John Kuhn has a story tell. It is a horror story worthy of
Stephen King made even more horrible because it is true. It is the story of how
Texas released the “test and punish” monster on public education and how, like
a 1950’s science fiction movie, that monster came to threaten the entire
country.
Kuhn is particularly well-qualified to tell this story. He
is the ultimate participant observer, having served as a public school
administrator in Texas and then becoming a vocal advocate for public education
when politicians in Texas combined huge spending cuts with a draconian school
accountability scheme. He has been a leader of the Save Texas Schools movement
and the speech he gave at that organization’s July, 2011 rally (included in
this volume) went viral on Youtube.
To tell his story, Kuhn takes us all the way back to 1968,
when citizens in one of the financially strapped school districts in San
Antonio, Texas, noting the great resources available to a school district just
outside of town, sued the State for equitable funding. The fault, of course,
lay in the State’s dependence on property taxes, which disproportionately
favored wealthier neighborhoods. That suit unleashed a decades long battle
between the advocates of equity and the powerful wealthy business people and
parents who wished to maintain the inequitable status quo. Guess who won?
It is not, however, the fact that the moneyed interests won
that is so important, but how they won. The plaintiffs in the original suit
actually won their case, but through a long series of appeals and new lawsuits,
the forces for equity won a few battles, but they lost the war. How? The
politically influential citizens of Texas hit on a winning strategy: they
convinced the people of Texas that funding inequity and poor student achievement
outcomes were unrelated. Poor outcomes had nothing to do with money, but were
instead “the simple result of bad classroom instruction” (location 239). The
convoluted way that this all came to be is the heart of the book and it is
quite a tale. Suffice it to say that some of the names involved have come to
haunt all friends of public education throughout the country. It is a dishonor
roll of conservative politics and reform education mis-leaders: George W. Bush,
Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings, Sandy Kress, Ross Perot, John Cornyn and The
Pearson Corporation among others.
Cornyn got the ball rolling when the now U.S. Senator, then
a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, in a dissent from the majority, suggested
that equity in education was not about equitable distribution of funds only,
but about educational “efficiency”, which he defined as measurable results of
educational quality. Perot moved the ball down the field, when, as the leader
of the Select Committee on Public Education, he declared that the schools were
not producing enough quality graduates.
That brings us to Sandy Kress who carried the ball over the
goal line with a “single minded obsession on standardized test-based
accountability.” Working in collusion with his powerful friends in the business
community, Kress, in his position as a member of the Dallas Independent School
District’s Commission for Educational Excellence, pushed for test based
accountability and a system of rewards and punishments for schools, teachers
and administrators. If schools did well, there would be rewards, praise and
cash prizes. If the scores fell there were punishments such as being labeled
“failing schools” and facing the firings of teachers and principals or school
closures. Sound familiar?
When Kress moved up to the State Department of Education,
the model he began in Dallas was expanded to the entire state of Texas.
Eventually, Kress, nominally a Democrat, became new Governor Bush’s education
advisor. While Kress was bending Bush’s ear, he was also receiving lucrative
consulting fees from Pearson, the company that would come to dominate the Texas
testing juggernaut to the tune of 500 million dollars. Test based
accountability aligned perfectly with the financial interests of Pearson and
that company’s extreme lobbying efforts resulted in Texas testing everything
but the armadillos crossing the road on a West Texas highway.
The rest of the story is familiar to most of us. Bush moved
from Texas to Washington, D.C. after the Supreme Court ruled him the winner of
the 2000 election. Along with Bush came that Houston miracle man himself, Rod
Paige, as Secretary of Education. Kuhn devotes a chapter to Paige, called The
Houston Mirage, that is a cautionary tale for anyone buying into public school
miracle talk. When the news of Paige’s improprieties in manipulating numbers in
Houston became too much for him to continue, Bush replaced him with another
Texas test and punish advocate, Margaret Spellings. Along the way, in 2002, we
got the Texas model of test and punish for the entire nation, No Child Left
Behind. Despite the hopes of public education advocates, President Obama and
his Secretary of Education have doubled down on test and punish in the form of
Race to the Top.
And so, Kuhn shows us, as Texas goes so goes public
education in America. Let us hope that this continues to be true for a bit longer, because
Kuhn’s book ends on a hopeful note. Parent groups, horrified by the amount of
testing their children were being subjected to, have been successfully
challenging the test and punish brigade. Politicians, responding to pressure
from constituents, began to listen. Wendy Davis, State Senator from Ft. Worth
and recent popular feminist hero, called the student assessment system “a
colossal failure.” Pearson and its lobbyists came under fire. The number of
tests was reduced. Kuhn feels that thanks to the pressure of parent and
educator groups, politicians “finally came to understand that education reform
was not synonymous with zealotry and over testing” (location 2047).
The book is compelling and informative. I have only two
minor quibbles. First, it may have been helpful for the lay person, if Kuhn had
clearly defined what he meant by the
“punish” of the title (labeling schools, closing schools, firing staff,
even just creating the impression that educators were not doing their jobs).
Second, the chapter on Diane Ravitch is interesting, as reading about a true
public education hero, Kuhn quotes another writer who calls her “our necessary contrarian”, should be and
she is also from Texas, but for me, the chapter detracted some from the
narrative flow and focus of the book.
As I said, these quibbles are minor. The book is a must read
for all public school advocates. As we all came to understand in school, if we
don’t learn our history we are doomed to repeat it. John Kuhn presents a
history we would be loath to repeat. If I don’t quite share his optimism at
this point, perhaps that is only because I don’t live and work in Texas on the
front lines as John does.
One more thing, don’t fail to read the appendices – John’s
“Alamo Letter” and his speech to the Save Our Schools rally. They left me in
tears of pain and of joy. They are worth the price of the book alone.
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