When I said last year that I was going to try to figure out what was going on in public education, I had no idea what a gigantic project that would turn out to be. Not only is it complex, it’s also political, making it that much harder to unravel the claims of groups both for and against. In short, despite hours of research, I still have questions. But our own Brattleboro Town School Board says it wants to do outreach on education, and I think we should take the opportunity to reach out to them so we’ll get our questions answered and our concerns allayed (or not). To get the ball rolling, I have a list of questions I’d like to see addressed by local education officials. Even if no public discussion ensues, at least we’ll know what’s going on.
Note: So far the High School has been staying out of this discussion, but I think questions about public education include the high school and hope that their board decides to engage at some point.
And now, questions about public education in Brattleboro:
No Child Left Behind and Standardized Tests
- In what ways do federal education programs such as No Child Left Behind drive how our children are taught in Brattleboro schools?
- To what extent do federal education mandates drive spending decisions such as the purchase of curriculum materials, textbooks, and devices such as computers and tablets?
- How much of federally-mandated costs are reimbursed or otherwise funded by the federal government, and for how long?
Common Core Curriculum Standards
- Are you aware of criticisms of the new Common Core Curriculum Standards nationwide and are you listening to the debate?
- Will a full implementation of Common Core leave room for teaching things not covered by Common Core?
- Are all children able to do the same things and perform at a “proficient” level on standardized tests?
- In the past, it was accepted that some perfectly smart, capable people do not perform well on standardized tests. Are any allowances made for such people today?
- What careers does Common Core prepare students for?
Computers and Data
- The new adaptive tests require Internet-connected computers to run. How will this requirement impact computer purchases in the run-up to test implementation in 2015?
- What concerns do you have, if any, about the way data collected on students will be used?
- Testing companies are creating tests to be used throughout the year in addition to the “big” tests with which we’re all familiar. Will Brattleboro be using the new interim tests as well?
Students
- How are Brattleboro school students managing in the new test-driven environment? Are some students doing better than others? What prevents all students from doing well?
- It appears that Brattleboro’s students are having trouble making sufficient year over year gains in proficiency numbers to make “Adequate Yearly Progress” overall. When students are made aware of the importance of standardized test scores to the school system, how does it make them feel when they learn that they or their school did not measure up?
- What do you say to students whose aptitudes and interests are not math, reading comprehension, engineering, science and technology?
- The Board has posed the question: What do we want our children to know? Can you answer that question for us?
Parents
- What percentage of parents are involved in the schools and in what ways?
- What does the school system expect of parents?
Teachers
- What drove the decision to buy out the contracts of higher-paid teachers?
- Does the loss of experienced teachers help or harm our schools?
- Some teachers say they felt pushed out of the school system by being subjected to enhanced scrutiny, increased criticism, and in some cases outright bullying (yelling, swearing). What do you say to a teacher or staff member who feels that they are being treated wrongly or unfairly by an administrative superior?
Policy Implementation
- How much leeway does the local school district have with state and federal education initiatives?
Outcome
- Is the concept of producing well-rounded people still part of the goal of public education?
- If so, how does Common Core contribute to the goal of educating well-rounded people?
- If not, what is the goal of public education?
These are a few of my more pressing concerns. Yours may differ. Meanwhile, the Town School Board wants to hear from the public on education matters, so if you’d like your questions addressed at an upcoming outreach forum, be sure to let them know. Otherwise, they may end up focusing on “success stories” and other less challenging topics, which will leave all the important questions unasked and consequently unanswered.
Quo Vadis (Wither goest thou)?
Taken as a whole, these questions contain a bias towards humanism. They reflect a view of education that presupposes notions of individuation, critical discernment, and aesthetic refinement.
Is it possible the charge of administrators and educators is not so much to foster versatile, unique, morally sound citizens, but rather, to train a corp of compliant respondents and docile consumers?
If the board rejects this supposition, then Lise’s questions become all the more pressing.
Corporations, Impact, and More Questions
The Common Core mission statements says the goal is prep for a global economy. “With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.”
Bill Gates said in 2009 that “When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well. And it will unleash a powerful market of people providing services for better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large, uniform base of customers looking at using products that can help every kid learn, and every teacher get better.” This means collecting data on everyone.
