FAPPAF Bucket

Why do we presume that poor kids need a more rigid and authoritarian school climate than “ordinary” kids?

David Berliner and Bruce Biddle wrote a book on the topic: The Manufactured Crisis, in 1995. Richard Rothstein has continued the theme in most of his work, but rereading The Way We Were?, one realizes that public schools have always been driven by crises. Albert Shanker once acknowledged to me that he realized the crisis was a fiction, but that it was a useful fiction without which no one would take public education seriously.

Noted education historian Lawrence Cremin is quoted by Michael Goldenberg in a blog I just received, as saying:

“American economic competitiveness with Japan and other nations is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and Congress, the Federal Reserve Board. …Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by education reforms, especially educational reform defined as school reform, is not merely utopian and millennialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direction attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the blame instead on the schools. It is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education.”

NCLB: She once supported it, but now says its requirements for testing in math and reading have squeezed vital subjects like history and art out of classrooms.

“Accountability, as written into federal law, was not raising standards but dumbing down the schools,” she writes. “The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something that was market-based began to feel too radical for me.”

“Nations like Finland and Japan seek out the best college graduates for teaching positions, prepare them well, pay them well and treat them with respect,” she said. “They make sure that all their students study the arts, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages, the sciences and other subjects. They do this because this is the way to ensure good education. We’re on the wrong track.”

As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted.

Government used to be staffed by party hacks. Today, it is staffed by people from public policy schools. But does government work better than it did before?

In 2007, 47 percent of Harvard grads went into finance or consulting. Yet would we say that banks are performing more ably than they were a half-century ago?

Now the lifestyle patterns of the college-educated are very different from the patterns in other classes. Social attitudes are very different, too.

All individuals, including healthy individuals, should be required by law to buy into insurance plants, this increasing the insurance pool.  Insurance only works when there are large numbers of people paying in who are not taking out (at least as much).

Trust in government is simply a function of how well the economy is doing, nothing more, nothing less.

But wait, not so fast…

- Asian disunity and regional conflicts

- Lack of Chinese innovation

- Increasingly aging population

- Military inferiority

Hitler, according to the Russian autopsy report, was missing one testicle.

3 theories on why…

- Congenital.  Various scholars and psychologists have used this to explain or partially explain his behavior (for instance, Freudians claim that those born with only one testicle are obsessed with ordering the world).

- War injury.

- Russians made it up.

What percentage of Georgia’s fourth-graders are good readers? It seems to depend on whom you ask. The state will tell you that 85 percent of them met or exceeded the proficiency benchmark on its 2007 test. Not too shabby. On the other hand, only 28 percent of fourth-graders in Georgia scored high enough to be considered proficient on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), an exam administered by the U.S. Department of Education that is usually regarded as the gold standard in education testing. The big difference results from where the two tests set their proficiency bars. Georgia sets its bar pretty low—so low that barely literate students can score high enough to be deemed proficient. The NAEP has a much higher standard; in fact, a student labeled “proficient” by Georgia could fail to score above “basic” on the federal test.

Unfortunately, Georgia’s low standard is not anomalous. Three states have even bigger gaps in fourth-grade reading. Worse, standards are declining, even as graduates need more and more knowledge and skills to get ahead in the global economy. A recent federal study noted that 15 states lowered at least one of their proficiency standards in math and reading between 2005 and 2007.

States’ low standards have spurred a bipartisan campaign to create worthwhile national ones. Conservative groups like the Fordham Foundation have pushed for national standards for years; more recently, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, as well as local leaders like New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, have embraced the idea. But the road to national standards would be extremely tough to navigate politically. A more feasible approach would give all states an incentive to set objectively high standards themselves, and the looming reauthorization of the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act gives us a perfect opportunity to do it.

The perverse incentives of NCLB clearly have something to do with the downward movement of state standards. NCLB punishes a school when too few of its students make progress toward math and reading proficiency—beginning with extending to students the choice of other public schools to attend and culminating with completely restructuring the school. But the law has a gaping loophole: states get to define proficiency however they want. A state can thus meet NCLB targets by defining proficiency down; toughening its standards, by contrast, handicaps its ability to meet the federal requirements.

Given such confusion, the case for high, uniform, enforceable national standards seems strong. States with unchallenging standards do a disservice to their students, who wind up thinking that they have mastered the skills to succeed when they may in fact be way, way behind peers in more demanding states.