This luddite finally got a twitter account: David Ellison@davidellisonMX. (Perhaps it is a dangerous thing to give me such an open mic...) Follow me, if you dare!

I was interviewed about my book on Gaytalk 2.0. It was a lot of fun! While Santander is not an overtly gay-themed book, some chapters deal with my coming out and experience as both a closeted then finally out teacher. The interview starts 30 min in to the show. Enjoy!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DWYZPBpKX08&feature=youtu.be

My New Book!

And it's free!!

My new Book, Santander: Rambling on Borrowed Time, was just published. A collection of my favorite writing from the last three decades, it's a memoir recounting the extraordinary life of a teacher/traveler. For the next five days, the ebook version is available on Amazon for free; and the paperback is available at cost, for $5.08.

Enjoy!

(Please share the link with anyone you think might be interested.)

David

I Would Have Been a Nazi

The revelation came as a slap in the face.

I’d been teaching my high school unit on WW II and the Holocaust when it hit me: I would have been a Nazi. Yes, I, a passionate long-time progressive activist and educator, would have been a goose-stepping, fascist monster.

You see, when I was a kid, I was a devout Catholic. I believed all the nuns’ drivel about how, if I didn’t do exactly what they prescribed, I’d surely go to Hell; about how fortunate I was to have been born in the United States, God’s bastion of goodness on Earth; about how, if I fought in any war defending America, especially against those awful communists, I’d become a martyr and go straight to Heaven—a place I knew was denied to all non-Catholics, in particular those infidels, the Muslims.

I became an avid Boy Scout, too, doing “my best to do my duty to God and my country, to obey the Scout Law…to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.” I loved the flags, the salutes, and especially my scout uniform, with all its badges and rank.

The truth is, I considered myself superior to most everyone else on Earth. So, oh yes, if I’d been born in Nazi Germany, I would have been first in line to join Hitler’s youth corps. And who knows what sort of abominations I might have gone on to do?

What saved me was the opportunity I had after college to live in Spain, to immerse myself in a foreign culture and language—an experience which both opened my eyes to a much wider world, and which forced me to finally accept humility. I learned that no person, faith, country, or race has a monopoly on goodness or evil, or the truth. Indeed, even the great United States is but one economic downturn away from fascism—closer now, perhaps, than ever before.

Today, despite my horror of Hitler, I can view with some compassion the Nazis of the last century and even those who perpetrate atrocities today, such as ICE agents who tear young, innocent refugee children from their parents’ arms and lock them into cages. After all, I could easily have ended up just like those goons. There but for the grace of God (or fate or just plain dumb luck) would have gone I.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for much of my Catholic education and my adventures as a boy scout. Nonetheless, I recognize that education truly is a powerful double-edged sword, one that can be used to brainwash or to challenge, to oppress or to liberate, to ennoble or to deprave. Our only hope, it seems to me, aside from sending our kids abroad for a year, is to teach children to question all dogmas and authorities; and, above all, to cherish the inherent goodness in themselves and everyone else, no matter who they are, what they look like, what they believe, or where they’re from.

This is the only vaccine against becoming a Nazi.

My latest speech about the failure of Education Reform

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=share&v=4kQkneLrxHI&app=desktop

My latest, Why I hate football:   http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/09/why_this_notre_dame_grad_came.html

School Boards: Watchdogs for Whom?

Mark Twain once quipped, “God made the idiot first, for practice. Then He made the school board.”

Nonetheless, according to the Center for Public Education (affiliated with the National School Boards Association, NSBA), school boards are “critical” for public education because, at least in theory, they look out for children, incorporating their community’s view of what students should know and be able to do; and, perhaps most importantly, the boards are accountable to that community, acting, in fact, as the “education watchdog” for it.

Well, especially in that last respect, too many school boards have succeeded only too well. And, that’s why they’ve been idiots.

Let’s recall that school boards are the quintessential manifestation of local sovereignty. The Bill of Rights’ 10^th Amendment mandates that whatever powers The Constitution does not explicitly give to the federal government “are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Thus, our founding fathers insisted that education, among many other things, remain a local concern—the purview for states and community school boards. Indeed, the fathers’ greatest fear was an overreaching, dictatorial national government.

With good reason. Over the last decades, the Department of Education has deftly executed a less-than-subtle coup d’état; using, for example, federal Title I funds to blackmail cash-starved states and school districts into implementing policies such as No Child Left Behind and the “voluntary” Common Core Standards.

This wouldn’t have been so catastrophic if those policies had been based upon evidence instead of ideology. The truth is that the Department of Education has promoted market-based “reforms” in defiance of research.

For example, in 1985, Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond documented that those states that had adopted high-stakes standardized testing as a means of education reform all suffered a subsequent decline in student achievement. Nonetheless, the Bush Administration made such testing national policy. In 2009, the most comprehensive study of charter schools (CREDO) revealed that, despite their significant advantages, only 17% of charters outperformed their public school counterparts, while fully 37% lagged behind. Still, the Obama Administration promoted charters as the centerpiece of its education policy.

And all the while, most school boards, like obedient little lap dogs, have done the bidding of the federal government—and of the billionaires like Bill Gates who apparently direct it and the Department of Education (Policy Patrons, Harvard Press, 2016). School boards have bared their teeth only at hapless superintendents and schools that failed to post high test scores, or at least “Adequate Yearly Progress” toward them.

The result has been disastrous, documented most eloquently in Diane Ravich’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education (Basic Books, 2010); in Alfie Kohn’s scathing The Case Against Standardized Testing: Raising Scores, Ruining Schools (Heinemann, 2000); and in mine, Bloodletting: Why Education Reform is Killing America’s Schools (Stairway Press, 2014).

My former superintendent raged publicly against high stakes standardized testing, but then made it her obsession, implementing practice computer-based testing throughout the year, even for kindergarteners. She knew her job depended on impressing the school board with high test scores.

Principals did, too. Mine (I taught 4^th grade at the time.) outlined a “balanced day” as one focused almost exclusively on math and Language Arts (since they were tested). History and art (since they were not) appeared at the bottom of her list, in parenthesis, to be taught “when we found the time.” Most of my colleagues rarely if ever did. The same narrowing of the curriculum occurred at district middle schools, too. Meanwhile, the school board banned most field trips, stressing how important it was to keep children in the classroom, in their seats, prepping for tests.

That school board was a fearsome watchdog. The trouble was, it served the federal government, not the local community (and certainly not the students).

Now we have a new secretary of education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, who seems intent on hastening the demise of public education. She definitely hopes to bring her embarrassing legacy of failed charter schools in Michigan (Arsen, 2015, Education Trust-Midwest, 2015) to every community in the nation.

So far, the National School Boards Association and many state counterparts (including New York’s and mine in California) have accepted charter school expansion with nary a whimper—this despite the mounting evidence of not only charter schools’ mixed performance (CREDO, 2013; NCEE, 2010;), but also their disastrous effect on school funding (Arsen, 2012; Lee-Allen, 2013), segregation (Finkenberg, 2010; Gulosino, 2011), and teacher retention (Stuit, 2010); which is not even to mention charter schools’ obvious violation of the separation of church and state.

The question is, Will the NSBA and local school boards remain so maddeningly docile? Will they enforce even DeVos’ machinations? Or will they return to their true masters, accept their sacred responsibility to local communities, and finally, rabidly protect public schools and the children who cower defenseless within them?

I agree that school boards could be critical, particularly in their role as watchdogs. If Mark Twain was right, however, if school boards are, in fact, little more than idiots, then Betsy DeVos will have her way with public education, just as previous secretaries of education have had theirs.

It is long past time for school board members and their associations to recall who elected them, and whom they ought to serve.

David Ellison teaches history in Union City, California.

The Glorious Legacies of President Trump and King John

445 words
By David Ellison, Berkeley, California
hellodellison@gmail.com
(510) 684-6506

I never imagined I’d thank President Trump for anything. But even I, a radical progressive, must admit that he has already accomplished what I’d long despaired of: Trump has woken America up.

To truly appreciate his achievement, one must consider what has transpired in this country over the last decades. The United States of America engaged in preemptive strike, regime change, rendition, torture, drone war, assassination, rampant spying…all under the pretext of defeating terrorism. Actually, we only exacerbated it, while enriching the obscenely wealthy oligarchy already in control of the Military Industrial Complex as well as our supposed democracy. The environment, the middle class, our unions, our schools, and our infrastructure have all teetered on the brink, as have our civil liberties.

Meanwhile, America has slept. Voter turnout plummeted to dismal levels, even for us. And, the only incident that managed to galvanize my liberal San Francisco Bay Area into thronging the streets with a million or more hysterical citizens was the Giants and the Warriors winning their respective championships. It was enough to depress a hyena.

Bernie Sanders offered an unexpected lightning bolt of hope, garnering more than 30,000 passionate supporters at some of his media-blacked-out rallies. (Where had they been hiding?) However, with everything including the DNC allied against him, a Sanders’ presidency wasn’t to be.

