Common Core

In his State of the State speech yesterday afternoon, Ohio governor Ted Strickland announced that Ohio had been awarded the Frank Newman Award for Education Innovation by the Education Commission of the States ”in recognition of the comprehensive education reform we created last year.”

A key component of Strickland’s recent education reform efforts was joining the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in October and committing Ohio to developing 21st century assessments and requiring professional development in the teaching of 21st century skills. We’ve presented the evidence to show the faults in P21′s program. Others have noted that developing these assessments will be very, very expensive. That’s interesting because two other P21 member states – South Dakota and Massachusetts – chose to award their lucrative 21st century skills assessment contracts to P21 board members. P21 itself handles the kind of professional development that Strickland has promised to spend taxpayer dollars on.

If we follow the money this looks less like thoughtful reform than it does an effort by a “non-profit” to grab tax dollars and put some in the pockets of its corporate backers. Perhaps ECS made a mistake.

James Elias

The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) has released its third survey report on foreign language instruction in the United States (CAL also released such surveys in 1987 and 1997). You can read the executive summary here and read about its methodology here. The report’s findings are bleak:

- The percentage of elementary schools offering foreign language instruction declined 6% between 1997 and 2008. Only a quarter of elementary schools now offer any foreign language instruction. 51% of private elementary schools offer foreign language instruction but only 15% of public elementary schools do so.

- Even worse, the percentage of middle schools offering foreign language instruction declined 17%. Now just over half of middle schools teach foreign languages. 

- Survey data indicated that students attending rural schools and “schools whose students were of low socioeconomic status (SES)” are really being left behind, as those schools “were less likely” to offer any foreign language instruction.

What’s to blame for this trend? Not surprisingly, NCLB is a big part of the problem. From the report:

Approximately one third of public elementary and secondary schools with language programs reported that their foreign language instruction had been affected by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education legislation. Comments from survey respondents suggested that NCLB’s focus on mathematics and reading instruction had drawn resources away from foreign languages because they are not included in the law’s accountability measures.

Despite some bright spots, such as greater availability of Chinese and Arabic classes and increased usage of literature from the target culture in the language class, the report’s authors conclude that “the overall picture of foreign language instruction in 2008 was no better – and in some areas worse – than in 1997.”

Unfortunately, we’re not surprised.

Lynne Munson and James Elias 

The new education reform bill in the Massachusetts state legislature is notable for including regulations governing “innovation schools,” a turnaround model for chronically underperforming schools. According to the bill, “[s]chools that score in the lowest 20 per cent statewide…shall be deemed eligible for designation as underperforming or chronically underperforming.” In other words, these are schools full of students who are already not performing at grade level. 

The bill’s solution? 21st century skills! It’s included as one of 13 baseline measures required in every turnaround plan: “In order to assess the school across multiple measures of school performance and student success, the turnaround plan shall include measurable annual goals including…(8) student acquisition and mastery of 21^st-century skills.”

This means students in 369 Massachusetts schools will be subjected to the rigors of 21st century skills. Massachusetts’ most disadvantaged students soon will be wasting their time with the kind of lessons recommended on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ website: studying corporate logos and translating Shakespeare’s lines into text messages. Talk about leaving children behind…

Common Core and the press have pointed out that the Partnership for 21st Century Skills’ staff is made up of people with a lot of knowledge about publicity and salesmanship and almost no knowledge about education.  P21 finally has added a staff page to their website, so now you can see for yourself.  The page lists eight staffmembers.  Seven are pr experts.  The eighth is a lobbyist.

The lobbyist position is P21′s newest.  They call it “national policy director” but the job description makes its purpose clear:

[R]esponsible for representing the interests of the Partnership’s Strategic Council before the Administration and Congress and to cultivate strategic alliances with other educational organizations in the nation’s capital.

