I can still recall sitting with other international educators at a conference of The East Asia Regional Council of Overseas Schools held in Vietnam in 2004 listening to William Durden deliver that message. The message has remained with me over the years as has the conviction that Durden’s warning must be heeded. Educators must, now more than ever, be prepared to step up and take a more forceful stand in promoting what they believe constitutes a quality education. They can no longer cede to politicians and business leaders (those others President Durden was referring to) the task of determining the purpose of an education, and then dictating it to educators, students and to the general public.
That conviction prompted my April post that asked educators (and others) to consider the question: “What is the purpose of education?” It led me to invite educators and others on several on-line discussion groups to address that question. It’s critical, I believe, for educators in collaboration with parents and students to determine what they
believe should be the purpose of education and for them to work together to move their agenda forward.
Why Educators Must Provide a Powerful Challenge to Politicians and
Business Leaders Mandates for Schools
The policy initiatives that have evolved since A Nation at Risk, No Child Left
Behind and Race to the Top being two of them, are misguided--not to mention politically self-serving. Their faults include, but are not limited to: encouraging competition rather than cooperation among schools, penalizing struggling schools rather than providing needed support for them, setting unrealistic goals that all students are expected to reach by a date determined by the policy, focusing on standardized testing as the ultimate assessment tool.
It is disheartening that most people, including many educators, still don't know that the conclusions of the National Commission on Excellence in Education presented in A Nation at Risk that continue to influence national educational policy were essentially refuted years later by The Sandia Report, a study conducted by an independent group of researchers who looked at the same data and came to a very different conclusion. http://www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk
It is likewise discouraging to recognize that the public still doesn’t realize that the education initiatives promoted by politicians and business leaders are not often designed with the best interests of students in mind; they are designed to promote the political and commercial interests of the designers of those policies. Do you doubt it? Check out the Edutopia link above and read what Tamim Ansary discovered was the reason behind the formation of Terrell Bell’s National Commission on Excellence in Education—the political one.
Do some research of your own on the political and commercial motivation behind No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top—or both. Ask yourself if these policies are really in the best interest of the nation’s children, or if they reflect Durden’s ominous warning about what educators must be prepared to challenge
Of course the justification that the engineers of these recent educational policies always use is that American students are consistently performing poorly on international comparison tests like the TIMSS and PISA. Whenever you hear some supposed “expert” tossing statistics at you to validate a policy decision they are promoting, you would do well to consider this comment by Professor Aaron Levenstein: "Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." This is not a condemnation of statistics per se; they have their value. It is, however, a caution: Do not be misled by what a superficial analysis of the statistics may reveal. Remember what the Sandia Group found when they looked at what the A Nation At Risk bikini was concealing?
And if you want further validation of Levenstein's point, you need look no further than David Berliner's article "Our Impoverished View of Educational Reform." In it Berliner disaggregates the data beneath the statistics so often cited about the poor performance of American students on international comparison tests and reveals the reality of what they conceal. His findings may surprise you. http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/documents/EPSL-0508-116-EPRU.pdf
Buyer Beware
The buzzword policymakers constantly use to describe what their mandates are designed to do is that they will make schools and those in them (educators and students)
more accountable. But by shining the spotlight of blame on schools, teachers and students for the nation’s failures, politicians, business leaders, and others keep the spotlight off their failures and their lack of personal accountability for what needs to be remedied in our society. In effect it allows them to shirk their responsibility for the country's shortcomings.
Blaming schools and those who work in them for compromising the future of the nation while leaving others unaccountable is what’s really jeopardizing the future of our nation and leaving many of its children behind. Follow this link and read about how our leaders too easily ignore the most valuable lessons of another nation whose students’ performance they insist they want America’s students to match.
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/?goback=%2Egde_2150680_member_239039342
There is one other fairytale that political and business leaders often use to discredit the efforts of those who work in schools. That fairytale is that because our nation’s schools lack rigorous academic performance standards, the nation’s workers are ill-prepared to compete with workers in other nations in this global economy.
In 1998, Henry Levin in “Educational Performance Standards and the Economy” (Educational Researcher, May, 1998), after reviewing the evidence about performance standards, reached this conclusion: “At the moment, there are no specific performance assessment standards that have been validated as strong predictors of economic productivity or the quality of the work-force, despite this being a major rationale for standards.” The reason that rationale is so often used, he concluded, is because it appears to be reasonable and thus is persuasive.
To date, I have found no research that refutes Levin’s conclusion. I encourage my
readers to send me research that refutes his conclusion if they have any. In the meantime, my advice to educators and the general public is: until we have such evidence, we need be wary of claims that if we don’t have a quality work-force it is because our schools lack rigorous performance standards. We may have to look elsewhere for reasons for the lack of quality in our workforce, if indeed there is such a lack of quality. I hope to address that in a future post.
Do we need performance standards? Yes we do. But what they are, who decides what they are, how they will be used, and how they will be assessed must not be left to political and businesses leaders to decide. It is time for leaders in schools, working with one another and with members of their communities, to muster up the strength to exert a powerful challenge to those whose policy mandates are already in the process of transforming teachers into mere mechanics and students into widgets fashioned for someone else’s purposes.
Politicians and business leaders deserve to have a voice in the discussion about the purpose of education and what kinds of policies and practices will best further that purpose, but theirs voices and their demands must no longer be the leading ones. It is time for educators to challenge their leadership and to set a direction for education that goes beyond the narrow self-serving direction they have charted for our schools and our school children.
And so I end with one educator’s view of the purpose of education.
Do I risk being stoned in the public marketplace if I suggest that the purpose of
education is not to make kids economically valuable, but rather to enable them to develop intellectual and personal worth as well as practical skills? As we become ever more instrumental in our attitudes, affixing monetary profit and loss statements to every activity, we risk losing sight of the need to produce truly well-educated individuals who can adapt to the extremes of any technological climate and who have the skills (and perhaps even the wisdom) to become leaders in science, medicine or public affairs. (Jane Healy, Failure to Connect)
I welcome your comments on this post.