The most important news in the education world today is not
the U.S. team winning the International Mathematics Olympiad, in spite of its headline status in Real Clear Education, a continually useful website where, along with Alexander Russo's likewise invaluable (to me) This Week in Education, I
start my weekdays by reading the morning news; it's the continued
progress of the opt-out movement, which started in the managerial east
of this country, in New York and New Jersey, with largely middle class
European-American (I hate the word "white" because of its racist history -- more on that, perhaps, another time) mothers objecting to what their local schools had become
under the influence of education reformers like Secretary Duncan and
then-New York state schools commissioner John King, but which has now spread across the
country to blue states like Washington and Oregon, along with purple
states in between like Colorado and New Mexico.
Politico has a new article out today, which I accessed through Real Clear Education, that aptly summarizes the state of education policy play in the United States; for in spite of isolated glimmers of hope such as our young mathematicians' triumph, the trend lines in U.S. education have been discouraging for about eight years now, approximately dateable from the time (see Class Warfare 178 -- "Money Meets Data") when Bill Gates finished reading Tom Kane's Hamilton Project policy paper and decided that rotating out bad teachers -- Jack Welch's personnel policy on steroids, applied to the entire U.S. teaching corps -- was what was needed to accelerate educational reform in the United States. That approach is now in flames, headed for a crash landing, as a conference committee begins attempting to reconcile two competing bills, the Student Success Act and the Every Child Achieves Act, passed by the House and the Senate respectively this month, in sincere though misguided attempts to "fix" No Child Left Behind", that law that has failed to prevent millions of American children from falling behind their peers, and that has led the United States as a whole to fall further behind the world's educational leaders during the seven years the Obama administration has been in office. So the time for a new education policy for the United States, and in particular for Democrats, has clearly arrived.
The opt-out movement presents Democrats with a choice: either stick with the failed social policy of George W. Bush, which depended upon nationalizing the fake "Texas miracle" as a cheap means of equalizing opportunity in America by reforming public schools only; or see the expiring future of the path erroneously (although the error wasn't obvious at the time) chosen by President-Elect Obama in late 2008 to back what is now status quo education reform and choose another path, one that presents freedom of educational choice to all families, not just rich ones -- the path of education reform that was gaining momentum, before Bill Gates read Tom Kane's paper.
Showing posts with label policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label policy. Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2015
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
On the Exetasecrats
I just coined that word--I derive it from (also my invention) exetasecracy, "rule by examination".
Jay Mathews did me the honor of quoting me in The Washington Post about a month ago, and specifically my phrase "government of the people by the highly educated for the well placed vested interests". Here I am drawing attention to the middle of those three prepositional phrases. In contemporary American civilization, a highly educated person is someone who will have taken many tests, and have done exceptionally well on them. Democrats, Republicans, talking heads supporting education reform and those opposing it, virtually all (including me) of those participating in any of our education debates, now that the Bush Administration is out of power, are exetasecrats, people who did well on tests when they were in school, and, because much of their self-validation derives from their performance on those tests, believers in their validity and usefulness.
But this post continues (and will probably conclude, for now, since I am actually a fan of TFA, on balance) my attack on Teach For America, begun two posts back and now in its third installment. TFA, being highly selective, is filled with bright young exetasecrats who are setting up an occupational sideline in education while they are between tests (LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, exetasecrat). Having amassed two or three years in the classroom before they moved on to other jobs, possibly involving telling the rest of us how to rearrange the educational system, they are likely to be very thinly informed, from a research standpoint, on the possibilities and limitations of various assessment systems; but because they are intelligent, they are likely, especially if they did their teaching in primary schools, to recognize that even our typical substandard state tests are more defensible, from a pedagogical standpoint, than the ludicrous high jinks that their older colleagues sometimes come up with and impose upon the public (I had a colleague once, a dear lady, whose idea of an appropriate final exam for her summer school English class was an African marketplace--not that she had ever been to a real one [not much English in the one I went to]).
But when one has experience, perhaps from teaching high school or college English, in working with more rigorous and admirable testing systems (I am thinking of those from Cambridge Assessment and the International Baccalaureate, but there are others), which do not reduce the complexities of human intellectual activity in the extreme way required for American educational data systems to be of any use--the reduced, lost information and truncated discourse of the machine--then one is far less enthused by all the simplistic prattle accompanying proposals to base our children's education more and more squarely and narrowly on the very imperfect assessment instruments present in the United States; and this is what the conventional proposals of well meaning amateurs, who have made endless money from selling pseudo-thinking machines, and who believe sincerely in the power of those machines and have seen them work well in other fields and whose own self-validation has come largely in connection with those machines, amount to.
Tony Wagner of Harvard appropriately suggests, on page 268 of The Global Achievement Gap, "Instituting better assessments is the one most important change we could make tomorrow that would have the greatest impact." Howard Wainer, formerly chief statistician of the Educational Testing Service who now teaches statistics for the Wharton School, has just published, via the Princeton University Press, Uneducated Guesses, which reveals how little our exetosecrats understand about the instruments that have provided them with important boosts in their young careers and which they now promote, to the impoverishment of us all.
Jay Mathews did me the honor of quoting me in The Washington Post about a month ago, and specifically my phrase "government of the people by the highly educated for the well placed vested interests". Here I am drawing attention to the middle of those three prepositional phrases. In contemporary American civilization, a highly educated person is someone who will have taken many tests, and have done exceptionally well on them. Democrats, Republicans, talking heads supporting education reform and those opposing it, virtually all (including me) of those participating in any of our education debates, now that the Bush Administration is out of power, are exetasecrats, people who did well on tests when they were in school, and, because much of their self-validation derives from their performance on those tests, believers in their validity and usefulness.
But this post continues (and will probably conclude, for now, since I am actually a fan of TFA, on balance) my attack on Teach For America, begun two posts back and now in its third installment. TFA, being highly selective, is filled with bright young exetasecrats who are setting up an occupational sideline in education while they are between tests (LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, exetasecrat). Having amassed two or three years in the classroom before they moved on to other jobs, possibly involving telling the rest of us how to rearrange the educational system, they are likely to be very thinly informed, from a research standpoint, on the possibilities and limitations of various assessment systems; but because they are intelligent, they are likely, especially if they did their teaching in primary schools, to recognize that even our typical substandard state tests are more defensible, from a pedagogical standpoint, than the ludicrous high jinks that their older colleagues sometimes come up with and impose upon the public (I had a colleague once, a dear lady, whose idea of an appropriate final exam for her summer school English class was an African marketplace--not that she had ever been to a real one [not much English in the one I went to]).
But when one has experience, perhaps from teaching high school or college English, in working with more rigorous and admirable testing systems (I am thinking of those from Cambridge Assessment and the International Baccalaureate, but there are others), which do not reduce the complexities of human intellectual activity in the extreme way required for American educational data systems to be of any use--the reduced, lost information and truncated discourse of the machine--then one is far less enthused by all the simplistic prattle accompanying proposals to base our children's education more and more squarely and narrowly on the very imperfect assessment instruments present in the United States; and this is what the conventional proposals of well meaning amateurs, who have made endless money from selling pseudo-thinking machines, and who believe sincerely in the power of those machines and have seen them work well in other fields and whose own self-validation has come largely in connection with those machines, amount to.
Tony Wagner of Harvard appropriately suggests, on page 268 of The Global Achievement Gap, "Instituting better assessments is the one most important change we could make tomorrow that would have the greatest impact." Howard Wainer, formerly chief statistician of the Educational Testing Service who now teaches statistics for the Wharton School, has just published, via the Princeton University Press, Uneducated Guesses, which reveals how little our exetosecrats understand about the instruments that have provided them with important boosts in their young careers and which they now promote, to the impoverishment of us all.
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