s assume that we do live in a society that requires everyone to have a college degree before they can start a truly meaningful career. If so, then it is impossible to have a set of language standards that define both college and career readiness, since students entering college can assume that they still have time to learn the language skills needed for a career. They wouldn’t possess those skills already, as the doubled-up standards would (and often do) presuppose—for example, in the insistence on mastery of discipline-specific vocabulary.

Missing Stakeholders

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), as reported in its president’s general letter to members last week, was not invited to help write the Common Core Language Arts Standards. In addition to the obvious inanity of this decision, I believe that the document shows a glaring absence of input from experienced writers. For example, it breaks one of its own standards for strong argument by being peppered with undefined adjectives such as “rich,” “sophisticated,” “exceptional,” and “resonant.” Who decides what these terms mean, and to what works they may be applied? The CCSSO should either avoid this type of language altogether, or it should pay much closer attention to creating and anchoring specific definitions of quality.

And the final technical blow: missing referents, capitalization errors, omitted punctuation, and murky, run-on sentences. That’s right: basic errors of mechanics in a document intended to become the highest standard of language in the United States.

In Defense of Holistic Education

Yet all these problems pale in comparison with the standards’ failure to recognize that in a true democracy, the primary aim of education is holistic. An excerpt of Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which is included in the document with no apparent sense of irony, states how the writer “is worried about how the language she dreams in, given to her at birth, is handled, put into service . . . for her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written—it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis.”

We are supposed to be helping our young people become both aware and expressive of their individuality, their general well-being, their talents and joys, their ethical code, their desire for lifelong learning, their sense of place, their local and global communities, and their responsibilities as members of the human race. These are what ensure that students are healthy, functioning members of our society. They are certainly my ultimate goals as a teacher, with language—particularly aesthetic, creative, and reflective language—as the vehicle. Yet beyond cursory mentions of citizenship, there are no sentiments like these—not a drop—in the current draft of the standards. Narrative, reflective, and creative communication receive relatively little attention in the standards, if they are included at all. All these things are included, notably, in other international standards of language, such as those of Finland—one of the highest-performing nations on the planet.

Dina Strasser is a middle school English/language arts teacher in upstate New York and blogs at The Line.

Related Posts:

• The Common Core: Whose Standards Are They?
• Detroit Free Press: MEAP may be replaced by national online test
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part II – The Political Significance of Assessment Governance
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part 1 – Danger, Will Robinson, Irrational Discourse Ahead!
• The Questions of Education Reform Are Really Questions of Who Decides

This “director of education” actually argues that students require tough national standards because there is a “gap between how U.S. students perform [on standardized tests] relative to those in high-performing countries”, and therefore it is “no longer tolerable for the United States to depend on the top 10 percent to carry this economy.”

Excuse me? So those who produce and distribute real wealth, those who provide services such as healthcare and education — the majority — “do not contribute to the economy”? And, those who don’t “excel” at answering irrelevant questions found on some guessing game are the cause of the country’s economic crisis? (Example possible analogy for the upcoming SAT: National Governor’s Association is to Bill Gates as Sycophant is to…) Does this “educator” mean to say that those who produced and benefited from the recent trillion dollar bailout have been “carrying this economy” — only if one admits they’re carrying it into the dumpster! It is precisely this “top 10 percent” who live off the toil of the vast majority of workers in the U.S. and worldwide, who steal from the public treasury in the name of “stability.”

But it gets better. “We have both a moral and an economic responsibility to ensure that all students have an opportunity to take advantage of what we traditionally call those high-wage, high-skill jobs.” Right. Monopoly capitalism is all about ensuring everyone has a high paying job. I have no doubts that, when the States “voluntarily” adopt “common standards” for math and language arts, the economic laws governing capitalism, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, will cease to operate. Everyone will be able to take advantage of those plentiful high paying jobs, thanks to national standards!

But hold on. Further on in the interview, we learn of a different concern: “And the other thing is that it’s just not defensible to spend as much money as we are on the development of standards and assessments — times 50. So if we can leverage resources from state to state — for example, on student assessments — we can stop spending the approximately $700 million we are spending collectively and reach an economy of scale that is not obtainable in one state alone.” So, assessment is really super important, but we don’t want to spend money on it, so as with the rest of education, let’s try to cheapen it, all the while championing high quality education for all.

Related Posts:

• The Common Core: Whose Standards Are They?
• Evidence on the quality of for-profit higher education?
• Bruce Baker: Smart Guy (Gates) makes my list of “Dumbest Stuff I’ve Ever Read!”
• Detroit Free Press: MEAP may be replaced by national online test
• Race to the Top Assessment Program: Part II – The Political Significance of Assessment Governance

In reviewing a front page item from Education Week (“Unions Set Sights on High-Profile Charter-Network Schools”), I’m reminded of how frustrated I have become the by vague and self-serving language of “accountability” that appears in news reports and speeches. Witness the law of diminishing accountability as one climbs the social hierarchy.

In discussing the “culture clash” of unions with philanthropy-backed academic sweatshops, Stephen Sawchuk writes: “Charter school advocates say unionization has historically carried a set of policies—such as seniority provisions and lengthy appeals processes for dismissed teachers—that discourage accountability and the recognition of differences in performance.”

But as Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, points out: “Collaboration [the buzzword of corporate charters used in the article] without having some balance of power is not collaboration, if a teacher knows that he or she can be fired for any reason at all.”

So what is the actual problem? The problem is not “accountability” but different standards of accountability for different people holding different offices. When administrators fire teachers for “no reason at all” they are rendered as masters of innovation, serving the public good as “no excuses” educators who have, finally, rescued poor, minority children from the grips of uncaring, lazy teachers.

How can setting up an arrangement where management cannot be challenged be described as somehow more accountable than collectively agreed upon contractual arrangements that stipulate rights and responsibilities of both parties? While much in the media aims to discredit collective bargaining, especially seniority and the right to challenge management, as the root of all that is wrong with public schools, I caution pause. The problem is not peoples right to collectively organize themselves in their own interests.

The notion of accountability is fundamentally relational, and refers both to the party who must give account, and to whom they must account. But also implicit in this notion is the idea of checks and balances. The present landscape of discussion about education is littered with conceptions of accountability rendered as a one way street, with those screaming the loudest about accountability simultaneously the most unaccountable. Has KIPP been held to account for its infractions against students, and the public? Has the growing list of corporate charter school fraud caused pause for those pushing expansion of the very charter school models that are associated with the fraud?

While democratic renewal is required in unions as in other spheres, attacking the right to collectively bargain the conditions of work and procedures for challenging decisions will not contribute to improving education.

Related Posts:

• Teachers have a right to unionize
• Stephen Sawchuk: States Aim to Curb Collective Bargaining
• Anthony Cody: Teachers Beware — They are Coming for Our Pensions
• Buffalo News endorses flawed system of teacher compensation
• Clifford Adelman’s “White Noise of Accountability”

Obama [is] behind the destructive strategies of Renaissance 2010 in a way that may just destroy the heart and soul of hundreds of communities across the US. Obama wants to see 5,000 schools closed and ‘turned around,’ which hasn’t worked….  And he’s going to use the precious stimulus money — you know, the money that’s supposed to help create new jobs — to fire thousands of experienced teachers.  Duncan says that ‘The point is to take bold action in persistently low-achieving schools’.  I disagree.  I think the point should be to try to do something that works, not to BOLDLY go expand a program that doesn’t work and actually creates worse problems.”

The post goes on to cite work by William J. Mathis and Charles Payne (who wrote the book, So Much Reform, So Little Change).  The essence is not only that “restructuring” schools does not improve the quality of education for those attending the restructured school, but that it also makes things worse for the students and communities ostensibly being helped.

Again, reports and debates about the merits of governance reform such as mayoral control now being promoted by Arne Duncan have meet with just criticism.  Here too there is little evidence that such reforms “work”.   Sherman Dorn argues that “governance reform” is not reform:

While New York rages over mayoral control, which is all the rage, schools in Pinellas County are headed towards The New Site Based Management, which was the rage in the late 1980s and early 1990s and which Bill Ouchi hopes will be the rage again.  While there are plenty of ways that governance can affect the classroom, I am consistently underwhelmed by the argument that governance reform improves what happens in the classroom.

While these criticisms and observations are certainly warranted and helpful, might they be missing something? 

If someone pursues the same path, over and over again, with little evidence of positive results, yet says they expect different results this time, and are going to push even harder, and even further expand their efforts in this failed direction, even when the chance of obtaining these expected results is extremely unlikely in light of past experience, and the possible negative outcomes for those who are the object of these efforts are likely negative, one has to conclude that the person is (a) insane and/or (b) not being truthful about the purpose of their efforts.  

“What works” is of course the kind of phrase designed to divert attention from the question: what works for whom, to what end? It may just be that these reforms are working well to alter the larger governance structures in the society, with the ideals of improved education the ideological garb that has us all debating the merits of “school reform” when in fact the object of reform is not school, but government itself.

Why not inform these debates with this question: who decides?  Even if “restructuring” or “mayoral control” “worked” shouldn’t the schools and communities who will be effected have a say?  Can research justify the elimination of democratic institutions?  Haven’t we learned our lesson from A Nation at Risk, a report authored by a committee that, in the end, had little regard for “what the facts are”?  Debates about proposed or enacted education reforms that ignore the larger political function of school reform are likely to mask in whose interests these efforts are driven, and what problem are in fact being addressed.

The AP story may have come the closet to going from appearance to essence:  “Obama doesn’t have authority to close and reopen schools himself.  That power rests with local school districts and states.  But he has an incentive in the economic stimulus law, which requires states to help failing schools improve.”  Indeed.  And so, we need an analysis of the political functions of the ARRA, the way in which it serves to alter the rights and responsibilities of the levels and branches of government.

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*  *  *

One can learn a great deal about a society by the way in which it treats its youth.  It is often said the youth are the future.  While often minimized as a cliché, a society that attacks its youth has no future.  In the United States, there are unprecedented attacks to education, with massive cuts to funding.  In addition to this, there have been massive cuts to social services in general.  Unemployment among the youth, including college graduates, continues to rise as does the student loan burden.  Concomitant to these developments are massive increases in police presence and methods in schools, where schools are filled with spy cameras, with some districts having cameras in every classroom; many schools now have metal detectors and armed guards.  Police raids of schools, where youth are attacked—showed to the floor and handcuffed, threatened with weapons—are becoming common.  Mere suspicion that a crime might be committed is justification for school officials to call the police.

Over the last few decades, several approaches have been developed, aiming to prevent violence and making schools safer.  Whether one examines anti-bullying measures, so-called school security initiatives, or violence prevention programs, one finds that the main theme is the need to “stop the problem before it starts.”  This is the notion of prevention.  Its content is similar to the notion of pre-emptive war.

Since all students are “potentially violent” they must be “screened” and “managed.”  Contrast this with the notion of safety, where people are protected from the arbitrary use of force by their government.  Two examples standout for analysis, namely the Secret Service’s “Safe Schools Initiative,” and state anti-bullying laws.  These examples reveal the role of the state in criminalizing the youth, and efforts to bring about new arrangements where the democratic norms are eschewed in favor of “security”.

The Secret Service’s “Safe Schools Initiative”

Ostensibly in response to the disturbing number of school shootings, beginning in 1999 the Secret Service, in a joint effort with the U.S. Department of Education, carried out what it calls its “Safe Schools Initiative.”  Over the course of four years, the Secret Service published three reports on what it calls “targeted school violence.”  Summaries of these reports have been widely disseminated in newspapers, on websites for educators, and in professional and scholarly journals.  Dissemination has emphasized the notion of identifying and stopping “potentially violent” youth.

The Initiative “examined school shootings in the United States as far back as 1974, through the end of the school year in 2000, analyzing a total of 37 incidents involving 41 student attackers.”  There are over 50 million students attending K-12 schools in the United States.  The Secret Service notes that almost all those convicted in school shootings have said they felt alienated, that nobody cared about them or listened to them.  Most experienced severe depression, with many (although exactly how many is not known for sure) were being treated with psychiatric drugs, and were at the time of the shooting experiencing a sense of great loss or personal failure.

A key component of the Initiative is the application of the Secret Service’s “threat assessment model” to schools.  Taking as its starting point the already widely opposed practice of “profiling,” the Secret Service says this is no longer the preferred method for evaluating “risk.”  The Initiative adds, “Until recently, most law enforcement investigations of violent crime have been conducted after the offense has occurred” [emphasis in original].  In popularizing this notion, the monopoly media is working to normalize the arrangement where police function not as law enforcers, but as a force to arbitrarily interfere with the human person in the name of prevention.

This so-called threat assessment is described as a “set of investigations and operational activities designed to identify, assess, and manage persons who may pose a threat of violence to identifiable targets.”  The main task of threat assessment is to look at “pathways of ideas and behaviors that may lead to violent action.”  The Secret Service says that “the question in threat assessment is not ‘What does the subject look like?’ but ‘has the subject engaged in recent behavior that suggests that he/she is moving on a path toward violence directed toward a particular target(s)’?”  The Secret Service also says to “watch out” for youth interested or involved in “extremist” groups without offering any examples or guidelines for identifying such groups.

The monopoly media fails to point out that the whole approach challenges existing U.S. law, where only an act can be judged, not intent: the notion of “potentially violent” is arbitrary and illegal.  Any one, particularly police and school officials, can brand a student’s behavior as “on a path toward violence” and thus call for their quarantine.  For example, an honor-roll high school student in Kansas was suspended for writing a poem entitled “Who Killed My Dog.”  A kindergartner in New Jersey was suspended from school for saying “I’m going to shoot you” on the playground while playing cops and robbers with his classmates.  A sixth-grader in Texas was put in juvenile detention for writing a Halloween essay (assigned) about a student who kills fellow students and a teacher.  Also in Texas, school officials disciplined students for wearing black armbands to mourn the victims of Columbine and to protest overly restrictive school policies. 

This claim to be “on a path to violence” also is used to criminalize dissent.  On April 23, 2004, U.S. Secret Service agents were in Prosser, Washington to interrogate a 15-year-old art student about political drawings he had turned in to his high school teacher as part of a class assignment.  The student was interrogated by the Secret Service and branded as being a threat, but then not arrested.  The school district did discipline him, but district officials refused to say why and what the punishment was. Youth at the school said the student was expressing his views against the war in his art, which is his right.

The student turned in several sketches opposing the war on Iraq and the war on terrorism.  One drawing showed a man “in Middle-Eastern-style clothing” with an AK-47 rifle and was deemed “most controversial” by school officials.  The man was holding a stick with the oversized head of President Bush on it.  The student said the head was enlarged as an effigy.  The caption called for an end to the war in Iraq.  Another sketch showed Bush dressed as a devil and launching a missile.  The caption read, “End the war on terrorism.”  Another drawing urged votes for then Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader. 

Revealing that school personnel are increasingly being drawn into profiling and attacking youth who oppose U.S. wars of aggression, the teacher reportedly turned the drawings over to school administrators.  The administrators called in the police, who brought in the Secret Service, all with no crime committed and no threats of any kind made.

School officials and police justified arbitrarily silencing the youth by simply asserting that the student’s drawings were not “political cartoons.” Instead, Superintendent Tolcacher insisted “it was not a freedom of speech issue, but a concern over the depiction of violence.”  Trying to normalize police profiling of youth based on their views and what police claim to be their intent, Wallace Shields, special agent in charge of the district explained: “If we get what someone reports to be a threat against any person or place we protect, we investigate it.”  “The drawing in itself is not the threat,” he said, emphasizing that it is “the intent behind it and the capability of the person to act upon it.”  The Secret Service, police and school administrators provided no explanation as to how the student’s intent was determined.  Note that the Secret Service is known as the President’s personal police force, an organization whose first director—a vigilante famous for attacking immigrants—had inscribed on his badge, “Death to All Traitors.”   The Secret Service is the same federal agency conducting live exercises in mass pre-emptive arrests and confining protesters to “protest pens.”  Invoking the “logic” of the “war on terrorism,” the Secret Service district office in Washington State said its actions in Prosser were not out of the ordinary.  “This is not something unique to Washington, and this is not something unique to the times that we live in,” said Shields.

States Make Bullying a Crime

The second example concerns so-called anti-bullying measures.  With these developments, social problems like bullying are made into “law and order” issues.  The actual problems are ignored.  In addition to specifically criminalizing behavior rooted in social problems, so-called anti-bullying laws and school security initiatives render youth as criminals on the basis of intent in much the same way that the USA Patriot Act defines terrorism based on intent.

Under the guise of preventing school violence, many states across the U.S. have or are considering adopting or modifying laws making bullying in public schools a crime.  At least 18 states now make bullying a crime, according to news sources.  (See http://www.bullypolice.org/ for updates.)

In Georgia earlier this year, the House passed a “tougher law on bullying,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The measure would expand the current law to cover elementary schools as well as middle and high schools.  As with many recently passed or proposed laws making bullying a crime, it calls on parents and students to make anonymous tips to their local schools and would require that all reports of bullying be investigated.  The news sources do not report who is responsible for carrying out the investigations.

Significantly, the new law would change the definition of bullying, which is now defined as a student’s “willful attempt or threat to inflict injury,” or an “intentional display of force” to provoke fear.  Under the new definition, bullying would be defined as “any pattern of written or verbal expression or any physical act or gesture that is intended [emphasis added] to ridicule, humiliate, intimidate, or cause measurable physical or emotional distress upon one or more students in the school, on school grounds, in school vehicles, at designated school bus stops, or at school activities or sanctioned events.”

In Indiana early this year, Superintendent of Public Instruction Suellen Reed actively backed a bill that would “require Indiana’s 293 school districts to adopt rules prohibiting bullying,” according to the Indianapolis Star.  “The bill,” the Star says, “would provide a better legal definition of bullying.” Senate Bill 231 defines bullying as “overt, repeated acts designed [emphasis added] to harass, ridicule, intimidate or humiliate another student.”  Indiana Legislatures are promoting the bill as an “alternative” to increasing funding for education, especially full-day kindergarten.  

In New York State, proposed changes would present an exceedingly broad and subjective definition of bullying.  Section 2803(D) of the proposed Senate Bill defines bullying as “threatening, stalking or seeking to coerce or compel a person to do something; engaging in verbal or physical conduct” [emphasis added]. 

The laws generally require that any “tip” be investigated by state authorities, thus immediately bringing state authorities into the picture even if no problem, let alone a crime, exists.  They also make determination of “bullying” a completely subjective matter of whether an administrator or teacher or parent thinks an individual intended to be bullying.

Discussion

It is important to recognize that this notion of safety is a “police” notion, where the issue is given as the need for safe schools. The question is of course safe from what?  According to the view of “safe schools” students make schools un-safe.  This notions of safety is informed by the aim of protecting the state or “national interest”.  As an example, the national organization of school resource (police) officers has recently sworn allegiance to the President and declared support for the war on terrorism.  This blocks people from recognizing that bullying, for example, is a social problem, not a question of national security.  This “prevention” approach actually blocks parents, students and teachers from uniting and working out together real solutions to the problems the youth and society face.  Instead, students’ behavior is criminalized, as all are labeled “potential” threats, and everyone is to be afraid of everyone else, secretly reporting on everyone else.  Teachers are to become informants and enforcers for the police.  This is a recipe for disaster, not a solution!

Equally important is this: the notion of prevention justifies attacking students rights and the basic democratic premises of innocent until proven guilty, due process and habeas corpus.  How so?  If prevention means “stopping people from committing acts of violence” logic holds that one must be able to identify the person who will in the future commit a violent act.  On this basis, the arbitrary notion of “potentially violent,” the notion that youth have a “propensity to commit violent acts” is popularized, normalized and justified.  Unless one believes in clairvoyance, determining those who will commit violent crimes in the future is impossible, and inherently arbitrary.

The notion of “potentially violent” serves as a justification for using force against students who have committed no crime, violated no school rule. This of course violates all three of the basic democratic premises listed above. The claim to be able to “identify potentially violent youth” is in fact a justification for impunity, where school officials can suspend and expel students at will under the guise of solving the problem of violence.  Now, similar actions are to be done in the name of “school security,” and “preventing terrorism.”

[NOTE: this is an edited version of a paper presented to the Halifax International Symposium On Media And Disinformation, June 30th – July 4th, 2004, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.]

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