…..
Let’s look closer at one of the Common Core “lessons” – this is from a handout at a recent school board meeting.
For the topic “Earth’s Systems: Processes that Shape the Earth” students can “demonstrate understanding” by doing four things, 4-ESS1-1, 4-ESS-2-1, 4-ESS2-2, and 4-ESS3-2.
The first is to identify evidence from patterns in rock formations and fossils and explain changes in a landscape over time. The second is to take note of weathering and rate of erosion “by water, wind, ice, or vegetation” (but not human paving or other impacts). The third is to be able to use maps.
The final one jumped out at me. “Generate and compare multiple solutions to reduce the impacts of natural Earth processes on humans.”
Reduce Earth’s impact on humans? That seems backwards.
But, it is repeated as a “Disciplinary Core Idea” as ESS3.8, Natural Hazards. It says “Humans cannot eliminate the hazards but can take steps to reduce their impacts.”
Really? We’re teaching children that we need protection from Earth? My, my.
….
It does seem that the more you investigate the current world of education, and each time you think you have a question answered, there’s another layer to peel back and even more questions are revealed.
– If education is increasingly guided from national curriculum, standards, tests, etc., what does the local school board’s role become?
– Why not develop strong regional education?
– Whatever happened to a strong PTA?
– Whatever happened to strong teacher unions?
Corporate education
I have been amused to see people complaining that common core has been developed by corporations to produce graduates suitable for the workforce corporations envision, as if it’s some kind of “takeover” of education. Perhaps they’re unaware that this has been going on for at least the last 120 years or so. The schools we went to were all about training good factory workers and managers.
Our factory education is no longer working for us or for corporations. But I agree that I’d like to see education that’s intended to develop minds rather than train people to keep producing wealth for the 1%.
Recent raiding
It is a recent takeover… the last decade. Before that, there were no national corporate curriculums for sale, and corporations generally stayed out of eduction, except for textbook makers and lunch box manufacturers.
It is common to think that education has been about creating workers, but it hasn’t. It started as a way to get people to read and know the Bible, then moved on to being for the creation of good citizens able to participate in democracy.
Even when factory-style learning (the assembly line approach) took over, it wasn’t for creating good workers or consumers. The focus was still on citizenry.
Technical schools to provide career skills were always off on the side and never the main focus of education. Nobody trained us to work for anyone. Home Ec, shorthand, adding machines, and shop were electives on the side.
The corporate raiding of every local education budget is a very new development, and should raise questions if not concerns.
Our industrial education
Yes, I think it’s a common thought because it’s true. American public education may have its roots in the nation’s desire to produce well-informed voting citizens, but turn-of-the-century reforms were instituted to meet the demand for an industrial workforce to replace the 18th and 19th-century agrarian workforce.
Many turn-of-the-century education reformers were directly influenced by Frederick W. Taylor’s theories of scientific management, and focused on standardization and quality-control. It’s not a coincidence that what you learned in 20th century schools was to show up on time, follow directions, don’t question authority, complete tasks on time, be a productive member of society. If you think you weren’t being trained to work for someone… I have a sentence diagram I’d like to sell you, cheap.
While general education was intended to fill general needs in the industrial economy, the same education reformers also advocated for the Smith-Hughes Act, which created vocational education to fill specific industrial needs.
In the early 20th century, only a small percentage of people went on to post-secondary education. That started to change after WWII, and public education has struggled with reforms since then, but never with much success and never really losing the factory formula. Reform is long overdue, although maybe not in the way most of today’s reformers would like to see it, IMO.
Educating a workforce isn’t necessarily a terrible thing – people need to have the skills to participate in the economy. But no, I’m not a big fan of corporations taking the lead in education reform, either. I do agree that it’s a more aggressive influence on education than business has had in the past. It’s time to wrestle education away from corporate interests, but I doubt that the corporate-owned government is up to the task. So who, then? Educators? That would seem to make sense, but maybe not with the current hysteria over teachers’ unions.
Products
I agree that we were all taught to conform to societal expectations, but again that was an outgrowth of needing to read one’s Bible more than Carnegie hoping his steel workers would be good at math.
And you are right that schools were modeled on a factory formula, but that’s a different subject.
I can’t find any prior example of businesspeople getting together and deciding to sell “education” as a product to every school system in the country, then creating the product, the means of evaluating the product, the mechanism for evaluating those implementing the product, and then the replacement for that product. But that’s what is going on now.
I think it is a significant change.
Bible factory workers, maybe.
Well, they’re a lot more than “societal norms,” they’re industrial age societal norms that you’re introduced to in school. Bible-reading farmers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century didn’t have managers to enforce production quotas or have to punch a time card. Schools weren’t simply “modeled” on factories by coincidence, it was intentional, not to create better bible scholars, but to create workers for industry.
I see your point about corporations creating education as a product for them to sell and control. But you can’t seriously claim that corporate influence on education is something new; that until Common Core education was basically a scholarly extension of bible study. As far as I’m concerned corporate influence and pandering has been the main problem with education for the past 100 years. Is this worse? Sure, okay.
Sears Deluxe School System
Sears sold just about everything but I’m pretty sure they didn’t sell schools systems.
The few corporations that were involved with selling to schools were school supply companies, globe makers, and a wide range of textbook publishers. School boards had choices of what to buy to help public school teachers teach and students learn. Teachers created curriculum.
Public schools were intended to foster democracy and create good citizens first and foremost, and being employable was certainly one of the many goals. Knowing the classics, being able to debate, learning a foreign language, playing an instrument, acting in plays and so on were common, but not anything needed for working the overnight shift.
Vocational schools and trade schools to prepare certain people for specific jobs were always a subset. That’s where one could learn how to operate machinery or tools. That’s what I think of when you talk about schools preparing workers for industry, but not general public schools.
Look more closely at the Common Core brand, how it came to be, and who’s behind it. It’s weird.
Local schools - where are we headed?
Thank you Lise for delving into these issues and trying to organize them in a coherent fashion. The interaction of high stakes testing, data collection (of certain types), school climate and professional supervision is challenging to say the least.
When area schools have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on the NECAP tests the public has been assured by school administration that these tests do not fully reflect the overall job that our schools are doing. The cumulative effect of these repeated assurances has been that the public is unaware of the real changes that have taken place in our schools. Things are changing in our schools in both substance and style.
I work in public education and continue to be a strong supporter of our local schools. However, I believe that we need more transparency in setting educational priorities. The adoption of new standards such as Common Core, the purchase of more pre-packaged curricula and the adoption of a new generation of tests only heightens the need for more public participation.
Education certainly has among its goals giving people the skills they need to survive – or even thrive – in society. John Dewey believed that education was at the heart of our democracy giving all people the motivation and the knowledge to participate as active citizens. Einstein believed that the primary purpose of education is to excite the imagination. Sir Ken Robinson (see: TED Talks) promotes the need to teach creativity because none of us knows what the world will look like in the next ten years. A factory model of education will probably not contribute to any of these lofty goals.
If public education continues the drift toward high stakes analysis of numerical data, top down administration and a behavioristic approach to building community I fear we will lose the best of our students and the best of our teachers. That would be a tragedy for us all – now and in the future.
School Board Meeting Jan 8 5pm
Late notice but there’s a Town School Board meeting tonight at Green St School at 5pm. Interested people are welcome to attend. They should be discussing the upcoming public forum so this might be a good opportunity to get some questions in.
Update
I went to the meeting but could only stay an hour so of course they didn’t get to discuss the public forum on Jan 22 while I was there. I did manage to give them my questions which I felt was important to do after taking all the trouble to write them.
I’ll try to catch the rest of this meeting online and find out what I missed. The first hour was devoted to presentations by teachers and staff at the schools. There was a presentation by foreign language teachers in the elementary schools, and another almost horrifying presentation from one of the school nurses about the many many medical needs that our students have. It left me with a lot of question that I would never have thought to have before. Times have changed.
Will try to follow up, as I said. If anyone who was there wants to chime in, feel free to post your own account as a story.
Do parents attend?
How many parents come to these meetings? I’d imagine that in Brattleboro, parents would be quite concerned about details of their kids’ educations, and the rising costs. It is, perhaps, the most important aspect of kids lives beyond their home, and shapes what they can do and become.