Instead, we’ve ended up its antithesis, President Trump.

Nonetheless, I’m glad! You see, Trump is so narcissistic, so bigoted, so misogynistic, so selfish and unscrupulous, so ineloquent and mendacious, so crass, so dangerous, so…awful that American citizens have risen up as never before. They clogged cities everywhere during the Women’s March (nearly 3 million diverse people, the largest demonstration in US History), and then did the same to airports throughout the nation only a week later. At one rally, people chanted, gleeful at themselves, “This is what democracy looks like!” Indeed.

Even Congress may be rising up, introducing a bill in both houses that would prohibit Trump (or any president) from a first-use nuclear strike without a congressional declaration of war.  (Oh, he’ll be tweeting a real tantrum about that!)

Just as in 1215 AD, when England’s terrible King John roused the nobles to find the courage to oppose him, to force him to sign the glorious Magna Carta (the precursor to our Bill of Rights), Trump’s nefarious administration may go down in history as a similarly glorious turning point in American history. By so starkly embodying the absolute worst of our country, Trump has inadvertently held up a mirror to America. And we’re aghast—finally.

 I am grateful to President Trump for fulfilling his campaign pledge. He is truly making America great again.

Berkeley resident David Ellison, author of Bloodletting: Why Education Reform is Killing America’s Schools (Stairway Press, 2014), teaches history in Union City, California.

In hot water again...


http://www.kqed.org/a/perspectives/R201511160643

My latest!

http://www.contracostatimes.com/opinion/ci_29070857/guest-commentary-desperate-battle-teach-respect-founding-ideals

My latest with KQED radio....

http://www.kqed.org/a/perspectives/R201510260643

My latest...

http://www.insidebayarea.com/news/ci_28659468/david-ellison:-schools-teachers-need-to-roar-against-common-core

Education Reform Doomed

Published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 31, 2015


Bill Gates and his lieutenant, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, insist that America's schools must be run like a business. If educators faced both the accountability (standards, high-stakes testing, merit pay) and competition (vouchers/choice, charter schools) of an open, capitalistic market, then teachers would finally have to get off their duffs and get to work.

Trouble is, after nearly two decades of this, American education is no better. That's because, Gates and Duncan maintain (completely unfazed by overwhelming evidence to the contrary), we haven't implemented market-based reforms enough. So now, let's switch to the new Common Core Standards, and use them to evaluate not just schools, but individual teachers.

Sorry. Even the Common Core are doomed because they cannot cure what truly ails American education today.

A correct diagnosis, however, would involve acknowledging the Voldemorts: vexing, embarrassing issues that, frankly, we'd much prefer not to name:

• America recruits most of its educators from the bottom percentiles of college graduates. (And now, thanks to "reform," my state, California, has seen a 66 percent decline in enrollment at teacher-education programs.)
• Fifty percent of our students writhe in poverty, the highest rate in the industrialized world, and the single most powerful impediment to academic success.
• 
  
• Our communities and, therefore, our schools are now more segregated by race and class than ever before in our nation's history. (Vouchers and charters, by the way, only exacerbate this.)
• 
  
• Heaping insult upon injury, we usually send our least qualified teachers to staff those decrepit, segregated schools -- perhaps the most heinous moral outrage of our time. 
• 
  
• Our families and our culture are in crisis. In fact, the United Nations ranks the United States 34th out of 35 industrialized nations in terms of childhood well-being.
• 
  
• Finally, our entire system of education is based upon a century-old assembly-line industrial model. We sort children according to their ages, insist they all learn identical things at precisely the same time ....

Why don't Gates and Duncan focus on any of the above dire, longstanding educational crises? Perhaps they are blinded by their ideology. Competition and other market-based strategies enabled Gates to amass his fortune. Therefore, they can't help but raise the "fortunes" of public education as well, right?

Besides, market-based educational reforms are so apparently simple, so relatively cheap. Everyone can conveniently ignore the real and shameful problems hobbling America and its public schools today. After all, to address them, we'd need to transform not just our schools, but our communities, 
even our very culture.

Finland did. 

In the 1960s, Finnish schools were by all measures mediocre. They are now universally recognized as some of the finest in the world. In 2009, they were ranked number one.

How did Finland do it? The Finnish Parliament replaced its failed market-based reforms with a new, bold plan: Finland would put a great teacher in every classroom in the nation.

Finnish teacher-education programs are now more competitive than many medical and law schools. All prospective teachers must earn master's degrees, but the government pays their tuition. When they graduate, teachers earn salaries commensurate with other similarly educated professionals.

In Finland, there are few, infrequent national tests that have nothing to do with teacher or school evaluations. Classes are small, with usually no more than 20 students.

Critics of citing Finland as a model usually cling to two differences between it and the United States: Finland is so much smaller, with a relatively homogeneous population. They're careful to eschew any of the many other, more profound contrasts, however, such as its narrow distribution of wealth. Or the fact that the Finnish rate of childhood poverty is only about one-quarter that of the United States. Or that all Finnish children receive free health care, free preschool, and free tuition to all colleges and universities. Their parents enjoy extended, paid maternity leave, free high-quality child care, and even a governmental stipend per child. Seventy-seven percent of Finns bought a book last year. Seventy-five percent of parents read out loud daily to their children.

By the time those children enter their first, bright classroom, they are so much more healthy and better-prepared than most American kids. And then they all meet great teachers there, too.

If we in the United States are to nurture our children as well as the Finns do theirs, we must likewise accept that real reform must be holistic and far-reaching. Education is but the canary in the coal mine of our nation. If the wretched bird is dying, it warns us that there's a heck of a lot more at risk than just our public schools.

In truth, we cannot reform only American education. We must reform America.
Otherwise, our schools are doomed. And so are we.

University Heights native David Ellison currently instructs high school history and Spanish in Union City, California, and is author of "Bloodletting: Why Education Reform is Killing America's Schools." (bloodlettingeducation.com)

Speaking Truth to the Wall Street Journal

Published November 26th, 2012, in The Wall Street Journal

In your Nov. 19 editorial "The Evil Empire Strikes Back," you claim that "No reform effort is too small for the teachers union to squash," citing union opposition to, among other things, charter schools. "Unions fight as hard as they do because they have one priority—preserving their jobs and increasing their pay and benefits." You then urge President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to "speak truth to union power."

As an educator of 29 years whose only priority has been to inspire children, and who gave up much more lucrative careers to do so, I'd like to "speak truth" to the Journal. The truth is that the comprehensive study of charters by Stanford University's Center Research of Educational Outcomes found that, despite all their advantages, only 17% of charter schools outperformed their regular public school counterparts, while 37% actually lagged significantly behind. Black and Hispanic students generally fared worse in charter schools.

The truth is, as Diane Ravitch, assistant secretary of education in the first Bush administration, points out, those states with the strongest teachers unions have the highest test scores in the nation, while those with weak unions languish at the bottom.

The truth is that unionized Finland, with the highest test scores in the world, long ago eschewed all the ideologically based "reforms" Messrs. Obama and Duncan currently inflict on my students.

See awful comments in response:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324851704578133492170215174.html?mod=ITP_opinion_1

Cheers! And Goodbye.

           I’ve poured myself a glass of wine to both celebrate and mourn this, my 551st and final column.

     As you know, the Bay Area News Group will soon consolidate most of its newspapers; and, since my column has appeared in but two them, it was a foregone conclusion that I as well as other columnists/journalists would be let go.

     Fortunately, I’ve matured a bit since I first started writing this column in 1991. I’ve learned that, while it’s important to grieve, it’s crucial as well to accept stoically how all things must pass, and to be grateful for what has been. (The older I get, the more Buddhist I become.)

     I am very grateful for this column. It’s been cathartic for me (and Lord knows, I can get very emotional about Education), a tremendous challenge (one I never imagined I could meet), a source of pride (sometimes inordinately so, I suppose), and, above all, a chance to tell the vital story of kids, teachers and schools--one laden with mirth and pathos, grace and rage, triumph and tragedy.

     So, I hope the Muses--or, perhaps, this glass of wine--will grant me some special inspiration tonight.

     I cannot ride off into the sunset without one last temper tantrum about school reforms.

     They won’t work.

     Why? Because they’ve been designed by ignorant politicians and market-based ideologues who, in their hubris, have misdiagnosed what ails public schools.

     The problem, reformers claim, is a lack of accountability and competition. So, they’d use standardized testing to root out the worst teachers, and force the others to finally do their jobs. (They’d destroy their unions along way, even though the states with the highest test scores in the nation are also the ones with the strongest unions.)

     Such testing has only exacerbated an already dire situation. Educators teach to the test, narrow the curriculum, abandon the kids at the bottom and, when that doesn’t work, cheat. The best of them often just quit.

     What are the real problems besetting public schools?

     The education profession usually attracts only the bottom percentiles of college graduates. (Now that we’ve so scapegoated public educators, we can expect even that shameful statistic to worsen.) We send the least-qualified of them to teach in dilapidated inner-city schools where we’ve imprisoned our poor, predominately minority kids. (Our schools are now more segregated by race and especially by class than ever before in our nation’s history.) Meanwhile, schools cling to a century-old, assembly-line, age-based model of education which serves no one. And too many parents have abdicated their responsibilities, allowing a sick, TV/PS4/wii/smartphone culture to raise their kids.

     Worst of all, one out of every five children in our country lives in poverty; which, besides being unconscionable, is the single most powerful impediment to them succeeding in schools.

     Will testing, accountability, or competition ameliorate any of the above?

     Nope.

     The truth is, this country has embraced testing because it hasn’t the courage nor the will to acknowledge, much less address the real issues in education or this country. As long as we squander our grandchildren’s wealth on killing (and thus creating more) terrorists, as long as corporate CEOs send jobs oversees, foreclose on families, manipulate the government, destroy the middle class, silence the press (columnists like me)--and pay themselves obscene bonuses for doing so--there really is no hope for public education in this country. (Or, perhaps, for this country.)

     The real school reformers are occupying Wall Street today, their voices crying in the wilderness that has become America. With my newfound free time, I hope to join them in Oakland or San Francisco soon.

     Well, I’m glad I’ve gotten that tirade off my chest one last time!

     I can’t end, though, without also expressing again how much I still love my job. It is such a privilege and pleasure to spend my days with children. I attempt to inspire them. They, without even trying, frustrate me, surprise me, and never fail to make me laugh. They are oh so beautiful gifts.

     So, with my final words, I raise my glass of wine to them, to the Bay Area News Group editors who have given me this column for so many years, and to you who have read it.

     Cheers! And goodbye.

Published October 24, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

NCLB Waivers: More Blackmail

“Dear Parents/Guardians: In Spring STAR testing, Kitayama Elementary School students made excellent gains. Overall, English/Language Arts scores in Grades 2 – 5 went up from 60% at or above state standards to 64%, and Math scores... from 66.2%...to 66.8%. Our Academic Performance Index rose from 828 to 841, well above the state’s goal of 800. However, because of increasingly stringent state and federal standards for achievement, our school has been identified as a Program Improvement (PI)…School under the federal No Child Left Behind [NCLB]…. All parents/guardians of students attending a PI school have the right to request a transfer of their child(ren) to a non-PI district school with district-paid transportation.”

So my school, Kitayama, must finally face the PI stigma. It was only a matter of time--for us, and for the 80% of the other California Title 1 schools now in PI.

You see, schools like Kitayama, with a large population of disadvantaged kids, receive federal Title 1 funding since their challenges are so great. And it is only such schools that face sanctions for not meeting NCLB benchmarks, culminating in 2014 when all students are required to be on grade level in Math and Language Arts.

Few if any schools could meet such pie-in-the-sky standards. But, in The Age of NCLB, only the schools catering to poor kids are punished.

(Can you imagine the federal government insisting that police departments everywhere completely eliminate crime by 2014; and, when they can’t, penalizing only those cities with high rates of poverty?)

The good news is that Kitayama’s community recognizes our school’s strengths. In fact, Kitayama became a prestigious California Distinguished School in 2010. (Oh, the irony!) The parents of only five of our students have chosen to transfer to a non-PI school. (Which didn’t meet the benchmarks, either, and may even have lower test scores. Oh, more irony!)

The bad news is that many other Title 1 schools may not be so fortunate. Once parents receive a similar letter to the one above, a brain-drain of the strongest kids and most educated parents may begin--the school diverting scarce education dollars to pay for their transportation--thus ensuring that next year’s test scores will be even lower. For many Title 1 schools, the PI designation will only precipitate an inevitable spiral into ruin.

Truth be told, federal PI sanctions have forced some of the worst California schools to finally confront their failure. A few, after replacing the principal and most of the staff, for example, have shown remarkable progress. But even they cannot hope to meet NCLB’s irrational standards.

We in education have long foreseen this ludicrous moment when all schools, Title 1 or not, would “fail.” However, instead of standing up as one and stating the obvious fact that the “Emperor” NCLB had no clothes, we’ve merely vied with each other not to be the first to earn the dreaded PI designation. In this respect, because of our cowardice and disunity, we’ve made the bed we now lie in.

             President Obama and U.S. Superintendent of Education Arne Duncan finally acknowledged NCLB’s absurdity last Friday. But, instead of scrapping it and creating a more enlightened plan for education reform, they merely offered NCLB-PI waivers to states that agree to additional unfunded, unsupported-by-research federal mandates, including using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers. Only then will the pressure be off all but the worst Title 1 schools.

