Just say no to the term ‘education reform’

Years ago, editors and reporters at a mid-sized Indiana newspaper sat around a conference table and talked about what to do about two words that had entered the political lexicon: pro-life and pro-choice.

We decided not to use them, except in direct quotes or if they were part of the names of organizations. Instead we would refer to “abortion opponents” and “supporters of abortion rights,” or something like that – an approach that now aligns with Associated Press style used by most newspapers.

Our rationale was straightforward. Both pro-life and pro-choice were simplistic, inaccurate and designed to demonize the opposition. People who opposed abortion didn’t have a monopoly on supporting “life,” whatever that meant. And people who opposed abortion did so because they believed it ended a life that was precious to God, not because they opposed anyone’s “right to choose.”

Both terms were, at best, misleading. Politicians can mislead. Advocates can mislead. Journalists should just tell the truth.

The issue comes to mind with the current use of the word reform for a menu of approaches to education policy – typically including giving parents more choices through charter schools and/or vouchers; using student test results to evaluate teachers and make decisions about compensating, promoting and firing them; and limiting the power of teachers’ unions and the authority of elected school boards.

The problem is that reform isn’t a neutral word. It doesn’t just mean change; it means change for the better. According to Merriam-Webster, it can mean “a) to put or change into an improved form or condition; b) to amend or improve by change of form or removal of faults or abuses.”

So people who oppose, or are skeptical of, the policies characterized as education reform are by implication the champions of faults and abuses. Or they are “defenders of the (abusive) status quote.” Even if, for example, they rage against the educational status quo, with its segregated schools, savage inequalities and inattention to poverty.

Bennett on reform: Get on board or get left

Education reform in Indiana is like a railroad track, state Superintendent Tony Bennett told a Bloomington, Ind., audience today. One rail is the competition provided by private-school vouchers and more charter schools. The other is new teacher evaluations and limits on collective bargaining.

The cross-ties? Those are accountability, as in the A-to-F letter grade system for schools and state takeover of low-performing schools.

It’s an interesting metaphor; a little clunky, maybe, but good for keeping the conversation going.

“Quite honestly, I see that railroad track as the big divide,” countered Monroe County Community schools Superintendent Judith DeMuth, who joined Bennett and others for a panel discussion sponsored by the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce.

Noting that Bennett admits to being influenced by school reforms in Florida, she said, “In Florida there are haves and have-nots, and I don’t want to see that for my children and grandchildren.”

While Bennett focused on the structural reforms that the Indiana legislature passed this year, DeMuth and Steve Kain, superintendent of Richland-Bean Blossom schools, had other priorities in mind. They said Indiana needs to provide adequate resources for public schools, which haven’t yet made up for the $300 million in funding cuts they suffered two years ago.

And they called for more state support for early childhood education. Indiana boosted funding for full-day kindergarten this year, but not enough to cover the full cost. It’s one of 10 states that don’t fund public pre-kindergarten programs, said panelist Terry Spradlin, director of education policy for the Center on Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University – who, in the spirit of transparent accountability, gave Indiana grades of C and “incomplete” for early childhood programs.

But this was mostly the Tony Bennett show, and the superintendent has in fact become quite adept at selling his views on education, even to a somewhat skeptical audience.

He batted away a question about vouchers providing tax support for religious and political extremism, insisting he’s “pretty agnostic” about what types of schools should get public support. The point, he said, is that low-income parents should have the same choice for their kids that more wealthy parents have. “Why shouldn’t they go where their needs are best met?” he said.

He hailed education reform as one of the few public issues where there seems to be some bipartisanship, with Democratic Secretary of Education Arne Duncan supporting the same charter-school and merit-pay initiatives as Bennett and other Republican state officials.

He insisted that passionate disagreement and debate is ultimately good for education. “We have reached consensus for so long that we’ve gotten complacent,” he said.

He could take an old bluegrass hymn as his theme song: “Keep your hands upon the throttle, and your eyes upon the rail.”

Education reform idolatry

If this education thing doesn’t work out for Tony Bennett, the Indiana superintendent of public instruction may have a future in reality TV.

Check out his performance at the recent Education Reform Idol competition hosted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute – where Indiana walked away with the title of the “reformiest” state in the nation.

Bennett’s fellow contestants, the chief state education officers of Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin, appear slightly uncomfortable to be taking part in a sort of questionable inside joke about changes that, for better or worse, will affect the lives of millions of students and teachers.

The “celebrity judges,” Jeanne Allen, Bruno Manno, and Richard Lee Colvin, seem never to have heard of American Idol’s Simon Cowell, never mind trying to imitate him. Despite prompting by emcee Michael Petrilli, most of the folks on the stage act like they’re at an education policy symposium.

Not so Bennett. He goes for the gusto, talking trash about his opponents, repeating his mantra of “competition, freedom and accountability” and drawing political lines in the sand.

He sets the tone by claiming he’s like Larry Bird at the first NBA 3-point contest: “I’m just here to see who’s going to finish second.” He scoffs at the notion that Illinois could be reformy: “Illinois is the state where Indiana legislators ran away to get away from education reform legislation,” he says, referring to the Indiana House Democrats’ walkout this session. He says reform in Indiana took off after we – that is, Republicans – seized control of state government.

Tossed a friendly question about helping teachers improve, Bennett takes it as an opportunity to zing education schools. He says Indiana lets teachers earn license-renewal credits through professional development “so no longer are teachers held hostage by the cash cows of higher education.”

“If you want to talk about flashy legislation, and implementing flashy legislation in a streamlined fashion, come to Indiana,” Bennett says.

If the judges won’t be Simon Cowell, leave it to Bennett.

What if you shout SOS and nobody hears?

The timing of last weekend’s Save Our Schools march in Washington, D.C., turned out to be awful. The summer heat was brutal. And the media’s attention was focused almost exclusively on the debt ceiling circus.

Only a few thousand marchers turned out, and news coverage was spotty, with a speech by actor Matt Damon getting most of the attention. The Washington Post covered the event and so did Education Week, of course. The Salt Lake Tribune and Baltimore Sun wrote about local teachers who participated. The New York Times apparently let it pass without notice.

There was quite a bit of after-the-fact analysis, however. Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post devoted several supportive columns to the march. Dana Goldstein, in The Nation, contrasted Damon’s speech with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s recent address to the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. (Near the bottom she links to her extraordinary American Prospect article from April about a Colorado school district that’s using tests to evaluate even gym and art teachers. Read this for a scary look at the future of education reform).

Some SOS supporters were tweeting insults at Kevin Carey’s analysis on the Education Sector website. The heat may have made him a little crankier than usual, but Carey makes good points. March participants risk putting themselves on the margins when they demonize Arne Duncan and Bill Gates and ignore public support for testing and charter schools.

But the U.S. Department of Education appeared equally clueless when it posted a response to the march from a teacher who’s working temporarily at the department. The post reads like a big, sloppy kiss for Duncan – producing a flood of online comments from infuriated teachers and SOS supporters.

So what happens next? According to Education Week, the SOS organizers plan to keep the movement going, and that’s a good thing. This was, after all, a true grass-roots event with a clear set of guiding principles. It was put together on the fly by relatively unknown teachers, activists and bloggers who are passionate supporters of public schools and teachers. Their voices should be heard – somehow.

Education researchers: Current ‘reforms’ will produce few gains in achievement

Indiana University education professors Jonathan Plucker and David Rutkowski offer up some hard truths about current education “reforms” in a recent Education Week column.

While supporters tout the reforms as silver bullets, they say, the “dirty little secret” among researchers is that the changes almost certainly will have little effect on student performance.

“Volumes of nonpartisan research over the past 20 years suggest that most reforms (e.g., vouchers, charters, merit pay) have marginal effects on student achievement,” they write. “Reforms that show benefits usually produce effects that are so small they call into question the enormous resource and opportunity costs of the interventions. Put simply, most education reforms are not effective, and those that show even a sliver of potential are very inefficient.”

The point about resource and opportunity costs is significant. In Indiana, Gov. Mitch Daniels and state Superintendent Tony Bennett spent political capital pushing through an education agenda that lacked broad public support.

Diane Ravitch speaking at Indiana University

Mark your calendar for Tuesday, April 26, if you’re going to be in or near Bloomington, Ind. That’s the day that Diane Ravitch will give a public lecture at Indiana University, titled “Will Today’s Education Reforms Improve Our Public Schools?”

The timing could hardly be better. The Indiana General Assembly will be wrapping up its 2011 session, which is fairly certain to include approval of the laundry list of “today’s education reforms”: charter schools, vouchers, performance-based pay for teachers, and weakening teachers’ unions.

Ravitch is probably the nation’s foremost critic of those approaches. And what makes her story interesting is that she spent much of her policy career advocating conservative and Republican positions on public education. Has Ravitch changed, or have the reformers? Probably some of both.

A historian of education and a professor at New York University, Ravitch was assistant secretary of education in the George H.W. Bush administration and supported the No Child Left Behind Act. But she turned against testing-based accountability and, especially, the market-based reforms advocated by what she calls the “Billionaire Boys’ Club” of the Gates, Walton and Broad foundations.

Ravitch’s essential book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, is part memoir and part policy analysis but primarily a history of the education policy debates of the past 30-odd years. It is decidedly not a polemic – which may come as a surprise to fans who follow Ravitch on Twitter, where she polemicizes with the best of them.

She advocates high standards and a rich curriculum in the book, but cautions, “If there is one thing all educators know, and that many studies have confirmed for decades, it is that there is no single answer to educational improvement. There is no silver bullet, no magic feather, no panacea that will miraculously improve student achievement.”

For a taste of Ravitch’s writing, read “The Myth of Charter Schools,” her devastating review of the film Waiting for “Superman” in the New York Review of Books.

Ravitch’s talk at IU will be at 5 p.m. on April 26 in Whittenberger Auditorium in the Indiana Memorial Union. It’s part of the Branigin Lecture series sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study.

On April 27 at 10 a.m., Ravitch and Deborah Meier, the well-known progessive educator and founder of Central Park Elementary School in New York, will have a public discussion of education issues in IU’s Willkie Auditorium. It’s billed as a live version of their popular “Bridging Differences” blog in Education Week.

Bennett to media: Teachers are good, unions are bad

Thursday was a super-big media day for Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett. He was quoted in front-page stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

In both, his message was the same: Teachers are the good guys; teachers’ unions, while they may be made up of teachers, with their leadership elected by teachers, are blocking what’s best for students.

“There is a tremendous difference in desire for reform between teachers and the teachers unions,” Bennett told the Post’s Nick Anderson. “Teachers want what’s best for children. The teachers union is an institution built to protect the interests of itself and adults.”

Anderson reported from Indianapolis for a story focusing on state legislation to institute teacher merit pay, limit collective bargaining and fund private-school vouchers. He interviewed the presidents of both state teachers’ unions, Indianapolis teachers and Gov. Mitch Daniels.

The New York Times story focused on nationwide teacher reactions to proposed changes in education laws. Bennett told the Times’ Trip Gabriel that union leaders had distorted the Indiana legislation to create fear. “This is in no way, shape or form an attack on teachers; it is a comprehensive effort to reform a system,” he said.

Coincidentally, Bennett was scheduled to be in Bloomington on Thursday to discuss his legislative agenda with local educators, but he called off the appearance. Lauren Auld, spokeswoman for the Indiana Department of Education, said Bennett canceled because of changes in the state legislative calendar prompted by House Democrats’ walkout over education and anti-labor bills. She said the department will attempt to reschedule the meeting.

In ‘reform’ vs. ‘status quo’: a rhetorical no-contest

Sean Cavanaugh has a good article in Education Week describing how advocates of charter schools, vouchers and merit pay have managed to label themselves as “reformers” and their critics as the “education establishment” and defenders of the “status quo.”

“Using rhetoric to frame policies in a flattering or negative light is, of course, as old as politics itself,” he writes. “But the pervasiveness of today’s education language, often echoed uncritically in the media, is striking, and reflects the extent to which self-described supporters of reform have seized the rhetorical high ground in making their case.”

Cavanaugh also notes how “reform” advocates claim their policies are good for students or children, while their opponents want what’s best for adults. He cites the “Putting Students First” agenda of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and state Superintendent Tony Bennett; Idaho Republican leaders’ “Students Come First” program; and Michelle Rhee’s new organization, StudentsFirst.

It’s an uphill battle for those who think choice, union-busting and high-stakes testing aren’t panaceas. How do you capture skepticism in an inspirational slogan?

Gates: bigger class sizes can be better

Microsoft founder and education super-philanthropist Bill Gates writes in the Washington Post that the U.S. needs to “flip the curve” to get more bang for its education buck. To do so, he says, “we have to identify great teachers, find out what makes them so effective and transfer those skills to others so more students can enjoy top teachers and high achievement.”

He makes the usual reformist argument that the key to improving education is to hire, retain and reward great teachers – and that advanced degrees and experience are unrelated to teacher effectiveness. And he suggests paying more to the best teachers if they agree to teach more students.

This makes logical sense. It will be more persuasive when elite private schools start advertising their large class sizes – you know, to better share the benefits of having excellent teachers.

Fifteen yards (and an indefinite delay of game) for taunting

Lafayette attorney Doug Masson uses a football analogy to describe the impasse in the Indiana House on his Masson’s Blog. House Democrats fled to Illinois last week, claiming that Republican over-reaching on anti-labor and education measures forced them to shut down the process.

“The House G.O.P. reminds me of one of those receivers that catches a deep pass in the open field, then starts showboating short of the end zone before being stripped by a second-stringer too dumb or stubborn to know the game is supposed to be over,” Masson writes. “It’s all the more maddening because the guy who stripped the ball is a short dude with bad hair.”

The short dude, of course, is Rep. Pat Bauer, D-South Bend, the House minority leader who led the Democratic exodus to Urbana, Ill. The dude is nothing if not stubborn.

Wait ends for ‘Superman’

The hype and buzz for Davis Guggenheim’s charter-schools documentary film Waiting for “Superman” seemed to fizzle. The expected Oscar nomination didn’t come through.

The movie apparently passed through Indiana theaters in December without much notice. But we’ll have a chance to see it again in Bloomington, thanks to the Indiana University School of Education and several student groups, including EDPOSA, the Education Policy Student Association.

The screening, at 6 p.m. Friday (March 4) at the IU School of Education auditorium, will be followed by a panel discussion with IU education professors Larry Mikulecky, Jesse Goodman and Jonathan Plucker and possibly area teachers. It’s free and open to the public.

More news on Daniels-Bennett education agenda

Thanks to Niki Kelly, Statehouse reporter for the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, for a clear and comprehensive story about the education reform proposals that Gov. Mitch Daniels and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett put forward last week.

Kelly focuses on the most potentially controversial elements in the Daniels-Bennett agenda: 1) publicly funded vouchers to pay for students to attend private schools; 2) changes in the way teachers are evaluated; and 3) financial incentives for students to finish high school early.

Bennett and Daniels provided details about their proposals for the 2011 legislative session Wednesday to the Indiana Education Roundtable. You can watch a video of Bennett’s presentation, view PowerPoint slides, and read the Department of Education news release and summary of the proposals.

The agenda includes:

– “Identify and reward great teachers and principals” – merit pay, an end to seniority-based teacher tenure, restrictions on union contacts, etc.
– “Real accountability and flexibility” – more aggressive state action and fewer union restrictions on low-performing schools.
– “High quality options for families” – more charter schools, state funding for students to attend private schools, scholarships for early high-school graduation.

The Education Roundtable (local members: Indiana University President Michael McRobbie and elementary teacher/Republican activist Danny Shields) endorsed two elements of the agenda: new teacher evaluations and early graduation.

Bennett joins ‘Chiefs for Change’

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett has joined with chief school officers from four other states to launch Chiefs for Change, a group pushing for aggressive education reforms.

The organization formed this week in Washington, D.C., at a summit sponsored by the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a think-tank headed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Other members are Paul Pastorek of Louisiana, Eric Smith of Florida, Deborah Gist of Rhode Island and Gerard Robinson of Virginia.

As for priorities, Education Week reports, “The five education leaders put these at the top of their list: ‘value-added’ ways of evaluating teachers and principals; more rigorous accountability systems based not on inputs but results; raising academic standards; and expanding school choice. The chiefs don’t walk in lock step on the choice issue, though. They said they all agree that students should have more charter and virtual school options, but some of the chiefs ‘may not go as far as others’ on other forms of choice—an apparent reference to vouchers.”

The list matches the agenda that’s been promoted both by Bennett and by Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Bennett said the five “kind of started our own union, a children’s union” that puts the interests of students first, Education Week said.