There is a lot to be said for national standards to be met in education. But there is a lot to think about as well. Like who is playing a huge role as the government sets those standards. And surprise, surprise...it's Bill Gates and Foundation.
A Dangerous ProposalA number of recent news items on education should demonstrate to educators how little attention the political establishment has paid to the legitimate concerns of teachers. That is because the so-called “educational reform” movements that were initiated during the Clinton Administration, codified by the Bush Administration’s “No Child Left Behind” program, and intensified by the Obama Administration’s “Race to the Top” have little if anything to do with improving education. They have to do with creating the illusion that they are improving education.
Please note that the same goals have been common throughout 3 administrations, two of them Democratic administrations. And the ideas were growing during the the Bush I years as well.
But there is a reason they are not going to be enough to truly fix anything in education.
To improve education would mean also improving the social and economic life of young learners who are disadvantaged because of racial, ethnic and class discrimination by an economic system that is consistently failing to provide good-paying jobs to an increasing number of working class and lower middle class workers. This is a systemic problem and using the schools as the whipping boy for its failure is one way in which politicians deal with serious problems: distract the public with a simplistic solution instead of a challenging one.
The writer mentions the recent discovery that NYC “State’s Exams Became Easier to Pass". Which made it look like students were doing better under the Bloomberg/Klein reign. And the writer wonders if the new national standards would meet the same fate.
.."The “higher standards” that Chancellor Klein is promising will be no more valid than the present “lower standards” the NYC school system has been promoting since the emphasis will continue to be on test prep instead of education.
The following day (7/ 21/10) The Times reported that 27 states are adopting “National Standards” for their education curriculum so as to be eligible for some of the “Race to the Top” funds by August 2. Laudable as it might be to have “national standards” (France has them), what procedures are going to be used to measure the success—or failure—of schools to “educate” their students up to these standards? Will there be penalties, as there are now, of school closings, student dislocation, loss of tenure, seniority, and, as a consequence, experienced teachers as a product of establishing and testing for these “standards?” If they are so important, why shouldn’t they be required for all schools in the country, private as well as public?
The 27 states easily adopted the national standards because of the promise of money from Arne Duncan. These are hard economic times, and why let a good crisis go to waste. Right?
But consider who has played a huge role, and a cozying up to the government role, in forming these standards?
Disturbances in the ForceThe writer is speaking of working in the 90s to formulate national standards, and how it was so very much a political process.
What I remember most clearly about the process, both within the arts and in the other groups working on curriculum areas such as English language and mathematics, is how arbitrary, political, and non-standardized it was. To create the national standards that we worked from, “experts” in each curriculum area gathered and hammered out their own vision of what those standards should look like. It was a process very akin to drafting legislation, complete with special interest groups, political intrusions, and wild incongruities.
Now, a couple of decades later, apparently Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama are either unaware of this history or are hoping that we don’t remember it. An administration that has struggled mightily to effect positive change in health care, financial regulation, and unemployment relief (to name a few) has swiftly gotten 27 states to adopt a set of curiously unexamined national standards, and a dozen more to move close to passage. How did they do it?
A possible answer is look who's on board.
So, to summarize:
* A private foundation created by one of the world’s wealthiest men funded the creation of “national” standards by “experts” in their fields.
* An unelected and unexamined group of people has decided for the entire nation which skills students should be able to master at each grade level; never mind that age and grade level are NOT determinant of readiness to learn any specific skill. (That whole discussion has been buried as inconvenient.)
* Private enterprise stands ready to scoop up billions of dollars in federal money that will pass right through the states’ hands and into those of textbook and test publishers.
That's a powerful group. Add to that Arne's billions for those states that approve them, and you have an answer.
The New York Times pointed these things out in a recent article.
National StandardsTheir support has surprised many in education circles, given states’ long tradition of insisting on retaining local control over curriculum.
The quick adoption of common standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school is attributable in part to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition. States that adopt the standards by Aug. 2 win points in the competition for a share of the $3.4 billion to be awarded in September.
“I’m ecstatic,” said Arne Duncan, the secretary of education. “This has been the third rail of education, and the fact that you’re now seeing half the nation decide that it’s the right thing to do is a game-changer.”
The effort has been helped by financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to most of the organizations involved in drafting, evaluating and winning support for the standards. The common core standards, two years in the making and first released in draft form in March, are an effort to replace the current hodgepodge of state policies.
More remarks from
Disturbances in the ForceInstead of all the “hodgepodge” of state standards, which result in spreading the textbook and testing dollars around to various sources, the biggest publishing companies now stand to rake in all the state dollars for the uniform, standardized textbooks and tests. And since it’s all new, everyone will have to buy new. It’s the capitalist’s dream of the function of government: to shovel the public’s money into private enterprise.
Once again, dear readers, we are hoist on the petard of profit. Once more we are rushed willy-nilly into a great flurry of sound and fury signifying nothing more than a transfer of money from our pockets to the coffers of big business, all gussied up in the self-righteous raiment of “better education.”
If you can find anyone to take the bet, you could make a lot of money by wagering that, when all the dust settles, actual teaching and learning will continue to languish in favor of showy, big-dollar initiatives that do little more than make politicians seem like they are doing something about a problem they clearly know nothing about.
And there is more to think about. Consider that the "reforms" have in large part been done by two men whose work in their districts have been criticized and often discredited...Rod Paige under Bush, and now Arne Duncan.
The two principal initiators of these school “reforms,” Rod Paige under the Bush Administration and Arne Duncan under the Obama Administration, have been shown to be failures, if not frauds in the case of Paige, in the programs they administered as the superintendants of schools in Houston and Chicago. In Paige’s case, the improved test scores were found, in some instances, to be the product of cheating, and many of the statistics were skewed by not counting drop out rates. In Duncan’s case, some of his “reforms” proved even more lethal as rival gangs, forced to share the same “turf” because one of their schools was closed, began to wage gang wars, reflected in the rise in the recent murder rate in Chicago. Yet there has been no serious re-examination of the validity of Paige’s and Duncan’s programs in view of their actual records as “educators.”
Journal of Education Controversy BlogTaking education policies national when they have not been proved to work on a local level...not a good idea.
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