The Gates Foundation “will advocate for the politically thorny goal of national standards — and will aim to write its own standards and its own national test,” reports Elizabeth Green at Gotham Schools.
The edusphere is reacting with arched eyebrows. “Gates-made national standards creep me out a little bit,” says Alexander Russo at This Week in Education, “I’d rather the states or the USDE develop the tests than the Gates Foundation do it.” At Eduwonkette, Aaron Pallas, aka “skoolboy,” laughed out loud at Green’s piece.
Does anybody else think this is a really, really bad idea? I’m delighted that the Gates Foundation has realized that throwing money at small schools didn’t work, but I’m not prepared to turn over the public’s interest in what is to be taught and learned to a private philanthropy, no matter how civic-minded it may be.
Perhaps I’m missing something, but industry lobbyists regularly play a role in policy and legislation where they have enormous self-interest with nary a peep. If it’s ok for the insurance industry to write health care legislation or the oil industry to craft energy policy, how could weighing in on national standards and assessments possibly be out of bounds for Gates, which has no dog in the fight outside of its reputational capital?
Bring it.
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If we want to spur innovation in education, the Department of Education should act more like the National Institutes of Health. So say Newark Mayor Cory Booker, venture capitalist John Doerr, and Ted Mitchell, chief executive of NewSchools Venture Fund in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece.
“We need a new, results-driven mind-set at the Department of Education that will drive pure educational innovation and ’scale up’ proven experiments and novel ideas that work, the trio write. ”The federal government stands in a unique position to meet these needs.”
The evidence for making a national commitment to innovation in education is compelling. Today, many of the most promising solutions are emerging from entrepreneurial organizations that embrace freedom and accountability. Indeed, such social entrepreneurs represent a growing force. They have started nimble, typically nonprofit organizations that work in partnership with creative mayors and school superintendents.
They cite the examples of KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Green Dot and others as worthy of federal support. Booker, Doerr and Mitchell want the next president to create a “Grow What Works” fund and a second fund to provide research and development money for promising early stage initiatives. They also favor eliminating caps on the number of public charter schools allowed and “excessive restrictions on how teachers are trained and credentialed.” They also call for national standards and tests — without actually using the words, prefering instead “a common set of standards” and “a national data infrastructure.”
“No fewer than seven bills that would alter how history is taught are currently before California’s legislature,” reports The Economist. “One is a measure about Filipinos. The others would encourage or force more lessons about African and Latin American cultures, American Indians, the “secret war” in Laos, the deportation of Hispanics in the 1930s, the desegregation of Mexican pupils and the Italian contribution to California.”
Each of these attempts to legislate content face an uphill slog. The magazine notes that California Democrats tend to support such measures, but Governor Schwarzenegger tends to veto them. But a larger battle looms: “Next month a group of academics and bureaucrats will begin holding public hearings on an overhaul of the curriculum framework—the first full one since 2001,” the Economist reports. “The coalitions that have been formed to push for legislation will no doubt make their feelings known.”
This presages what a debate on national content standards might look like, but that is not an argument against the attempt. In Bridging Differences recently, CK board member Diane Ravitch noted, “I see a national curriculum as the product of a professional consensus, one that involves subject-matter experts, teachers, administrators, and even end-users of the public schools like college professors and journalists. I also see such a curriculum evolving from careful research on international curriculum standards about what students at various ages are expected to know and be able to do. And I envision a curriculum that in toto amounts to not more than 50 percent of the school day, so that there would be many variations and additions depending on the state, region, and locale.”
A New York University study followed students entering the New York City public school system in the 1995-1996 school year and finds that about 40% of them had exited the system by 8th grade.
Student mobility is an underutilized, dead-bang argument for national content standards and curriculum. One out of four kids change schools three or more times over the course of their public school career. A GAO study showed one out of six children had attended three or more schools by the end of the 3rd grade. This high level of mobility has long been associated with lower student achievement and a higher likelihood of dropping out of school. While moving is disruptive for children in any scenario, continuity in curriculum would provide one less moving part, as it were.
Not surprisingly, it’s low-income and minority children whose education is disrupted by mobility the most. This is not news and the new NYU study reinforces it. The authors of the study are most concerned with continuous progression, grade-by-grade, associating “standard academic progress with higher performance on standardized tests.” (Huh? Do they mean to suggest that being held back caused lower performance? Isn’t low performance why they were held back?) Ignoring mobility is tantamount to writing off the academic outcomes of millions of kids.
Update: ASCD’s Educational Leadership has a story about student mobility online today (Thanks, Alexander Russo). It’s all about the emotional toll on teachers “I also thought of myself and the frustrations and heartbreak I had faced each year as students I cared about vanished,” writes Laura Hoeing, a 1st grade teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina. ”At what point would their frequent mobility discourage me from investing in relationships with my students and trying hard to teach them?”
I only know two things about UVA law school professor Jim Ryan. He’s a neighbor of Alice Wiggins, Core Knowledge’s Early Childhood Program Director, and he’s got a pretty solid prescription for what ails public education.
Slate is promising a 10-part series of posts from experts “offering detailed policy prescriptions for the next president, whomever that may be.” Ryan’s answers for education include national testing (”No one argues that it would be better to have 50 different AP tests in American history instead of one”) and fewer of them, “perhaps in only fourth, eighth, and 11th grades.” Agreed, and while we’re at it, let’s take up E.D. Hirsch’s idea to correlate reading tests to the content standards in other subjects. Teachers will teach to the test. Make that a productive use of classroom time as Hirsch’s idea suggests. This would also fit neatly with Ryan’s prescription: “Don’t stop all testing, stop stupid testing.”
Ryan also adds his voice to the growing chorus in favor of national standards . “It’s time to create national standards and tests in at least reading, math, science, and social studies/history,” he writes. “National tests in the past have been nonstarters politically, but they have always polled well, and some politicians are starting to come around. The reality is that the current federal-state compromise isn’t working and doesn’t make sense in a shrinking and flattening world. Why should we expect less of a student in Mississippi than in Massachusetts? Do fractions and algebra matter in North Carolina but not North Dakota?”
Ryan has lots more to say on value-added, preschool and teacher pay. Worth reading.
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