Reforming Toward the Center
Writing in The Nation, Alfie Kohn criticizes the “education reform” movement and opens with the good point that this term gets thrown around in a pretty loosey-goosey and unprincipled manner when the movement actually has some pretty specific commitments. Here’s his debunking:
But groups with names like Democrats for Education Reform–along with many mainstream publications–are disconcertingly allied with conservatives in just about every other respect [i.e., other than support for vouchers]. To be a school “reformer” is to support:
- A heavy reliance on fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests to evaluate students and schools, generally in place of more authentic forms of assessment;
- The imposition of prescriptive, top-down teaching standards and curriculum mandates;
- A disproportionate emphasis on rote learning–memorizing facts and practicing skills–particularly for poor kids;
- A behaviorist model of motivation in which rewards (notably money) and punishments are used on teachers and students to compel compliance or raise test scores;
- A corporate sensibility and an economic rationale for schooling, the point being to prepare children to “compete” as future employees; and
- Charter schools, many run by for-profit companies.
Notice that these features are already pervasive, which means “reform” actually signals more of the same–or, perhaps, intensification of the status quo with variations like one-size-fits-all national curriculum standards or longer school days (or years).
The structure of his article calls for this list of bullet points to be a tendentious caricature of what soi disant school reformers want, but with the exception of “corporate sensibility” I would actually say that I’m pretty much on board for this agenda. Indeed, I actually wish school reformers would be considerably more aggressive in pushing for genuine national standards.
I would, however, deny that this is a “conservative” agenda in any particular way. I think there are two aspects of education policy debates that have substantial linkage with the basic left-right ideological conflict. One concerns levels of spending. The right generally wants to spend less on social services (such as education) and the left generally wants to spend more. Another concerns centralization. The left generally supports federal action, national standards, and a strong center to prevent slippage whereas the right tends to favor decentralization as a means of weakening state capabilities. Nothing on Kohn’s list is relevant to the issue of spending, where certainly I like a very conventional “left” person would favor high levels of spending. And on the issue of centralization Kohn has, for no real reason I can see, decided that it’s conservative to believe in national standards. In fact it’s the reverse, and a strong belief in school decentralization is something many conservative legislators adhere to. It has, therefore, been a useful thing for left-wing NCLB opponents to latch on to in order to build a coalition with right-wing NCLB opponents. But I think it’s a little sad to see some people confusing their alliances of convenience with their real principles.
At any rate, the case for national standards of some kind is, I think, pretty clear — it’s silly for the federal government to invest a significant amount of money in something without articulating any kind of uniform national goals the money is supposed to be supporting. Beyond that, it’s incredibly harmful to children that when they move — a circumstance that disproportionately impacts poor children — there’s no curricular alignment between what they were learning previously and what they’re being taught now.
40 Responses to “Reforming Toward the Center”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
December 12th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Are you really unfamiliar with the progressive critique of memorization and regurgitation via standardized tests as an educational model? There’s a long tradition of progressivism in education that involves how kids learn, not just how resources are distributed in the educational system.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Matt,
I always read you and usually agree with you. Yes, Kohn might be an absolutist in his own way. But he is right on in this critique. And Jim’s response is similar to my own? Are you a progressive except in education? True progessive education hasn’t really been tried in this country. It should be of little surprise that schools that focus all their attention do better on standardized testing- but that only proves they can do well on standardized testing. But it is more surprising to note that many progressive schools do even better on standardized testing. Of course there are some lousy progressive schools. And there are some very fine traditional schools (usually based around a tremendously charismatic teachers. We all have had some great teachers whose pedagogy was stuck in the Jurassic Age but whose flair for teaching and concern for students made them a favorite.)
But back ot the point. Kohn’s concern that for many Democracts, their only problem with NCLB is that is was not fully funded.) Any true progressive educator is instead aghast at the whole idea. No Child Left Untested is a better monikor for the program and is what upsets most teachers.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:16 am
That’s it, Matt. I’m done with you. You have done zero research on this, and I take this to mean that you take a similar approach to other issues on which you comment.
If I wanted to hear uninformed “opinions” on education policy, I’ll turn to the Washington Times or perhaps the City Journal. National standards are one thing, but to advocate a whole series of proposals that would undermine education and our democracy without doing even a cursory review of the research literature is unconscionable for someone in your position. You have a very large platform here and that comes with a responsibility that you obviously do not take seriously.
I was hopeful that traveling to Finland would open your eyes to other possibilities, but it is obvious that you’re just a tourist. You’ve done no research on the Finnish model let alone what’s going on over here. If you don’t want to do the work to gain an understanding of educational issues then do not comment on them.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:17 am
This is an enormously condescending statement.
As other commenters have pointed out, there is a large, well-developed progressive critique of national tests that decimate teachers’ flexibility, pacing, and classroom control.
Hell man, if nothing else I know you’ve watched Season 4 of The Wire — the big critique there wasn’t of the funding disparity, but of the supremacy of the test culture.
This is also a goofy statement:
How quickly we forget! Where was most of the action on climate change, healthcare reform, and virtually every other progressive policy over the last 8 years? Decentralization doesn’t necessarily have to = “weaker state capabilities” so long as the funding structure is right.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:18 am
It is hard to deny that the measures Kohn outlines represent the status quo, rather than reform.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:39 am
As I read this post a phrase popped into my head out of nowhere:
Trust-fund scumbag.
MY knows about as much about public school policy as I do about organic chemistry. Someone asked a question in a previous thread–has Matt ever even been in a public school, even once in his entire life? Of course, Matt doesn’t deign to read his comments so he has no idea the question was even asked.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:41 am
True, but this:
has typically reflected a stance of the left, not the right. Generally, because it got evolution into the schools and creationism out. More broadly,for some time liberal interests have been served by federal standards – in the treatment of racial minorities primarily. However, I see nothing inherently liberal about it. Chartered towns, for example, always had more liberal laws than the kingdoms in which they were located. Their citizens certainly didn’t want more centralization of power, at least not until they held the bulk of it.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Yup. What Naureckas said. Your notions of educational policy and educational psychology are not only entirely conservative, they’re also – and as a fan of your blog I hesitate to say this but I have to – almost entirely bankrupt*.
Conservatives have supported uniformity in educational practice, standards and behavioral management since the turn of the century (Tyack, 1974), supporting rote-memorization and toe-the-line behavioral prescriptions for predominately working-class public schools as a means to rationalize and control restless urban populations. It’s true that big ‘P’ Progressives did briefly align with conservatives in these efforts (Rodgers, 1998), notably the introduction of Carnegie units, but this alliance fractured with the rise of progressive theories of education (Dewey, Frobel, Montessori, Piaget, etc) that proved to have much better results.
Cognitive psychology and information processing (e.g. Newell & Simon, Simon & Chase) – both fields that have very conservative theories of mind-as-machine underlying them – dominated American educational psychology for most of the 20th century, resulting in a reification of standardized “best” practices. It’s worth noting that private schools for the upper class and public schools for upper-middle class have never really adopted the resulting educational models, instead relying upon a more craft-like approach as they developed and shared their own pedagogical practices and curricula.
Of course, contemporary cognitive psychology has finally begun moving away from its treasured symbol system hypothesis (with its notion that the mind is made up of abstract, arbitrary & amodal), and towards notions that human memory (and even our perceptual system!) is best-suited for situated action (Glenberg, Barsalou, etc). Such a notion, of course, contradicts the entire theory of mind that the ‘psychometrics’ field uses to produce standardized tests.
Of course, many psychologists (Lave, J.S. Brown, J.J. Gibson is an antecedent), cognitive anthropologists (Scribner & Cole, Hutchins) and sociolinguists (Gumperz, Heath, Gee) who *actually* study human learning and cognition in naturalistic settings hae been saying this for decades 0 as well as emphasizing that cognition is inherently mediated by culture and representations (Scribner & Cole’s work on the cognitive and literacy practices of the Vai is a landmark example, also Scollon & Scollon on the Athabaskans). These thinkers have long advocated for more formative and situated means of assessment in public schools.
As the US economy has become increasingly based on a growing part of its population performing mindless service jobs, conservatives have called again and again (see Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind) for more rote, standardized means of instruction and assessment that *decrease* reading comprehension has been heavily emphasized.
*Now, I’m now an anti-federal radical like Kohn – I would love to see elimination of the property tax for funding schools as it is a primary driver of socioeconomic stratification and racial segregation in the US – but I am very much against standardization of pedagogical practices and assessment, as its had consistently negative results in public education. I’m sure there has to be *some* form of assessment of schools to ensure there quality, but I’d like to see more formative evaluation methods of students, which reflect the way the human mind actually works.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:50 am
As other commenters have more aggressively pointed out, I’d love to see your research that justifies your opinions on this matter.
I hesitate to be condescending, but my impression is that you support the solution described above because it is more aligned with ‘wonkish’ discourse and ways of thinking. I’m all for some innovative wonking in educational policy, but I think your vision trends toward default notions rather than anything that would actually improve education in the U.S.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:51 am
I would also point out that a lot of the progressive objection is coming from the behaviorist approach/corporate mentality side of things.
Progressives worry, with some justification, that basically these schools are more interested in turning out well-regulated workers with basic competency than people who can actually think critically about the world, that the interest in privatization and union-busting flows directly from a belief that the market is the be-all and end-all of education (as opposed to the idea that the goal of mass education is to create well-informed and critically-thinking citizens in a democracy, a la John Dewey).
As for centralization, I don’t think I have a problem with that from a left perspective. I think the issue is more the autonomy of the teacher as expressed above by other posters, especially when you consider that one of the legacies of the New Left has been an increased emphasis on individual rights of self-expression and creativity, of freedom of thought against the status quo, and a dislike of systems of control and uniformity. There’s something really creepy and dehumanizing about the way in which some “reformers” want to break down the teaching process in a very neo-Taylorite way, such that the teacher becomes a rote reciter themselves.
December 12th, 2008 at 11:54 am
I have read your writing for a long time. I quit for a while because you supported our foolish excursion into Iraq. I think that your current thinking on education is a little less well thought out than your thinking on Iraq was, and I look forward to a book in about eight years where you describe how wrong you were about education, as our education system devolves further into mind-numbing mediocrity.
If you took the time to read a book of Alfie Kohn’s, you might begin to see outside of the 19th century box you have created for yourself. But I will use an observation you made about your own education. You wrote, some time ago, that the books that were chosen in high school were not interesting to you and that there was maybe one book that you remember and would reread. If your elite education does not make you want to revisit and rethink, and re-admire the books of your youth, you have missed something precious. It could have been better. It could have made you feel more alive. It could have made you want to be a better person. But it left you bored. Why?
I read once that the definition of a good marriage is a conversation that is always too short. I think a good education is one which always makes you want to continue the conversation with the art and ideas introduced. It is not the ability to bubble in tests in the belief that life has short black and white answers. If that’s what you got from Harvard, I don’t think you got your money’s worth.
December 12th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Matt, what problem in America do you think will be solved by kids learning how to fill in bubbles? As a 15-yr veteran of corporate america, I can say that standardized tests teach no skills that I need to see among my colleagues. As a parent of three, I can say that none of the struggles I have in parenting my kids would be helped by this sort of thing, and as a husband of someone familiar with the research on this topic, I can say that Alfie Kohn is much more fact-based on these issues than you are.
December 12th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Matt, just because your girlfriend used to work for Andrew Rotherham (eduwonk.com) doesn’t mean you have to parrot his center-right views. Leave that hackery to David Brooks.
December 12th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
As a parent, nothing scares me more than national standard. Already text book publishers wishing to satisfy state-wide markets in a couple of states (I believe Taxas and CA make textbook purchase decisions on a state-wide basis), are pushed to to publish total pabulum. I can only imagine what will happen to the teaching of the history, biology, geology and cosmology if we had national standards. At least now we can vote with out feet without having to leave the country. As it is, I live in one of the two most liberal towns in the most liberal state (Brookline, MA), and the textbooks in use extol colonialism and confuse founding myths (of countries and religion) with history. These predilections are offset by fantastic teachers etc.
Even in New Rochelle, NY, no hotbed of conservative Christians, the English department is tearing pages out of books because of their offensive nature. http://lohud.com/article/20081210/NEWS02/812100425/-1/newsfront
Why MY thinks that the benefits of national standards would be worth the risk, is beyond me.
December 12th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
It is refreshing to see Matt openly support behaviorist rote learning that can be assessed by fill-in-the-bubble testing.
And it’s true, the left does support federal action and national standards- for cans of soup.
But it seems pretty obvious that Matt doesn’t think this rote-learning model should apply to everyone. Instead, Matt and his children will purchase immunity from the NCLB regime by attending private schools and being forwarded to private universities on the tried and true basis of money.
The rote-learning model Matt espouses will be reserved for the lower classes, and will essentially consist of an attenuated form of the child labor of the 19th century, with children from the age of six focused intently on learning the correct stimulus-response patterns to generate the winning numbers for their school district or state. This is so far from a liberal or progressive view of education that you can’t even get there from here.
As for Matt’s idea that it’s silly for the feds to throw money at schools with no national standards, well, that’s exactly what they did in the 50s and 60s and the results were pretty damn good. In those decades the feds provided money for schools with student parents employed by the federal government or federal contractors, and that money built tens of thousands of schools and paid teacher’s salaries for the booming suburbs of that highly mobile and growing economy. It was the students of those schools who bit the bullet and threw a monkey-wrench in the works of the Vietnam war which, left to the Greatest Generation, might have gone on forever or resulted in the use of nuclear weapons.
Strange to say, the liberal education those students received came from a corporatist philosophy that said “Send us a graduate who can think and we’ll train them for the specific task”.
Ironically, Matt’s education has apparently not trained him to think or fitted him with the rote-learning to understand what has gone before. Fortunately for him, it did equip him with the social graces to mingle with the upper classes, one of the most important “skills” in a highly stratified society.
December 12th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I’m only familiar with Kohn’s “Punished by Rewards,” but based on that he is pretty clearly an ideologue: his perspective on rewards, while perhaps useful in an environment dominated by corporations, economists, and behaviorists, are very one-sided.
That said, Yglesias is a smart rich kid with zero first-hand knowledge of public education, and it shows.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Agreed, “Punished By Rewards” is overly polemical. But at least he starts with reviewing the real research before going overboard in his conclusions.
December 12th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I teach in a good university and the product of this kind of ‘education’ is not ready for prime time.
Bubble-filling is no replacement for some serious skills in thinking, critical reasoning, and clear communications. Harder to teach, but worth the effort. Teaching tot he test may demonstrate to some headquarters fer removed from the classroom that a teacher is ‘good’ but it is not producing smart, committed citizens.
December 12th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Matt, you get points for saying soi disant. That was funny.
There are some things that can be tested pretty objectively. Say, math, grammar, spelling. These are basic skills that people need. And railing against the top-down model of teaching kids math by letting them memorise tables is… pretty far out there. You need some basics before you can move beyond them.
Also, a test doesn’t necessarily need to be just fill-in-the-bubble multiple choice. A non-MP test will obviously have a larger overhead, but hey, if you’re liberal then you can offer something in terms of spending. Who can argue with smarter tests?
I think a lot of people on the left get this issue wrong. A more meritocratic school system is ultimately better for social mobility, if it is backed up by sufficient and largely equal funding.
I don’t see the point in charter schools, though.
December 12th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Well, sorry to point this out, but the degree of meritocracy has nothing to do with social mobility.
Meritocracy can promote the response of the Confucian mandarins, ultimately devoted to keeping out of power anybody not born to the mandarin class. In the process, China became arguably the least socially mobile society in the world.
Meritocracy can divide students into different tracks, turning some at an early age into vocational tracks that never can lead to higher liberal-arts styles of education.
Meritocracy can be used, as it was for many years, to justify ending the education of poor performers at an early age, simply dumping them on the labor market.
There is no reason to assume that a meritocracy will promote social mobility, or even that anyone knows what would constitute merit. Would it be an understanding of Hayek, or Vonnegut, or perhaps both, or neither?
Thee are other meritocracies, of course. Napolean’s Marshalls were notoriously chosen on merit and notoriously good at what they did. That didn’t save Napolean, though.
December 12th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Dear Matt:
Regardless of your ultimate stance on these issues, you currently come across as a rube to those (such as myself) who know enough to consider themselves only mildly informed.
Read more on this topic before opining about it, as you’re basically ignorant about the state of public education in the US (let alone the rest of the world).
December 12th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
Matt,
I generally like and find funny – if not neccessarily right on the money – your writing on any number of topics.
But here, I have to chime in with the universal approbrium you are receiving, as you clearly have no idea of what you are talking about.
I’m not an education person, but I am married to someone with a PhD in education who currently works as an instructor in a low income, previously failing public school that is going through a reform process (that is largely progressive in nature, although with certain features conservative like): ie the educational goals are progressive and focused not much on grades and grading but improving students ability to think critically and to love learning for its own sake. Oh, and BTW, these progressives reforms have worked in conservative terms, ‘despite’ themselves, as standardized test scores have gone up significantly. I doubt they would have if they followed the rest of this agenda, however.
As such, I feel very comfortable saying that this post is extremely glib and shows how little you know about this topic. Indeed, your views – although you probably didn’t appreciate it while writing it – come across as extremely elitist and conservative.
Is this the kind of learning experience you had when going to Manhattan private schools and than at Harvard? An endless stream of bubble test and rote learning? Of course not. But then, you were being educated to join the elite – the liberal cognoscenti – not to work as a store manager at Bed Bath and Beyond. And of course, for the poor people who had the bad luck of being born into a disadvantaged background, such a career aspiration is all they should hope to aspire to. As such, schools should teach them as such.
While you might not think it, this is basically what you come across as advocating here. This is a deeply conservative and reactionary view of what schools in poor, disadvantaged areas should do and aspire to achieve. That is not meritocratic – it is designed to solidify class hierarchy.
December 12th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
A lot of people have commented that Matt has no business posting about education. I happen to disagree with most of his opinions as well, but one positive thing, at least for me, is that I’ve been able to read a nice discussion about education in the comments section!
I am a classroom teacher and am wondering if anyone has a recommendation for a good website or journal that one could read to keep up-to-date on the types of issues being discussed here in the past few days.
I have really appreciated reading all the different viewpoints everyone has offered.
December 12th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
I agree with Matt here. As Daniel Davies, not someone I would characterize as a reactionary has said, “Children are not ‘candles to be lit’, they are buckets to be filled.” As oppressive as “rote memorization” sounds, it’s extremely useful and we need more of it.
December 12th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Taken without permission
December 12th, 2008 at 11:44 pm
Thanks DRR, that’s a perfect segue way for my comment.
From pre- through 5th, ages ~4 through ~10, curriculum should certainly centralized, standardized, and rigorous. “Rigorous” means we put serious resources into remediation, identifying learning disabilities, language remediation and parent coaching on ways to support learning at home.
Middle school is training for the great divide: pass an entrance exam and make a choice, go to high school. Fail the entrance exam or otherwise choose to and you can learn a trade or do community service/job experience as a teenager.
But then high school curriculum is:
a) project-based and multi-disciplinary
b) responsive to the unique learning goals of students, and
c) assessed by impersonal panels of evaluators for next-level competency.
I believe this is developmentally appropriate. Those who like to learn need autonomy, those who don’t like to learn need to see a concrete reason for their particular efforts in life.
It’s interesting that, from what I’ve seen, rote learning picks up prestige and relevancy again in college: pre-med, pre-law, lit., history, and social science majors want to master the jargon and merge their growing recall prowess with their ever-more-sensitive analytic and synthetic abilities.
Really the only place where we’re pissing into the wind in US education is our universal assembly line secondary culture (which is where I teach).
December 13th, 2008 at 10:24 am
‘I would actually say that I’m pretty much on board for this agenda. Indeed, I actually wish school reformers would be considerably more aggressive in pushing for genuine national standards.’
That’s it for me. I’ve read enough of your thinking about box stores in cities,
chastising school reform, calling out 1960’s anti war voices.
You are clearly an idiot! I finished with your blog
December 13th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Jeff @ 24, you might want to try schoolmatters.blogspot.com and its blogroll.
December 13th, 2008 at 11:17 am
OOPS — it’s schoolsmatter (”school” is plural, “matter” is not). You want Jim Horn’s blog.
Maybe there’s something about this site that promotes typos.
December 13th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
People, people, ease up a bit. Matthew knows a thing or two about this subject.
As a wee whipper snapper at the Dalton School in NYC, Matt and his fellow proles would often file back to their class room after the obligatory “free” lunch and were forced to sit down and adhere to the rigorous memirization standards handed down by government fiat to pass the latest skills exam.
And he also saw many of his less fortunate peers drop out after failures to “achieve” the standard set.
Oh, hell…I’ll let ‘er rip:
“trust fund scumbag”
December 14th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
The status quo, at least in the worst inner city schools, is not that we are creating fact-memorizing robots ready to take on their role in the class hierarchy. The status quo is that we are graduating about 50% of the students in some districts. The status quo is that the average graduate in some school districts reads at a 9th grade level. I think the progressive critique of “education reform” lacks perspective on the massive failures happening in our inner city schools. That said, reform bandwagon jumpers don’t exactly show a nuanced understanding of inner city schools either. It’s a little frustrating.
March 11th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
March 14th, 2009 at 9:27 am
Incredible site!
xanax
March 17th, 2009 at 3:26 am
Great site. Good info
tramadol
March 22nd, 2009 at 7:25 am
tramadol
Excellent site. It was pleasant to me.
April 2nd, 2009 at 9:43 am
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
buy cheap viagra
April 8th, 2009 at 3:37 am
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
viagra