Curmudgucation: 40 Years of Failure by the “Ed Reformers” – Now What?

Peter Greene has some suggestions:

https://open.substack.com/pub/curmudgucation/p/the-end-of-ed-reform-and-a-clue-for?r=3u611&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

I had been also thinking (but did not write down) that the tide would turn, and that teachers and schools themselves would no longer be seen as the whole cause of poverty or brilliance.

Instead, I feared that racists would once again become free to loudly and publicly blame black and brown people for their own poverty, just like they did from the end of Reconstruction 147 years ago, right up through the anti-Civil Rights backlash of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1983 the essay (disguised as an objective report) called “Nation At Risk” (NAR) jump-started an Education Reform drive that was truly bi-partisan, and had scores of billionaires both liberal (eg Gates) and conservative (eg Waltons) willing to fund it and push politicians to back it. Presidents Clinton, Bush2, and Obama and their secretaries of education all embraced it.

If you hadn’t noticed, this reform movement failed completely.

By its own terms (that is, test scores).

Despite having ‘edu-reformers’ in charge of every single large public school system in the nation.

But it took a while for those failures to become obvious.

At first, only a handful of writers such as Gerald Bracey pointed out the errors in that study and in the reformers’ steamroller. When the report first came out, I was teaching math to 7th graders in a very poor region of DC, and felt embarrassed that so many of my students there (100% Black) did so poorly in school, despite my efforts and those of my colleagues.

Some teachers from East Asia warned me not to believe the hype surrounding NAR. They said the model of education that exists in China, Japan, Korea and so on was NOT one that should be emulated by the US.

But I did believe the myth.

Later, I read some columns by Bracey and others and began to have doubts.

Then the amazing fraud Michelle Rhee was given control of DC’s entire public school system in 2007, less than two years before I retired.

I had never heard of the woman before, but upon her being named Chancellor of DCPS, I heard that she claimed to have performed educational miracles in a low-income, all-Black public school as a 3rd and 4th grade charter school teacher in Baltimore. She wrote in her resume: “Over a two-year period” in the mid-1990s she “moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.”

When I read that sentence in her resume, I seem to recall my jaw literally dropping open.

If you have ever been around kids and looked at their test scores, you would realize that this feat would be the equivalent of landing a triple axel in ice skating, while also sinking a three-pointer in the NBA, and running a marathon in under two hours.

Simultaneously.

If this really had happened, it would have been front-page news in every single publication that dealt with education.

(Sounds like George Santos took lessons on fake resume claims from Michelle Rhee!)

Of course, there were no such articles. So I scratched my head and wondered.

After I retired, someone pointed me to where the fairly detailed Baltimore test scores could be found. I looked at them, and found that she had mythologized a small bump in test scores into the greatest educational achievement ever accomplished, anywhere. And nobody had called her on this lie.

I suspect that the bump can be attributed in large part to the fact that over one third of the students at her grade level, at that school, in that year, had scores that were so low that they weren’t counted!!! I wrote a few posts on my blog about it, and even did a call-in on an NPR interview with her, asking why she lied so much, in particular about those scores. She just giggled, as if to imply that I was just being an idiot for trying to call her on such a small technicality, when she was still working miracles.

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From the Daily Howler: “In the 1994-1995 school year, the seven schools run by EAI were under enormous pressure. During and after the previous year, major disputes had broken out about the low test scores of the EAI schools; by the fall of 1994, everyone knew that the pressure was on, that the plug might be pulled on the program. (As a simple Nexis search will show, all these matters were being discussed in the Baltimore Sun.) Do we possess three brain cells among us? If any school in the EAI group had an educational miracle occurring, this glorious fact would have been shouted to the skies by EAI’s corporate leadership. Trust us: The teachers involved would have gained acclaim in the national media—the kind of “acclaim” Rhee used to say she had attained, before she realized she had to stop saying it. It’s absurd to think there was some large group of third-graders “scoring at the 90th percentile or higher,” but their test scores somehow never came to the attention of the UMBC researchers.”

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Apparently nobody else with any knowledge of basic, elementary statistics and probability had previously bothered to compare those actual scores with her extraordinary claims. So I wrote what I found, with a fair amount of fury at the fact that such an amazing, world-class fraud and liar could be in charge of education in my home city, Washington, DC, the very seat of national government and so on. I got my 15 minutes of fame, but while Rhee did retire in disgrace, she has unfortunately never been indicted for fraud, even though she clearly suborned all sorts of cheating and erasing of bubble marks on students’ tests, and gave prizes and awards to one of the most prolific cheaters, a principal in my own neighborhood. (see here for some details.)

As I have recently feared, but did not put into writing, the really scary part now is that right-wingers and racists are using the failure of this billionaire-led disruption of public schools to get rid of the very idea of public education as a public good. They applaud the self-segregation.

Along with Curmudgucation, I find the prospect very scary.

Comic Strip Shows the Uselessness of Big Standardized Tests

I had similar experiences back when I was teaching. Any other teachers, parents, or students want to add their thoughts?

As a 7th grader, could you have solved these? And how about now?

Do you realize how DIFFICULT the problems are on today’s 7th-grade PARCC-style standardized tests?

Take a look at this handful of questions, and feel free to look at others. If you compare these to the typical 7th-grade standardized test items from 30 or 40 years ago, you will have to conclude that these items asked these days are **much** more difficult than the ones from the past.

I strongly doubt that the folks who wrote these items, and those who are putting these items on the tests that nearly every 7th grader in the USA has to take, could have solved these when they were 7th graders?

And how many of my readers can solve these now, as adults?

Here are just a few:

‘Beatings Must Continue Until Morale Improves’

The ‘Value-Added Measurement’ movement in American education, implemented in part by the now-disgraced Michelle Rhee here in DC, has been a complete and utter failure, even as measured by its own yardsticks, as you will see below

Yet, the same corporate ‘reformers’ who were its major cheerleaders do not conclude from this that the idea was a bad one. Instead, they claim that it wasn’t tried with enough rigor and fidelity.

From “Schools Matter“:

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How to Learn Nothing from the Failure of VAM-Based Teacher Evaluation

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform is a most exclusive academic club lavishly funded and outfitted at Brown U. for the advancement of corporate education in America. 

The Institute is headed by Susanna Loeb, who has a whole slew of degrees from prestigious universities, none of which has anything to do with the science and art of schooling, teaching, or learning.  

Researchers at the Institute are circulating a working paper that, at first glance, would suggest that school reformers might have learned something about the failure of teacher evaluation based on value-added models applied to student test scores. The abstract:

Starting in 2009, the U.S. public education system undertook a massive effort to institute new high-stakes teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting the staggered timing of implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 1.5 percent of a standard deviation for achievement and 1 percentage point for high school graduation and college enrollment. We also find little evidence of heterogeneous effects across an index measuring system design rigor, specific design features, and district characteristics. [my emphasis – GFB]

So could this mean that the national failure of VAM applied to teacher evaluation might translate to decreasing the brutalization of teachers and the waste of student learning time that resulted from the implementation of VAM beginning in 2009?

No such luck.   

The conclusion of the paper, in fact, clearly shows that the Annenbergers have concluded that the failure to raise test scores by corporate accountability means (VAM) resulted from laggard states and districts that did not adhere strictly to the VAM’s mad methods.  In short, the corporate-led failure of VAM in education happened as a result of schools not being corporate enough:

Firms in the private sector often fail to implement best management practices and performance evaluation systems because of imperfectly competitive markets and the costs of implementing such policies and practices (Bloom and Van Reenen 2007). These same factors are likely to have influenced the design and implementation of teacher evaluation reforms. Unlike firms in a perfectly competitive market with incentives to implement management and evaluation systems that increase productivity, school districts and states face less competitive pressure to innovate. Similarly, adopting evaluation systems like the one implemented in Washington D.C. requires a significant investment of time, money, and political capital. Many states may have believed that the costs of these investments outweighed the benefits. Consequently, the evaluation systems adopted by many states were not meaningfully different from the status quo and subsequently failed to improve student outcomes.

So the Gates-Duncan RTTT corporate plan for teacher evaluation failed not because it was a corporate model but because it was not corporate enough!  In short, there were way too many small carrots and not enough big sticks.

Would You Want to be a Student in Korea?

I doubt it. Or, why “Rigor” sucks.

This is from Schools Matter:

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New Year’s Resolution: Eliminate “Rigor” from Education Lexicon

Posted: 09 Jan 2022 02:27 PM PST

If there is a single word that comes close to capturing the zeitgeist of corporate education austerity policies that have metastasized since the Reagan era (among both Democrats and Republicans), it would be a five-letter signifier that has done more damage to effective and humane schooling than any one word in the English language: “rigor.” 

If you can believe the education efficiency zealots of the last two generations, the answer to most questions about schooling have the same answer: more “rigor.” Whether we’re talking about curriculum, teacher quality, teacher education, leadership, or assessment, what we need is more “rigor.”

I went to Webster’s online looking for a word that might serve as an adequate replacement.  Here’s some of what I found for the word “rigor:”

Synonyms & Antonyms of rigor

2. the quality or state of being demanding or unyielding (as in discipline or criticism)

• after being coddled by his former coach, the swimmer was shocked by the rigor of the new training program

Synonyms for rigor

• exactingness,
• hardness,
• harshness,
• inflexibility,
• rigidity,
• rigidness,
• rigorousness,
• severity,
• sternness,
• strictness,
• stringency

Words Related to rigor

• callousness,
• hard-heartedness,
• implacability,
• obduracy,
• obdurateness,
• pitilessness
• dourness,
• gruffness
• asceticism,
• austereness,
• austerity,
• monasticism
• determination,
• firmness,
• resolve,
• steadfastness
• obstinacy,
• stubbornness

Near Antonyms for rigor

• forbearance,
• indulgence,
• kindness,
• lenience,
• patience,
• softness,
• tenderness,
• tolerance
• responsiveness,
• willingness
• compliance,
• pliability,
• pliancy

Antonyms for rigor

• flexibility,
• gentleness,
• laxness,
• mildness

And, yet, there seems to be no end to the use of this code word for segregated “no excuses” KIPP Model schools, “zero tolerance” straight jacket discipline, and racist standardized testing regimes that effectively keep marginalized populations on the margins.

Today I came across an interview with Amanda Ripley, who has become one of the pretty masks placed on the corporate education Frankenstein that continues to wreak havoc with any efforts to transform schools into substantive learning communities aimed at opening and integrating the world for children in challenging and supportive ways.

In the summary provided for her interview, Amanda praises the “rigorous learning” of Korean students.  What does Amanda know about Korean education? Well, she interviewed a student who lived in both Korea and the U. S.:

Kids rise to the level of their peer culture when it comes to how important they think rigorous learning is. Especially adolescents are extremely focused on what their peers are doing. There’s a great example of a girl I met in Korea named Jenny, who had lived half of her life in the U.S. and then moved back to Korea. And what she talked about was how different she was in each place. In Korea, everybody worked really hard and took school really seriously, so she did too. And then in [America], school was much lower on her priority list.

No, Amanda, students in Korea try to rise to the level of the monstrous system created by a steroidal version of American capitalism, which has created a dystopian regime whereby parents sacrifice the health and well-being of their children for the “rigorous” demands of a soul-crushing system of schooling based on memorization and recitation.   

This is from a former teacher in one of Korea’s hagwons, or cram schools:

Cram schools like the one I taught in — known as hagwons in Korean — are a mainstay of the South Korean education system and a symbol of parental yearning to see their children succeed at all costs. Hagwons are soulless facilities, with room after room divided by thin walls, lit by long fluorescent bulbs, and stuffed with students memorizing English vocabulary, Korean grammar rules and math formulas. Students typically stay after regular school hours until 10 p.m. or later.

Herded to various educational outlets and programs by parents, the average South Korean student works up to 13 hours a day, while the average high school student sleeps only 5.5 hours a night to ensure there is sufficient time for studying. Hagwons consume more than half of spending on private education.

Any Ripley hit job wouldn’t be complete without an attack on teacher education programs in the U. S. While she decries the continued existence of non-rigorous “mediocre teacher training colleges,” she has nothing to say about the micro-preparation provided to Teach for America beginner missionaries who are placed into schools with children who need the most experienced and best prepared teachers among us. Nor does she voice any objection to the exploitative non-higher ed alternative certification programs that leave would-be teachers less prepared than accredited university programs. 

Finally, one of Ripley’s conjectures remains truly puzzling to me, even considering her thorough lack of understanding of how schools actually work and how teachers experience their jobs:

Anyone who has seen a great teacher or been a great teacher knows that it is not different from being the CEO of a company; there is a lot that is demanded of you and it requires a lot of support.

Yes, Amanda, “rigorous” teaching is sort of like being a CEO, except for the pay, the prestige, the perks, the lifestyle, and the autonomy. Teachers in the U.S. rank 27th in teacher pay among 32 OECD countries.   I’m still looking for a substitute for “rigor.” Until I find it, I guess I’ll settle for challenging, supportive, substantive, open, and integrative.

How to Cheerlead for Charter Schools by Leaving out Important Data

Copied from the rather uneven blog “Schools Matter”.

The Sunny Side of Corruption by Jay Mathews

Posted: 10 Jan 2022 07:55 AM PST

American print media’s most prominent charter school cheerleader is at it again.  In his most recent Washington Post column, Jay Mathews is preaching the virtues of IDEA Charter Schools, Inc., which recently lost its CEO founder and other senior leaders due to corruption charges involving private jets, NBA sky boxes, and routine use of public funds for “personal benefit:”

A financial investigation “uncovered substantial evidence that … a small number of IDEA senior leaders directed the use of IDEA financial and staff resources for their personal benefit on multiple occasions,” Board Chair Al Lopez wrote in a letter Tuesday. “Furthermore, their actions appeared to be done in a manner to avoid detection by the standard external audit and internal control processes that the Board had in place at the time.”

None of this corruption or efforts to conceal the crimes could ever dampen Jay’s enthusiasm, however.  Nor has Mathews departed from his unique brand of dissembling propaganda. Just one example from this latest column:

“Charters are independently run public schools that use tax dollars. Most are no better academically than regular public schools. But a 2013 Stanford University report showed that 25 percent of charters were significantly better in reading achievement and 29 percent were significantly better in math achievement than neighboring regular public schools serving the same kinds of students.”

When we go to the actual research report that includes Jay’s numbers, we find the details that put a whole new light on Jay’s sunny summary.  From the Credo Study, 2013, p. 22 Executive Summary:

Figure 8 shows the performance of charter schools relative to the TPS in their market. Based on our analyses, we found 25 percent of schools had significantly stronger growth than their TPS market counterparts in reading, 56 percent were not significantly different and 19 percent of schools had weaker growth. In math, the results show that 29 percent of charter schools had stronger growth than their TPS market counterparts, 40 percent had growth that was not significantly different, and 31 percent had weaker growth. These results were an improvement over those in the 2009 report.

LEFT: reading Right: Math

[In other words, the results for charter schools and regular public schools are essentially identical. – GFB]

Another Unsuccessful ‘Reformer’ to head NYC Public Schools

Someone named David Banks will most likely be the next head of New York City’s public school system. Gary Rubinstein, a math teacher and prolific blogger at Stuyvesant HS there, had never heard of the fellow, even though Banks had founded and led a network of nearly a dozen NYC public schools called the Eagle Academy for Young Men. So Rubinstein looked at the public record, and found that on just about all measures that Reformsters use, those schools are mostly failures. However, none of the local news outlets (NY Times, NY Post, etc) appears to have examined that record.

The record is not good. Read Rubinstein’s post for details.

I followed the links he gave, and found the following graphics for a number of the schools in that network. Feel free to explore some on your own by going here and then typing the word “eagle” and choosing any one of the schools.

Note the dark blue dots in the right hand graph in each case that I copied and pasted; they all, without exception, showed that the schools in that ensemble of schools, showed that they had both low average performance by the students AND had a low impact (meaning, they didn’t raise the academic performance of their students) by comparison with all of the other public schools in New York City.

Why do ‘reformers’ get a pass from the media, even though they never succeed at pulling off what they so boldly promise?

Reposted from Valerie Jablow:

Fixing OSSE (And DC Democracy): Testimony From A DCPS Parent

OCTOBER 29, 2021 ~ VALERIE JABLOW

[Ed. Note: On October 26, a subset of DC council members (Phil Mendelson, Janeese Lewis George, Robert White, Brianne Nadeau, Mary Cheh, Brooke Pinto, and Charles Allen) heard hours of testimony on two bills that would change the governance structure of DC’s office of the state superintendent of education (OSSE).

One of the bills in the hearing would make OSSE an independent agency, while the other bill (co-sponsored by Lewis George and Robert White) would ensure its oversight by the elected state board of education (SBOE) and permit DCPS staff to run for elected office. In support of a change in governance, council members cited OSSE’s clear conflict of interest (wherein both it and DCPS now report to the mayor); the fact that many of our Black students are not achieving well; and OSSE’s withheld or undiscovered information about attendance, suspensions, and graduation rates in all DC publicly funded schools.

Public witnesses in support of the legislation noted that OSSE’s current governance shuts out the people most affected by its policies: parents, school staff, and students. In the meantime, true accountability for schools remains impossible when “bad news out of OSSE means loss of votes for the mayor” (per inimitable DCPS parent and ed researcher Betsy Wolf). Those opposing the legislation (mostly charter and ed reform interests) argued that it puts progress at risk, while adding a “burden” to schools and altering the “streamlined decision making” (our deputy mayor for education’s term) that currently exists.

Pointed exchanges occurred with questioning by Ward 4 council member Janeese Lewis George of the hearing’s sole government witness, deputy mayor for education Paul Kihn. In two sessions well worth the view (about 4:57:58 to 5:13:20 and 5:39:35 to 5:51:20 in the video), Lewis George asked Kihn about enrollment, use of federal covid relief funds, loss of Head Start funds, and retention of teachers. After about 5 minutes, a frustrated Kihn said the questions felt like a pop quiz and noted that he was used to responding in writing (!). Lewis George replied that she submitted the questions ahead of time, so not only had Kihn time to prepare answers, but also that this process ensured the answers got on the record verbally.

But beyond the (now) well-known and brutal history of our state education agency’s accountability gaps, the council testimony of Ward 4 lawyer and DCPS parent Robin Appleberry elegantly connected that history to the last 19 months of our pandemic—and to the idea and ideals of DC democracy itself.

Read on–and be sure to weigh in on the legislation before the record closes on November 9.]

By Robin Appleberry

Thank you, council, for holding this important hearing. My name is Robin Appleberry, and I am a parent in Ward 4. I have lived in DC for over 20 years, and my children have attended our neighborhood public schools for over 7 years. Based on my family’s experiences and the core principles of democracy, inclusion, and accountability that I know all of you embrace, I urge you to support the DC State Education Agency Independence Amendment Act, sponsored by Councilmember Lewis George, as well as sensible amendments to realize its goals.

Mr. Chairman, when you disbanded this council’s committee on education almost a year ago, you stated that every member of this council is now responsible for education. I agree. You and others on this council speak often about your commitment to equity in education. I applaud that commitment. And many of you have spoken powerfully about why statehood is critical to democracy and justice for DC. For example, last March Chairman Mendelson testified to Congress on behalf of this entire body that independent, locally elected representation is “the only way to ensure a . . . system that is sensitive to community values” and “the only way to give residents a full, guaranteed and irrevocable voice.” I agree. And those same commitments and principles should compel you to support the moderate and sensible reform proposed by the Lewis George legislation.

At the heart of your many statements to the people of this city and to Congress is the notion of checks and balances, the idea that power is unjust and unsustainable without transparency, accountability, and–perhaps most important–the participation of those directly affected.

But that is exactly what we have with unchecked mayoral control over schools.

Families living the reality of public education in DC have no reliable information and no real voice in the policies that shape our children’s health, safety, growth and well being. And let’s be clear–the majority of these children and families are Black, Latine, recent immigrant or otherwise in communities subject to vast historic and continuing inequity. So when we call for equity but oppose accountability to those most affected, we are performing, not leading.

Reopening during the pandemic is a perfect example: at every decision point in the last 19 months, the mayor has obscured, mischaracterized, withheld, or even refused to collect essential health data; infantilized, disempowered, and discounted the lived experiences of children, families, and educators; and misled the public and this council about the critical factors such as building safety, digital resource distribution, behavioral support services, staffing, and more. The message to me from the mayor, the chancellor, the deputy mayor for education and OSSE throughout the pandemic has been crystal clear: We know better than you what is best for your child. And not only should you trust us to decide that for your family, you should not ask us to explain ourselves, to show that our commitments are met, or even to share the data on which we rely to make decisions.

Experience has made plain that without the accountability and oversight that only a truly independent body can provide, the mayor and those who report to her answer only to this council, which cannot possibly serve as a close and comprehensive check on that consolidated power.

Even when this council identifies a serious gap and musters the collective will to act, its ability to remedy the situation is profoundly limited, by procedure and by bandwidth. We can look at the recent emergency legislation enacted by this council just weeks ago, which did not even manage to ensure that any student living with a medically vulnerable family member can learn virtually until the child can be vaccinated against covid-19. Would anyone here feel comfortable sending a member of their household to spend all day, every day in a building that may or may not have adequate ventilation with hundreds of unvaccinated kids who may or may not be wearing masks properly, and then to come home every night to live with a family member undergoing cancer treatment? If this is not what we would accept for our families, why do we accept it for anyone, and why is emergency city council intervention our only means of addressing these issues?

This is just an example. Whatever your views on reopening–and reasonable minds absolutely can land in different places–I hope we all agree that decisions affecting children and families should be made not for children and families but with us, and with transparency and accountability. Elected representatives with real oversight authority are the only way to provide that. Just as we don’t want congressional representatives from Utah or Florida deciding how we in DC can live, love, and keep each other safe, neither should our schools be run in secrecy by a handful of people who don’t meaningfully answer to the people whose lives they affect.

I want to emphasize that simply making OSSE into an independent agency is not enough–we need elected officials with the resources and authority to engage in meaningful oversight and to hold leaders accountable. We don’t just need someone to document when a DC agency is, for example, failing to fix HVAC systems, reporting buildings as safe when they are not, failing to conduct enough covid tests, or seeking ways to obscure the results of those tests. We need real checks and balances–a body to ensure that policies and practices actually change. An independent OSSE without the oversight and accountability of resourced, elected SBOE officials is not going to get us there.

It’s undeniable that education is at the very core of what this city is and what it can be. Education is not a perk of a robust economy, a luxury for the privileged, or a consumer good for the savvy. It is a human right to which every single child in this city is entitled, and it is the only way–the only way—for us to become a city that thrives. No amount of painted street slogans, hip restaurants, or new condos will save us if we give up on inclusive democracy and excellent, equitable education for all. By any measure, that is not what we have now.

In this moment, when you look at how the children of our entire city are faring under unchecked mayoral control, it is evident that the system is not “sensitive to community values” and we have failed to “give residents a full, guaranteed and irrevocable voice.” How can we ask Congress to respect democracy, when we ourselves do not?

I urge you to take a reasonable and balanced approach to restoring community voice in our schools by adopting the DC State Education Agency Independence Amendment Act, along with targeted amendments to that bill to enhance equity, inclusion, transparency and accountability for all our children and families. Thank you.

Alfie Kohn: “Who’s Cheating Whom?”

The prolific and incisive education writer Alfie Kohn casts a discerning eye on the current and past epidemic of cheating in K-12 schools and higher education. He notes that the evidence shows that …

“[…] when teachers don’t seem to have a real connection with their students, or when they don’t seem to care much about them, students are more inclined to cheat.[5] 
That’s a very straightforward finding, and not a particularly surprising one, but if taken seriously it has the effect of shifting our attention and reshaping the discussion.

“So, too, does a second finding:  Cheating is more common when students experience the academic tasks they’ve been given as boring, irrelevant, or overwhelming.  In two studies of ninth and tenth graders, for example, “Perceived likelihood of cheating was uniformly relatively high . . . when a teacher’s pedagogy was portrayed as poor.”[6]  

“To put this point positively, cheating is relatively rare in classrooms where the learning is genuinely engaging and meaningful to students and where a commitment to exploring significant ideas hasn’t been eclipsed by a single-minded emphasis on “rigor.”  The same is true in “democratic classes where [students’] opinions are respected and welcomed.”[7]  

“List the classroom practices that nourish a disposition to find out about the world, the teaching strategies that are geared not to covering a prefabricated curriculum but to discovering the significance of ideas, and you will have enumerated the conditions under which cheating is much less likely to occur.   (Interestingly, one of the mostly forgotten findings from that old Teachers College study was that “progressive school experiences are less conducive to deception than conventional school experiences” – a result that persisted even after the researchers controlled for age, IQ, and family background.   In fact, the more time students spent in either a progressive school or a traditional school, the greater the difference between the two in terms of cheating.)[8]”

In addition, concentrating on class rankings or awards in academics provides even more pressure to cheat.

There is a lot more. Read the entire article. And click to subscribe to his page.

A new attack on the very idea of Public Education

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has always been very right-wing, pro-billionaire, anti-labor, and so on. It appears to be helping build an attack on the very idea of a common, public education.

Peter Greene of Curmudgucation analyzes a recent article by an ideologue of Koch-type, Ayn Rand-style ideas.

CURMUDGUCATION

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What The WSJ Anti-Public Ed Op-Ed Gets Wrong Posted: 25 Oct 2021 09:08 AM PDT Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal (Fix News’ upscale sibling) published an op-ed from Philip Hamburger, a Columbia law professor and head of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a Koch-funded pro bono firm that takes cases primarily to defend against the “administrative state.” It’s a hit job on public education with some pretty bold arguments, some of which are pretty insulting. But he sure says a lot of the quiet part out loud, and that makes this worth a look. Let me walk you through this. (Warning–it’s a little rambly, and you can skip to the last section if you want to get the basic layout) Hamburger signals where he’s headed with the very first paragraph: The public school system weighs on parents. It burdens them not simply with poor teaching and discipline, but with political bias, hostility toward religion, and now even sexual and racial indoctrination. Schools often seek openly to shape the very identity of children. What can parents do about it? Hamburger offers no particular evidence for any of this catalog of arguable points. Various surveys repeatedly show that the majority of parents approve of their child’s public school. The rest is a litany of conservative complaints with no particular evidence, but Hamburger needs the premise to power the rest of his argument. So here comes Hamburger’s bold assertion: Education is mostly speech, and parents have a constitutional right to choose the speech with which their children will be educated. They therefore cannot constitutionally be compelled, or even pressured, to make their children a captive audience for government indoctrination Conservative talking points about public education routinely assert and assume that public education is a service provided to parents, rather than to the students or society at large. It’s case I’ve never seen them successfully make. At the same time, society’s stake in educated members is clear and the entire rationale behind having non-parent taxpayers help pay the cost of public education. In any other instance where the taxpayers subsidize a private individual’s purchase of goods or service (e.g. food stamps, housing), some conservatives say the social safety net is a Bad Thing, so it’s uncharacteristic for them to champion public education as, basically, a welfare program for parents when they want to dramatically reduce all other such programs to bathtub-drowning size (spoiler alert: they’d like to do that with public education, too).  But Hamburger has taken another step here, arguing that speech to children somehow belongs to their parents. It’s a bold notion–do parents somehow have a First Amendment right to control every sound that enters their children’s ears? Where are the children’s rights in this? Or does Hamburger’s argument (as some angry Twitter respondents claim) reduce children to chattel? Hamburger follows his assertion with some arguments that don’t help. He argues that public education has always attempted to “homogenize and mold the identity of children,” which is a huge claim and, like much of his argument, assumes that schools somehow have the power to overwrite or erase everything that parents have inculcated at home. But then, for the whole argument currently raging, it’s necessary to paint public schools as huge threat in order to justify taking dramatic major action against them.  The great Protestant scam Hamburger also notes that public education has “been valued for corralling most of the poor and middle class into institutions where their religious and ethnic differences could be ironed out” which would be a more powerful point if most of the poor hadn’t generally avoided public education entirely. But he’s going to go further by claiming that “well into the 20th century, much of the political support for public schooling was driven by fear of Catholicism and an ambition to Protestantize Catholic children.” There’s no doubt that some of this was going on, but the primary goal of public education?  The court case he leans on first is Pierce v Society of Sister, a 1925 Oregon case that established a parental right to substitute private religious school for public schooling. Hamburger argues that the underlying idea of the case is that Freedom of Speech = educational liberty, which gets him back to his central idea:  education is speech and therefor public education impinges on parents’ First Amendment rights. Further, Hamburger imagines an America in which some sort of pressure is exerted on people (mostly Catholics) to accept public education mind control, thereby violating–well, here’s the shortest form of the argument he offers. When government makes education compulsory and offers it free of charge, it crowds out parental freedom in educational speech. The poorer the parents, the more profound the pressure—and that is by design. Nativists intended to pressure poor and middle-class parents into substituting government educational speech for their own, and their unconstitutional project largely succeeded. Most parents can’t afford to turn down public schooling. They therefore can’t adopt speech expressive of their own views in educating their children, whether by paying for a private school or dropping out of work to home school. So they are constrained to adopt government educational speech in place of their own, in violation of the First Amendment.Hamburger doesn’t offer any kind of smoking gun to underline or expose the “nativists” dire intent. Nor does he explain why the public school system in some locales had to be forced to accept some students (I assume that he does not intend to argue that Southern schools blocked Black students out of deep respect for their parents’ First Amendment rights).  Public education squashes parents, apparently. Hamburger returns to a funhouse mirror of public education. Rather than an attempt to improve society as a whole and extend equal opportunity to all children, his view is that public education exists strictly to indoctrinate, to overrule parents, and is so lacking in any desirable virtue that government must conspire to force families to submit. His language posits a bizarre world. Parents somehow “can’t adopt speech expressive of their own views” and must adopt government “educational speech in place of their own.” All of this as if once parents send their children to school, they must never again express their own values or ideas in their own home. He hits this “in place of their own” idea a lot, as if the beginning of public education is the end of any sort of childrearing at home.  He next does a neat ju-jitsu trick where he observes that if fears of coercion and indoctrination are enough to keep religious elements out of public school, they should be enough to keep Other Secular Stuff out of school. Next, he works his way around to the objection I raised earlier–society’s “compelling interest in public education.” He would like to dismantle this claim. I’m unconvinced.  The U.S. was founded in an era when almost all schooling was private and religious, and that already suggests that any government interest in public education is neither necessary nor compelling. This elicited my first “Oh, come on.” When the US was founded, some students went to private school. Some did not. Most enslaved children were specifically forbidden to. When the US founded, the body of knowledge one needed to grasp to make one’s way through the world was considerably smaller, and there were fewer citizens in the whole US than there are right now in New York City. So, no. Also, he argues again that public schools caught on basically as a plot by anti-Catholic nativists. This is a bold argument, made all the bolder because many, many paragraphs in, he has not offered even a cherry-picked out-of-context quote to back this up. But he is going to try to reinterpret a quote with a wild stretch: In their vision, public schools were essential for inculcating American principles so that children could become independent-minded citizens and thinking voters. The education reformer and politician Horace Mann said that without public schools, American politics would bend toward “those whom ignorance and imbecility have prepared to become slaves.” That sounds wholesome in the abstract. In practice, it meant that Catholics were mentally enslaved to their priests, and public education was necessary to get to the next generation, imbuing them with Protestant-style ideas so that when they reached adulthood, they would vote more like Protestant. Has any giant conspiracy ever failed so spectacularly? Horace Mann and his ilk were out to wipe out Catholicism and make everyone think Protestanty ideas and get everyone to vote the right way, and yet, none of that actually happened. And again, Hamburger talks about education as if it has no value or purpose beyond indoctrinating children.  Is this one more plan to replace white folks with Democrat voters? This goal of shaping future voters gave urgency to the government’s interest in public education. As today, the hope was to liberate children from their parents’ supposedly benighted views and thereby create a different sort of polity. Now as then, this sort of project reeks of prejudice and indoctrination. There is no lawful government interest in displacing the educational speech of parents who don’t hold government-approved views, let alone in altering their children’s identity or creating a government-approved electorate So, again, Hamburger reduces public education to a vast conspiracy to shout down parents and not, say, a means of creating educated citizens who are empowered to understand themselves and the world well enough to forge a productive and rewarding place in it.  Hamburger wraps up by again harkening back to those great days of the 18th century: The shared civic culture of 18th-century America was highly civilized, and it developed entirely in private schools. The schools, like the parents who supported them, were diverse in curriculum and their religious outlook, including every shade of Protestantism, plus Judaism, Catholicism, deism and religious indifference. In their freedom, the 18th-century schools established a common culture. In contrast, public-school coercion has always stimulated division. I have some serious doubts about the diversity he lists, but I will note that it does not include a diversity of wealth and race. Or, for that matter, gender. Divisions is always less of a problem when Some People know their place and avoid interrupting their betters with complaints. But he needs this to be true because he’s headed back around to the assertion that public schools are “coercive” and “the focal point for all that is tearing the nation apart.” His solution, favored by Libertarians these days, is to get public schools to stop tearing people apart by letting people tear themselves apart and silo with other folks of the same ideological stripe, because that has always worked out well. So what is actually new here? Or is this the same old anti-public ed stuff? What is he actually saying? Let me boil this down. Hamburger’s argument breaks down into a few simple parts. One is that the country (aka “government”) has no legitimate stake in public education. Just let everyone get their own education for their own kids; it worked great back in the 1700s. This is a silly argument.  Also, the government has no legitimate stake in public education  because it’s all just a nativist plot to grind down Catholics and other dissenters. This part of the argument is important because it sets up the notion that only parents should have a say in education, which is an old favorite assertion of the anti-public ed crowd. If you don’t know why we all benefit from being surrounded by well-educated people, I don’t know how to explain it to you. Education is speech. This part of the argument is important because it allows him to rope in the First Amendment so that he can declare public education unconstitutional. But it feels like a stretch–does he mean formal education? Is it still speech if it’s not in a classroom? Is reading a book speech if you learn from it? Does this mean teachers have more First Amendment rights than previously rules, or fewer?  If it’s on a computer? Is anything a person learns from speech?  But “education is speech” is not the really bold part of his argument. That really bold part is where he goes on to say “therefor, parents should have total control over it.” I have so many questions. Should parents have total control over all speech directed at or in the vicinity of their children, including books, and so would I be violating a parent’s First Amendment rights if I gave their child an book for Christmas? And where are the child’s rights in this? Would this mean that a parent is allowed to lock their child in the basement in order to protect that parent’s First Amendment right to control what the child is exposed to?  Hamburger’s argument has implications that he doesn’t get into in his rush to get to “do away with them and give everyone vouchers.” The biggest perhaps is that he has made an argument that non-parent taxpayers should not have to subsidize an education system. I’m betting he’s not unaware of that.