Couched as benevolent relief, the waivers are just more blackmail, of course. “Do what we want, or else the insanity will continue.”

            And, if past is prologue, California and most other states will grudgingly comply, even though we know it to be wrong.

            We will have to lie in that bed, too.

Unfortunately, so will all the children we’ve so cravenly betrayed yet again.

Published September 26, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

No Thaw Soon

       Three weeks ago, the Georgia governor’s office capped its investigation of Atlanta’s schools with a scathing 800-page report. It described with horrific detail the school district’s “culture of cheating.” In fact, investigators discovered that teachers and principals had been changing student answers on standardized exams at 44 of the 56 schools examined. Eighty-two educators admitted to altering tests, and their testimony implicated 96 others.
        Many additional districts are facing similar scrutiny, including now the District of Columbia, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
       Atlanta’s debacle is particularly galling, however, given the amount of accolades the district had received for its meteoric rise in test scores. Philanthropies such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had showered the district with grants, while the superintendent, Beverly Hall, had accepted numerous awards including 2009 National Superintendent of the Year from the American Association of School Administrators.
       But it was all a sham. Worse, many children who should have received additional support failed to because of their inflated, false scores.
       The July 13th issue of Education Week highlighted some of the more sensational narratives in the Georgia Governor’s Office report, including that of a teacher who surreptitiously photographed the test storage room so that, when he later broke in, he could leave everything as it was; of a principal who wore gloves when she changed answers to keep her fingerprints off student exams; of veteran teachers altering new teachers’ tests for them until they trusted the newbies enough to accept them into their cheating fold; of teachers holding weekend “[test] changing parties” at their homes.
       It boggles the mind. It deadens the soul.
       How shaming to learn that so many of my colleagues could betray their vocation, their profession, their integrity, and especially their students!
       It is true that Superintendent Hall and her administrative minions had intimidated teachers. They’d threatened would-be whistle-blowers. And one principal had even forced a teacher with low test scores to crawl beneath a table during a faculty meeting.
       Even so, none of that excuses the heinous behavior of so many Atlanta educators, and so many others who knew of it but remained silent.
       A silver lining to this despicable affair could be that it would add fuel to the increasing debate about the merits of high stakes testing. But, honestly, it seems inexplicable that there could still be any debate at all since research, including most recently that of the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and the National Research Council, has decried such testing as, at best, ineffective at improving real student achievement.
       The trouble is, U.S. Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan has once again turned a deaf ear to such research, even though he, himself, commissioned the NCEE report. Instead, he used Atlanta to argue for more testing: “This unfortunate incident highlights the need for transparency and accountability throughout our system…. There are districts across Georgia and across the country that are facing the same expectation to perform that are making genuine progress without cheating.”
       Genuine? Yes, many schools have raised state test scores. But how? By “teaching” (drilling and killing) to a narrow fill-in-the-bubble test, eschewing all knowledge and skills not on it, such as creative and higher-ordered thinking. By focusing on students just below proficiency (cherry picking) while abandoning the kids at the bottom. By doing nothing to discourage drop outs since those kids would have brought down test scores anyway.
       Or, as some whole states have done, by simply lowering the score required for proficiency (and then shamelessly crowing about a remarkable increase of proficient students).
       There are many ways to cheat.
       The obvious, embarrassing fact is that high stakes testing—and the fear it engenders—has brought out the worst in public education, not the best. The cheating in Atlanta and elsewhere is but the tip of a massive educational malpractice iceberg.
       But, since Duncan is urging Congress to quickly reauthorize No Child Left Behind and its centerpiece, high stakes testing, there is little likelihood of a thaw any time soon. 

Published August 1st, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

Sing Children--While You Can

     THE CHILDREN sang, but I seethed.

