National Affairs Committee
No Democrat Left Behind
Pat Hynes, Fairfax County School Board Member and National Affairs Guest Author
Democrats trying to follow the na-tional debate on education policy could be forgiven for not knowing which side to take. Going to the mat for schools, unions, and public serv-ants is what we do. Yet, at every level of government, we’ve seen elected Democrats joining Republi-cans in union busting, privatization, and massive disinvestment in public schools.
The confusion is that, for some pub-lic school reformers, the goal is to make public schools better. For oth-ers, the goal is to take public school dollars out of public schools and put those dollars into the hands of pub-lishers, bankers, real estate inves-tors, and religious institutions. The true reformers, unfortunately, have not been watching their backs very well.
This story starts with accountability. Quite rightly, the public expects pub-lic schools to provide a good educa-tion to every child, regardless of zip code. The devil is in how and what to measure. We want to measure the skills we really care about, in a way that tells the community and the educators what to do to improve. And then we want to provide the resources for improvement. A de-ceptively simple task that the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law got wildly wrong from day one.
Under NCLB, we have spent the last decade measuring mastery of trivia, of content standards a mile wide and an inch deep. Each state has devel-oped its own standards and tests, further deepening the zip code effect. The tests have been poorly designed, skewing results in favor of children from higher income house-holds with rich English vocabularies. Test results have been misused, twisted from their designed purpose of measuring a snapshot of fact re-tention–—a type of assessment use-ful only in the classroom to plan for next steps and given power over everything from teacher compensa-tion to school closures.
Students who don’t “test well” end up in years-long remediation tracks. Teachers leave the remediation-heavy schools, or the profession al-together. Classroom instruction becomes a stressful, stultifying test score chase. In all, a punitive system, seemingly designed to frustrate stu-dents, demoralize teachers, and ex-acerbate socioeconomic achieve-ment gaps. Eventually, whole communities suffer. When schools are labeled as failures, property values plummet. And the cycle builds, with more well-to-do parents abandoning struggling schools for other neighborhoods, charters or private schools, deepen-ing the divide and further segre-gating schools and communities into haves and have-nots.
Cue the vultures. When President Obama describes your school as a “drop-out factory,” good luck de-fending yourself against the venture capitalists with the corporate take-over playbook. Good luck protecting your neighborhood from the banker who happens to sit on the local char-ter review board, deciding whether a depressed property should be pur-chased by one of his mortgage cus-tomers for a new charter school. Good luck surviving the “disruptors” who know nothing about education, but get free rein to reinvent your neighborhood school by firing every-one, replacing them with college graduates whose teacher training is a six-week summer camp, and then abandoning everyone a few years later when the numbers don’t add up. And good luck convincing anyone that Bill Gates is actually not an ex-pert in classroom instruction.
As long as schools can be labeled as failures, those who believe no public program should be allowed to live will have ammunition to defund pub-lic education—even better if they can blame the failure on teachers and, especially, their unions. In an era of job insecurity, when the small investor is unsafe on Wall Street, it’s no great challenge to convince tax-payers that teachers have too sweet a deal, with their due-process pro-tections and secure pensions. [Some of these cynical taxpayers are FCDC members, who argue with me about whether we owe our teachers a dig-nified retirement after decades of public service.] To be fair, NCLB and its supporters were reacting to a manufactured crisis. International comparisons show, quite plainly, that our stu-dents’ apples are different in color and shape from their students’ or-anges. In fact, when students from high-scoring nations are compared with U.S. students of similar eco-nomic backgrounds, our students do very well. We have an achievement gap crisis, but it won’t be solved by bankrupting schools. It will be solved by taking lessons from other coun-tries that have no gaps. Lessons about income equality, family sup-port, integrated housing, teacher autonomy, relevant curriculum, and not testing the joy out of everyone.
The ultimate irony is that Democrats are now, at last, being led away from the corporate reformers by an erstwhile Republican. Diane Ravitch, not just any Republican, was George H.W. Bush’s Asst. