Best Education Books of the Year

Looking for a last minute gift for an educator in your life? Let me suggest the following.

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch. The one book that all people who care about public education must read now. You can find my review of the book here. 

Test and Punish: How the Texas Education Model Gave America Accountability without Equity,by John Kuhn. An indispensable history of how the test driven education reform movement in Texas became the model for the nation through No Child Left Behind. You can find my review of the book here.

Whose Knowledge Counts in Government Literacy Policies: Why Expertise Matters, by Kenneth S. Goodman. Robert C. Calfee, and Yetta M. Goodman. A collection of essays by the leading literacy experts in the world discussing the lack of respect for knowledge among education policy makers. I discuss some of the essays from the book here and here.

Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading, by Kylene Beers and Robert Probst. Informed and practical advice to teachers from two long-time experts in the literacy field. The authors take a look at close reading from an entirely different lens than the Common Core proponents. I discuss some elements of the book in this post.

Happy reading and happy holidays.

Test and Punish, by John Kuhn Reviewed: An American Horror Story

Kuhn, J. (2013) Test and Punish: How the Texas Education Model Gave America Accountability without Equity. Austin, TX. Park Place Publications

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.

Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch: A Fairy Tale Review

What if Chicken Little had 70 billion dollars? Would his comical error in believing the sky is falling have been dismissed so quickly? Would the acorn of truth have been discovered and Chicken Little disgraced? Instead of making Chicken Little the laughingstock of the barnyard, would we instead be drawing up plans for “sky proof” shelters and evaluating them with standardized quality control measures all financed by Chicken Little’s largesse? Perhaps Chicken Little would decide that the public barn on the farm was substandard and he would contract out to have charter barns built. Perhaps he would finance a project to bring Common Corn to the barnyard feed, so that chickens in Mississippi would be fed the same stuff as those in Wisconsin. Perhaps Chicken Little would be lionized in the media as the great fowl hope for the future of barnyards everywhere.

In Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, Diane Ravitch, highly respected author, professor and former Assistant Secretary of Education, has discovered the acorn in the so called education reformers’ barnyard. What is the truth?

1.    Our schools are not failing.

2.    Test scores are higher than ever.

3.    Genuine progress has been made in narrowing achievement gaps.

4.    High school dropout rates are at an all-time low.

5.    Poverty is not an excuse for ineffective teaching; poverty is highly correlated to low achievement.

6.    Test scores are not the best way to determine teacher effectiveness.

7.    Merit pay has never improved achievement.

8.    There is no evidence that schools will improve if tenure and seniority are abolished.

9.    Teach for America which began as a noble experiment has lost its way and is now a tool for the corporate reformers.

10. Charter schools run the gamut from excellent to mediocre to awful and are no more innovative or successful than public schools.

11. Virtual schools are a poor substitute for real teachers and real schools.

12. Vouchers are a major step toward privatization and most Americans do not favor them.

13. Firing teachers and principals and closing schools will not improve learning.

Ravitch backs up each of these assertions with the kind of strong narrative story telling one would expect from America’s premiere education historian. But she also provides a wealth of charts and graphs that demonstrate each of the points she makes. It is in this hard data that the acorn of truth is to be found. The data make a compelling argument that the American public has been sold a bill of goods by the reformers.

And why has this bill of goods been so easy to sell? First of all, there is the incredible amount of money that has been invested by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walmart Family and others. Second of all, powerful politicians like George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal are vocal, in power, and on board with the reform rhetoric. There is no loyal opposition here, the Democrats have basically adopted the Republican plan and doubled down on it. Finally, the reformers have a seductive message: the schools are failing and we know how to fix them.

Ravitch sees the reform movement as a privatization movement. Charter schools like to say they are public schools, but many are run by for profit companies. When challenged to provide the kinds of data required of any public school, they refuse on the basis that they are not public. Many have harsh discipline policies that would never fly in public schools. Apparently they are only public when feeding at the public trough. Vouchers have lead in Louisiana to the growth of many fly by night schools looking to turn an easy profit by attracting desperate parents with promises they can’t keep. Charters, vouchers and the entire reform movement is seen by Ravitch as an existential threat to one of the most bedrock of all American institutions – public education.

Ravitch does not believe that our schools are failing, but she does not believe that all is well either. She sees the reformers denial of poverty as a major factor in low achievement as absurd. Without dealing with poverty and improving the conditions by which poor children arrive at school, we will never be able to achieve our social contract with American children. Her specific recommendations are as follows:

1.    Provide good pre-natal care for every pregnant woman.

2.    Make high quality early childhood education available to all children.

3.    Ensure a full balanced and rich curriculum, which includes the arts, science, history, literature, civics, geography, world languages, mathematics and physical education for all children.

4.    Reduce class sizes, particularly in schools with large numbers of struggling children.

5.    Ban for-profit charters and charter chains and ensure charter schools work collaboratively with public schools.

6.    Provide the medical and social services that poor children need.

7.    Eliminate high stakes standardized testing and rely instead on assessments that allow students to show what they know and are able to do.

8.    Insist that teachers, principals, and superintendents are professional educators. Work to attract capable students to the profession and provide them with a rigorous training program.

9.    Protect democratic control of the public schools through elected local school boards.

10. Devise strategies to reduce racial segregation and poverty.

Will implementing these strategies be easy? Of course not. Will implementing these strategies cost money? Certainly. If we don’t find the will to do these things that might actually make a difference in students’ lives; however, then we are abandoning them to the drudgery of a test driven business model of education that will raid the public coffers for money and leave every child behind.

Buy the book. Read it. Get angry. And then get busy spreading the word that Chicken Little has gotten it wrong again.

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch. New York: Alfred A.Knopf.