education reform

England is Trying to Catch up with Massachusetts: England’s Secretary of Education says Massachusetts’ Education System is One of the Best in the World!

Deborah Duncan Owens education reform, England, Great Britain , , , ,

Wow!  Thanks, Michael Gove!  BBC Education News Correspondent Sean Coughlan quoted Gove in 2013 as saying, “No national curriculum can be modernised without paying close attention to what’s been happening in education internationally,” citing Hong Kong, Massachusetts, Singapore and Finland as as “the world’s most successful school systems”.

Reminiscent of the U.S., teachers in England have confronted an ideological sentiment that their schools need reforming in order to address the downward spiral of their students on international measures of academic achievement.  Under the leadership of Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron, led the initiative to re-write England’s national curriculum to make it more “rigorous, engaging and tough.”  I wonder, however, if the writers of England’s revised curriculum examined Massachusetts’ standards and curriculum as a model.  And, if they did, was it the set of standards and curriculum that created Massachusetts’ excellent education system and made it worthy of such praise?  Or did they examine the one-size-fits all CCSS that was adopted by Massachusetts in order for their state to be aligned with the rest of the U.S.?

I wonder, too, why our country didn’t simply look to the Massachusetts’ education system for a model of excellence instead of embarking on the corporate inspired Achieve model for developing education standards?  Another thought occurs to me as well.  It seems that teacher tenure and teacher unions may very well be a very good thing for educational excellence.  At least that’s the case in Massachusetts.

 

Why I Wrote “The Origins of the Common Core: How the Free Market Became Public Education Policy”

Deborah Duncan Owens Common Core Book, conservatism, corporate education reform, david berliner, diane ravitch, education reform, free market education policies, high stakes tests

My book will be released next January by Palgrave Macmillan.  It represents a number years of research which began when I was an elementary public school teacher in Mississippi.  What originally began as an inquiry into the voucher movement emerged throughout the implementation of No Child Left Behind and the introduction of the Common Core State Standards and Race to the Top policies.

http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-origins-of-the-common-core-deborah-duncan-owens/?isb=9781137482679

It’s Sunday morning and my husband, Thomas Fiala,  and I are listening again to an interview with David Berliner that was posted on Chalk Face radio last summer.*  Berliner has been a valuable voice in education policy for quite a number of years.  The book he wrote with Bruce Biddle in 1995, The Manufactured Crisis, is an essential read for anyone attempting to understand education policy history.  I read The Manufactured Crisis when it was first released.  It remains on my bookshelf, now highlighted, annotated, and a little worse for wear — an enduring valuable resource.

David Berliner was asked by Shaun Johnson, how do we go about having a conversation with our teacher colleagues about what’s happening in education?  Berliner basically said, by somehow getting enough people to talk about it will get the conversation going.  I found it interesting that the interview began with the notion that we need to get a conversation going, given that the blogosphere seems to be well populated with voices opposing Race to the Top policies and the Common Core.  Grassroots movements, such as the opt-out movement, have indeed been fueled by the blogs.  However, it’s hard to stop a freight train, particularly when it carries a cargo laden with millions of federal RTTT dollars and a slew of free market devotees poised to make huge profits from charter school expansion policies, creating data mining systems, publishing and administered standardized tests, and promoting Teach for America and alternate certification paths for teachers.  Well funded conservative think tanks have dominated education reform discussion for many years and they continue to fuel the education reform freight train, persevering in efforts to free-marketize and privatize public education.

The grassroots movement to address failed education policies certainly lack the financial resources of those who are actually making education policy in the U.S.  To the billionaires who have a seat in policy discussions, the blogosphere represents a swarm of mosquitoes biting at their heels, which they too often seem to easily swat away. Will grassroots efforts have an impact?  YES!!  Certainly, for example, the opt-out movement has the power to impact education policy — and it doesn’t cost a thing to simply refuse to take a standardized test.

One of my motivations in writing the Origins of the Common Core was to do my part in helping to get a meaningful conversation started.  However, I wanted to not only get teachers involved in the conversation, but to get all citizens involved who support their public schools and local control over those public schools, something that Berliner indicated was important.  I realized that what was needed was a coherent story that helped explain how we ended up in this place and time in education policy history.  On March 2, 2014, as I was completing my book, Diane Ravitch spoke at the first Network for Education conference in Texas, echoing my thoughts.  In her speech she explained, “The problem that liberals have is liberals believe that facts will persuade people.  Conservatives understand that stories persuade people, so we must have our story.  We already have the facts. … There is no question that the facts are on our side.  But we have to shape the narrative. … So its very important that we shape our narrative to say we’re defending American democracy, we’re defending the children, we’re fighting for what’s right.  We have the narrative.  We’ve got to think about our rhetoric and get the story to the public …”.**   In writing this book I have tried my best to accomplish this task.

Over the years, as I transitioned from elementary teacher to teacher educator, first at Arkansas State University and now at Elmira College in New York, I continued to try to make sense of what was happening in education policy. Why is America so convinced that our public schools are a failure?  Why were the dominant voices in education policy coming from conservative think tanks, continuously promoting school choice, high stakes standardized testing, VAM teacher accountability models, the erosion of local public school governance, and national standards?  And in spite of the voices of scholars like David Berliner, Susan Ohanian, Alfie Kohn, Patrick Shannon, Joel Spring, and Gerald Bracey, to name just a few, who for many years warned the American public that we were on the wrong track, the freight train of systemic education reform continued at break neck speed.  Nevertheless, the voices of these giants should be heeded as never before!  Seamlessly, however, from one presidential administration to the next, education policies were re-hashed, re-framed, re-named, and foisted on the American public.  I breathed a sigh of relief when Barack Obama spoke along the campaign trail about the problems associated with high stakes testing and promised to address these issues once he became president.  It soon became obvious, however, that President Obama would heed the siren song of free market ideas in the education arena.  His appointment of Arne Duncan solidified his position and, once again, the U.S. would continue its quickstep march toward free market education reform. Race to the Top policies would solidify the Obama administration’s allegiance to free market reform initiatives in education.

While much has been written about the current problems associated with the Common Core and corporate reformers, and certainly Bill Gates is being well and thoroughly blasted on the blogosphere, how is it that the Common Core so readily became the law of the land?  And why are charter schools seen as the panacea for education reform?  I set out in The Origins of the Common Core to lend my small voice in telling that story.  It was an interesting journey, leaving me to realize that our federal education policy makers acquiesced their decision making responsibilities to corporate reformers a long time ago.  Tech companies have led the way.  Bill Gates is walking, albeit with much more money at his disposal, in the footsteps of other technology corporate superstars like David Kerns and Lou Gerstner, who led the charge to revolutionize education policy through systemic free market reform education policies.  Other billionaires would lend their effort to these efforts.  Along the way, the voices of less monied education scholars were systematically silenced.  Federal policies, built on the false notion that America’s public schools were a total failure, continued to thrive in spite of documentation to the contrary.

The titles of the chapters in The Origins of the Common Core demonstrate a road map to my journey in writing the book:

  1. The Nation Was at Risk and the Public Schools Did It
  2. Public Schools: Conservative Coalescence and the Socialist Threat
  3. Friedmanomics, School Vouchers and Choice
  4. Corporate Superstars and an Inconvenient Truth
  5. Public Schools and a Third Way of Governing
  6. NCLB and the Texas Tall Tale
  7. Education Reform and the Deep State: An Alternate Universe
  8. The CCSS: Systemic Education Reform Writ Large
  9. CCSS: The Gorilla in the Room for Free Market Education Reform

*http://www.blogtalkradio.com/chalkface/2014/08/17/david-berliner-the-chalk-face

**http://www.publicschoolshakedown.org/diane-ravitch-speech-network-public-education-conference

http://www.amazon.com/The-Manufactured-Crisis-Americas-Schools/dp/0201441969

Ruby Bridges: Grit, A Dream Deferred, and the Destruction of New Orleans Public Schools

Deborah Duncan Owens charter schools, corporate education reform, education reform, free market education policies, free market education reforms, kristen buras, martin luther king, new orleans, privatization of education, ruby bridges , ,

On the 54th anniversary of Ruby Bridge’s courageous and lonely walk that led the charge in desegregating New Orleans’ public schools, I want to pause and say a heartfelt thank you to one of America’s heros.  In 1960, little Ruby’s parents heeded the call of the NAACP for families who wished to exercise their right to send their children to the school of their choice and break the color barrier in New Orleans’ public schools.  Day after day, Ruby walked the gauntlet to William Franz Elementary School amidst white racist protesters shouting racial epithets at her, one woman even placing a black doll in a miniature coffin for the brave little girl to see.  As a result, President Eisenhower sent U.S. Marshals to accompany Ruby to school and keep her safe.  This action helped Ruby to persevere.  She never gave up and today speaks of the success of her efforts.

Cain Burdeau spoke with Ruby Bridges and provides an excellent commentary (http://www.berkshireeagle.com/news/ci_26936821/ruby-bridges-us-divided-by-race-again?source=rss). According to Bridges, “… white students returned to William Frantz and the school became integrated … she went to integrated middle and high schools in New Orleans. Fast forward to today: The school now occupying the William Frantz building is 97 percent black, according to school data.”

Education policy makers are enamored with the idea of “grit” as the factor that will help low income and/or low achieving students to overcome the structural factors that inhibit academic achievement.  They laud perseverance, self-control, and the ability to embrace challenges.  Grit has become a research agenda in education and scales have been developed to measure “grittiness.”  I suggest that if you want a model of grittiness in a young child, look to Ruby Bridges.  Of course, the power of her grit was not used to document a standardized test score.  Rather, her grit sparked a social movement and resulted in the fruition of a dream that Dr. Martin Luther King would eloquently speak about almost three years later in August, 1963, when he said “I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”  For a short period of time and in some schools, and although not seamlessly, that dream was realized in New Orleans.

The dream did not last very long in New Orleans, however.  In the decades following Ruby Bridges’ lonely walk, the dream was sadly deferred.  Education policy discussions no longer focused on the impact of poverty, racism, and equity.  We will never know what the educational achievement of our public schools would have been if we’d kept the dream of integrated schools alive in the U.S.   Efforts to ameliorate the impact of poverty on educational attainment begun during the Johnson administration were never fully realized.  I am reminded of the Langston Hughes’ poem “A Dream Deferred.”

A Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

 

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore–

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over–

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

As the War on Poverty initiatives were steadily defunded, the dream dried up in cities like New Orleans.  Segregated schools slowly but surely once more became the norm.  And the problems festered.  Poverty’s grip on the city placed a stranglehold on its schools and, not surprisingly, students’ educational achievement suffered.  It’s a story that repeated itself across the country in large urban areas.  Jonathan Kozol wrote extensively about the problems of schools like those in New Orleans and urged America to right the wrongs associated with schools trying to survive in desolate, crime ridden neighborhoods with shrinking tax bases and funds in which students, predominantly of color, were increasingly isolated.

In the headlong rush to demonstrate that America’s public schools were a failure and to systemically reform our public school system through free market principles and efforts to privatize education, New Orleans and other urban areas in the U.S. would become ensnared in the corporatization of public schools.  The syrupy sweet public relations campaign surrounding the charter school movement would provide the propaganda needed to further efforts to dismantle the public schools in these cities and divert efforts to reform the schools by addressing poverty, racism, and other structural factors at the heart of educational disparities.

And then the dream exploded in Ruby Bridges’ own home town, New Orleans.  Hurricane Katrina hit the city square on, bringing death and destruction and leaving families displaced.  Friedmanomic free market coporate reformers grasped at the opportunity to totally remake New Orleans’ public school system and privatize education.  Teachers were fired en masse and public schools were closed and re-opened as charter schools.  As Kristen Buras explains in Charter Schools, Race, and Urban Space: Where the Market Meets Grassroots Resistance, “Time and again in New Orleans, charters would be given funding and facilities in what amounts to an educational land grab premised on historical erasure and the racial-spatial redistribution of resources.”

There are no traditional public schools in New Orleans any more.  They are all gone.  The school Ruby Bridges’ attended, William Franz Elementary — a historical landmark — does not even bear its own name.  It was taken over by the charter school management group Crescent City Schools and renamed Aliki Academy.  I am left to wonder why the legacy of Ruby Bridges’ efforts was not important enough to preserve the name of the school that has such an important part in history?  It seems that the name of Ruby Bridges’ school is being erased from history in New Orleans.  Is this part of the erasure that Buras talks about?