     At my grade school's final assembly of the year, the choir performed three wonderful songs, "I Believe in Music," "My America," and "Bright Happy Day," often with intricate counterpoint and harmony. Amazing!
     The loveliness of the music, expressing so eloquently the beauty of the children singing it -- American kids of myriad races, creeds and backgrounds, so full of naive joy and hope -- was enough to bring anyone with a warm heart to tears.
     Yes, tears of immense gratitude; but also tears of blind rage. You see, as those priceless children, jewels all, sang their own warm hearts out, so many adults in this nation were at that very moment conspiring against them.
     Take U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, for instance.
     At his request (Oh, the irony!), the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) had reviewed the best educational programs in the world. Its damning conclusion: Duncan's blueprint for education reform had been, at best, a monumental waste of precious time and money.
     While Duncan had been touting shortsighted quick fixes such as high-stakes standardized testing, merit pay, vouchers and charter schools -- guided in defiance of all research by a business/competition ideology -- nations such as Finland, whose schools currently rank first in the world, had implemented much more common-sensical, forward-thinking even revolutionary strategies.
     Most importantly, leading nations had recognized how an educational system can never be any better than its teachers, and so had transformed their teaching professions into one of the most competitive and prestigious. (Finland recruits its teachers from the top 10th percentile of college graduates; the United States from the bottom 30th.)      Then, Finland and others had distributed their teachers and funding equitably to all schools and communities.
     They'd eschewed once-a-year fill-in-the-bubble testing in favor of broader (including science, social studies and the arts) less frequent evaluation, focusing on in-depth knowledge and the ability to apply it creatively.
     And they'd discarded an archaic age-grouped assembly-line approach to education.
     True to form, however, Duncan merely gave lip service to the NCEE report, then called for Congress to reauthorize a revised version of No Child Left Behind.
     In other words, he chose more of the same, but with some adjustments. He thus doomed the United States to fall even more swiftly from its already precarious eminence.
     Arne Duncan betrayed the kids in that choir -- again.
     Oh, but he was hardly alone.
     Banks continued to foreclose on their parents, corporations to send their future jobs oversees and the hidden oligarchy of the nation's giga-rich to diminish their hope for a middle-class life.
     Meanwhile, Republicans nationwide, clinging so tenaciously to their no-taxes-except-for-war/lower-taxes-for-the-rich ideology, were at that moment arguing for catastrophic cuts in schools everywhere, as well as the evisceration of unions and environmental protections.
     Will my school even have a choir next year? Will more than just a few of the youthful singers be able to afford college? Or a home, for that matter? What kind of contaminated world will they inherit? Will there be any Social Security or Medicare for them when they retire? (If they can retire.)
     For the first time in this nation's history, the kids in the choir could expect to live fewer years and at a lower standard of living than their parents.
    I wish all the powerful people in this nation -- who, because of their unbridled greed, thoughtless ideology or inexcusable cowardice, were betraying the next generation of Americans -- had been required to stand by me that morning as my school's choir sang.
     But, no, like the pilots of the B-52 bombers during the Vietnam War, they didn't have to look into their victims' innocent eyes.
     Sing children, I thought. Sing of your oh-so fleeting "Bright Happy Day," and of the "My America," which long ago ceased to be anything more than a legend.
     Yes, sing -- while you still can.

Published July 4th, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)

What Happened to Research?

     What is the role of research in public education? Apparently, very little.
     For example, I've long "known" that the best way for children to study at home is to sit in the same room, at the same table, at the same time every night, and to focus on one topic or assignment intensely before moving on to the next. Indeed, this self-evident fact has long formed the core of my yearly letter to parents every September.
     Unfortunately, it's all wrong.
     Research, summarized in an article that appeared in the September 6th, 2010, issue of The New York Times, "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits," debunked everything. (Just Google the title.) The numerous studies, some dating back to the 1970's, reveal that varying study location and even the topic vastly increases a student's ability to learn and remember.
     Can you see my red face? I'm not the only one, thought. Even the internet sites I found dealing with homework and study habits continue to give the same bogus advice.
     How is it that such important research has had no effect on educational dogma, that I learned of it only by accident when a non-teacher friend sent me a link to the article?
     "We have known these principles for some time," lamented Robert A. Bjork, a UCLA psychologist, "and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up. Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken."
     Sometimes, however, vital educational research does make it out into the public. But, it is simply ignored. For example, (I apologize for kicking my favorite dead horse.) recent and comprehensive studies have documented the folly of both high stakes testing and charter schools. The Obama Administration still adopted both as national policy.
      Last September, the most rigorous study of merit pay as well proved its uselessness in raising student achievement. (Most teachers--who accepted a scandalously low salary when they entered the profession, and so are unlikely to be motivated by paltry bonuses--are already working as hard as they can. Merit pay, however, does discourage them from collaborating with each other.)
      Nonetheless, the very day after the study was published, the U.S. Department of Education distributed millions of dollars to promote merit pay programs nationally, and committed itself to dole out an additional $1.2 billion. (Yours and my tax dollars at work! Better than wasting them on war, I suppose.)
      Research clearly has no effect whatsoever on national education policy.
      As if to underscore that, President Obama signed a law last December designating teaching interns as "highly qualified."
      Of course, research highlights how the single most important factor in children's academic success--often trumping, amazingly, the socio-economic level of parents--is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. The scandal--no, the outrageous moral injustice--has been that we've sent our worst and least prepared educators, especially interns, to our neediest children in inner cities. Then we test the kids, respond with surprised indignation, and punish their schools. (This is reform? Yet another dead horse of mine.)
     The No Child Left Behind Law (spit!) briefly acknowledged this fundamental impediment to improving education for all. In a consummate act of naiveté, Congress simply mandated that all schools employ "highly qualified teachers." As if it were that easy! (We can imagine all those inner-city principals sighing in resignation, "Oh, heck, now I'm going to have to start hiring all those great teachers I've been turning away!")
      Of course, it wasn't that easy. Perhaps that's why, rather than respond to the research or address the crucial issue by redesigning how the nation recruits, trains, and distributes teachers, Congress and Obama simply redesignated interns as "highly qualified," and then washed their hands.
     What happened to research? What happened to a sincere attempt to reform our schools? What happened to honesty, courage, and justice?