It is surprising to see a lobbyist’s job description rather brazenly appear on a non-profit’s website.  The job is occupied by Alan Knapp.  According to his bio, Knapp has no experience in education, but he does have a whole bunch of experience (and contacts) on Capitol Hill:

Before joining e-Luminate Group, Alan worked for over 10 years on Capitol Hill, most recently as the Deputy Chief of Staff and Legislative Director to U.S. Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) and before that as Legislative Director to former U.S. Rep. Nick Smith (R-MI).

And, no, neither member Knapp worked for has served on the House’s Education and Labor Committee.

We’re once again reminded that education isn’t P21′s raison d’etre.  It is to help create policies at the state and federal levels that will sell the products produced by members of its Strategic Council (Dell, Disney, Apple, etc.).

Perhaps that’s P21′s idea of “content.”

James Elias and Lynne Munson

In “What Makes a Great Teacher?” (The Atlantic, January/February 2010), Amanda Ripley tells us that Teach for America has succeeded in linking certain personality traits with teacher “greatness”-that is, the ability to drive up test scores. According to Teach for America staffers, those teachers who achieved “big, measurable goals” in college – particularly grade point average and “leadership achievement” – have a greater chance of bringing up their students’ scores than others. “If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size,” Ripley explains, ”that’s promising.”

But Ripley’s article neglects to ask: What makes a great education? Teach for America, too, has forgotten to ask this question. The researchers seem indifferent to the purposes of school, the content of a curriculum, or anything beyond the test results. Worse, their findings directly affect their admission practices:

Last year, Teach for America churned through 35,000 candidates to choose 4,100 new teachers. Staff members select new hires by deferring almost entirely to the model: they enter more than 30 data points about a given candidate (about twice the number of inputs they considered a decade ago), and then the model spits out a hiring recommendation. Every year, the model changes, depending on what the new batch of student data shows.

If the “new batch of student data shows” that those who were presidents of clubs in college are likelier to bring up test scores, then apparently Teach for America will give preference to former presidents of clubs. By their reasoning, if the data showed that thieves and bandits brought up test scores, then TFA would recruit thieves and bandits.

Do we really want our teaching faculty to consist entirely of a “perfect” personality type, be it leader types or others? Let us say we filled a school with straight-A leaders. Wouldn’t we be missing something? Don’t we also want teachers who love to delve into their subject, who would rather read Far from the Madding Crowd than lead a club? Don’t we need a few teachers who in college stayed up all night debating a philosophical question and got a B on their chemistry test the next day?

Such a system operates on an empty conception of education. The only meaning lies in the results. So we are letting the results on dumbed-down tests determine who our teachers should be? We think the “right” sort of teachers will make our schools right? Let us instead begin by defining education. Is education preparation for a test? Yes, but it is much more. It should give students knowledge, ideas, and works that will stay with them throughout their lives. It should teach real subjects, not watered-down versions. Literature, not literacy; history, not social studies; biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, languages, music, art, and drama should fill the curriculum. Teachers will seek out this sort of school.

In a school with an excellent curriculum, students respond to both the teacher and the subject. The teacher brings knowledge, insight, and a special way of conveying the material. Some do it with humor, others with solemnity. Some are structured in their presentations, others ruminative. Some are stern and formal, others less so. Some lead solitary lives; others have large families. Some may be organizers, others quiet contributors. A liberal arts education teaches us that there is more to humanity, even within ourselves, than we have recognized before. There is room for many personalities in a great school; what unites them is their knowledge, passion, and contribution to the school’s endeavor.

Teach for America’s attempt to identify the personality traits of a successful teacher-and to select candidates possessing those traits-amounts to social engineering. It reflects a lack of educational vision. It is deadly for the teaching profession and for our schools.

Diana Senechal

Diana Senechal taught for four years in the New York City public schools and has stepped back to write a book. Her writing has appeared in Education Week, GothamSchools, the Core Knowledge Blog, Joanne Jacobs, and Common Core. She has a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale.