Education Reform: What if Bill Gates and President Obama are wrong?

A few months ago, I started a series of posts entitled Education Reform Journal. Reflections on my experience as a school board member, built on daily reading and research to aid the evolution of my thoughts. This amidst the growing criticism and skepticism of where President Obama and many elected leaders (and deep-pocketed philanthropists like Bill Gates) are taking our public schools. Two recent articles in the New York Times tied it up a bit more for me.

Then, yesterday, a guest post on Ezra Klein's blog hit the nail on the head. 

In the first article (on the front page of the New York Times), Behind Grass-Roots Advocacy, Bill Gates, Sam Dillon reveals the depth and breadth of the Gates Foundation's reach in how public education in the United States is being "re-formed." I put this in quotes because my understanding of reform is to strengthen what works and fix what doesn't. On the contrary, Gates (and hundreds of well-positioned satellite organizations and well-healed individuals) are reshaping the whole education system, not simply "reforming" it. Most who are leading the charge are big-personality, bottom-line business executives or philanthropists and few are experienced educators.

In some cases, Mr. Gates is creating entirely new advocacy groups. The foundation is also paying Harvard-trained data specialists to work inside school districts, not only to crunch numbers but also to change practices. It is bankrolling many of the Washington analysts who interpret education issues for journalists and giving grants to some media organizations.

“We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes,” said Allan C. Golston, the president of the foundation’s United States program. “The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer.”

The foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009, the latest year for which its tax returns are available, and devoted $78 million to advocacy — quadruple the amount spent on advocacy in 2005. Over the next five or six years, Mr. Golston said, the foundation expects to pour $3.5 billion more into education, up to 15 percent of it on advocacy.

It's safe to say no one unelected person or privately held organization has had such influence on public policy, especially affecting an institution so deeply democratic as public education and impacting the lives of so many children, and the adults who teach them.

The second article, in the same edition of the New York Times, The Math of Heartbreak by Michael Sokolove, is a visit to Levittown, Pennsylvania where continuing budget cuts are impacting the town's public school district.

When he first introduced cuts at a public meeting last month, Samuel Lee, the superintendent of the Bristol Township School District, was plainspoken and direct. He did not say that everyone would pull together and the children would get the same great education, but, rather, that worthy programs would be dismantled and young teachers would lose jobs. “Everything that is going to be presented tonight is not good for our kids,” he said as about 300 teachers, parents and students looked on. “We are heartbroken.”   ...

The discussions I heard over the school budget sounded much like a couple talking around their kitchen table with a stack of bills, no hope of paying them and nothing but bad options. Mr. Lee, the superintendent, called the shortfall “catastrophic” and added, “What’s worse, I can’t promise things will get better next year.”...

Parents in Bristol Township do not generally have the means or, in some cases, the inclination to pay for art or music lessons for their children, or for prep courses and academic enhancements common in wealthier communities. As in many blue-collar towns, the schools are counted on to round out children — to educate them in the basics, push gifted students higher, pull up the lagging ones, and to give everyone a degree of culture and a vision of what exists beyond the horizon. It’s a big, expensive job. 

“You want to be able to say that the amount of money you have to work with doesn’t matter, and you can do the same quality job with less. And we can try to do that,” Mr. Lee said as we talked in his office. “But in what other enterprise is that true?”

To compensate for falling revenues, it's been reported elsewhere that the Gates coalition, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, think bigger classes, on-line learning and tinkering with teacher compensation will fill budget holes. Not surprisingly, Mr. Gates, a numbers guy, sees education as a technical problem to solve and promotes ideas that are almost entirely data driven. These ideas are easily picked up by politicians and other non-educator "reformers" who are looking for the "big sexy idea" to solve all problems in public education. Most are now convinced that improving education means running schools like businesses. So the the big, sexy ideas include: paying teachers based heavily on standardized test scores of their students ("performance pay"), recruiting non-traditional teachers through Teach for America (bypassing the need to improve schools of education), recruiting business executives through the Broad Foundation Superintendents Academy to "run the business of education," and embedding standardization and testing to, they promise, raise our nation's rankings in international assessments, such as PISA and TIMMS. President Obama and most of our elected leaders in Congress and many statehouses support and are determined to implement these ideas.

But the Levittown article is a story about our traditional public school system where the vast majority of school-age children are educated. It could be repeated in hundreds of communities around the country. School boards, superintendents, principals, teachers, citizen committees, parents striving to work together to educate all of the children in their neighborhood and regional schools. They don't always agree, they don't always have the solution, but the whole point is that they are doing it together. And they know their children. They know their communities. Besides, our public schools are built upon the idea that we teach every child from the ground up, one at a time and collectively. Individual and together. To be educated, but also to be engaged citizens. It's complex. Complicated. Dynamic. And not easy. It can't be made simple nor cheap. It's not black and white nor always 100% successful as the Gates coalition seems to think it can be. In these economic times, our public school system is  vulnerable. As additional revenue, programs like the federal grant competition, Race to the Top and grants from private foundations, like Gates, are tempting, even with all the strings attached. And because "community" and "democracy" appear to be less valued by the the Gates coalition, even necessarily evils to work around or dominate, their data-driven ideas are becoming more and more the norm.

This coalition is certainly happy that they're "winning," but what if they're wrong? What if the great strengths of community and democracy become irrelevant? What are the potential consequences of this path?

Recent jobs data revealed that education is one sector of the economy that has been relatively stable through our ongoing recession. As new teachers are hired, especially young ones, the culture of standards, testing and data is what they know. So, if we realize that we are on a wrong path, how hard will it be to re-train them to teach collaboratively instead of competitively? Or re-train them to teach the whole child, the whole young adult, instead of mainly preparing students to take standardized tests? Or re-train them to work within a democratic institution instead of a top-down, top-heavy bureaucracy? Or re-train them to work within a community of neighborhood and regional schools instead of a competitive, privatized network of "education providers"?

Increased standardization, intense competition, weakened democracy, sidelined community. That's where we seem to be headed. And President Obama and the vast majority of our elected leaders are convinced it's the right path. But is that where we want to go? Is that where we need to go?   

Intuitively we know the opposite is what our society, economy and children need. A fully integrated, healthy public school system. Robust, community-based, democratic public schools with local school boards focused on all children, and trained to understand education, public policy-making, budgeting, finance, strategic planning, school construction and, yes, politics. Communities and parents educated, empowered and engaged to understand the complexities of educating all children. Superintendents and principals who are well-educated, well-experienced leaders who know curriculum, know instruction, know children, know communities. Teachers who have been educated at high levels, work in schools where they are well-supported, well-compensated, well-respected, and deeply engaged in the communities they serve.

So, yesterday's post by Dana Goldstein was like an echo to me. The title says it all, Is the U.S. doing teacher reform all wrong? 

There is good reason for education reform efforts to focus on teaching. We know that although about two-thirds of the achievement gap can be explained by family poverty, teachers are among the most important in-school factors that effect student learning, with some teachers being  better than others  at helping children progress. We also know that most teachers are given cursory and unhelpful (if they are evaluated at all) and that tenure makes it difficult to remove bad teachers from the classroom.

To address these problems, many American education reformers spent the past decade demanding that districts and states get tough with teachers and provide them with more prescriptive advice on how to improve their practice. The political results are the new state laws written in response to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant program, some of which base up to 51 percent of a teacher’s evaluation on student test-score data.

 But what if the United States is doing teacher reform all wrong?

That’s the suggestion of a new report from the National Center on Education and the Economy, a think tank funded mostly by large corporations and their affiliated foundations. The report takes a close look at how the countries that are kicking our academic butts — Finland, China and Canada — recruit, prepare and evaluate teachers. What it finds are policy agendas vastly different from our own, in which prospective educators are expected to spend a long time preparing for the classroom and are then given significant autonomy in how to teach, with many fewer incentives and punishments tied to standardized tests. 

Indeed.

Not only then should we be questioning the "big, sexy idea" of performance pay for teachers, but we should also be questioning other ideas that Bill Gates et al are embedding in our public policy and classroom practice. Those that, however well-intended, are moving us well away from our democratic roots and the role of community in how we educate our children. And may not produce the economic or social impact they are so quick to promise. No matter our varying political leanings and loyalties, we should all start asking hard questions about this current path before it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to turn around.