Published January 31, 2011, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group) 

A Tale of Two Teachers

     Mr. Smith teaches in the United States, which once boasted some of the finest public schools in the world, but has since fallen behind most other industrialized nations.
     Since teachers in his country are held in such disrepute, Mr. Smith's gifted college friends usually choose other, more respected and better remunerated professions. Indeed, he, himself, came from the bottom percentiles of college graduates. He had to spend an additional year at his own expense in a school of education focused mostly on esoteric theory instead of research-based pedagogy.
     If Mr. Smith somehow emerged, nonetheless, a great educator, he probably works at a beautiful suburban school where he prepares mostly affluent Caucasian and Asian students to go to college. If, on the other hand, he's uncredentialed, ill-prepared, just plain mediocre or worse, he's likely ended up in a dilapidated urban school to teach predominately poor African-American and Latino children--who, for some reason, drop out of high school in scandalously high numbers.
     Every day, Mr. Smith faces well over 30 or even 40 students per class. Perhaps he has enough textbooks for them all, perhaps not depending on where he works.
     He needn't be innovative because he must primarily drill his students to pass standardized tests measuring a narrow band of knowledge and skills, but requiring little to no higher-ordered or critical thinking. If he has any time to spare, he rushes through an absurdly broad but embarrassingly shallow curriculum.
     He can only rarely meet with colleagues about anything other than announcements, test scores, and schedules. His is a lonely profession.
     Poor Mr. Smith has little hope of redemption. The United States government insists on market-based "reforms" such as competition, high-stakes testing, charters, and merit pay, even though the most recent and comprehensive research proves them all to be, not only ineffective, but detrimental to both student and teacher achievement. Everyone's demoralized.
     Mr. Virtanen, however, loves teaching in Finland, a nation that, although wallowing decades ago near the bottom of international academic rankings, now places first.
     In order to become an educator, he had to beat 85% of other applicants. Finish teachers, you see, are revered, their jobs coveted. Indeed, Mr. Virtanen underwent an additional three-year, rigorous graduate preparation entirely at the government's expense, during which he received a stipend as well. He and most of his colleagues hold master's degrees in both Education and their content areas.
     Once he graduated, it didn't matter where he worked because nearly all Finland's small schools (less than 300 students) boast beautiful campuses, well-equipped, small classrooms (fewer than 30 children) and, of course, highly prepared teachers.
     Apparently, the Finish government believes the nation's children are its first priority because every student enjoys free health care, free busing, free school supplies, free counseling and free, nutritious lunches.
     Mr. Virtanen rarely lectures. Instead, he assists his students as they pursue individualized weekly and long-term goals he's helped them choose, goals that often involve teaming up with other students on research for multi-faceted, fun projects, such as publishing their own newspaper.
     Thank goodness the national curriculum is minimal, allowing Mr. Virtanen tremendous leeway and creativity. It also helps that neither he nor his students face high-stakes standardized testing. Instead, for their report cards, he writes detailed narratives of their progress, accomplishments, and challenges.
     Where does Mr. Virtanen find the time? Well, he spends nearly half his school day, not teaching, but meeting with students, communicating with parents, and collaborating with colleagues. Together they form a tightly-knit community where he thrives.
     Mr. Smith and Mr. Virtanen: Only one of them lived happily ever after. And only one of their nations did, too.
     For a more detailed look at Finish schools, read my source for this column. Just Google "Linda Darling-Hammond" and "Finland."

Published December 20th, 2010, in The Argus and The Daily Review (Bay Area News Group)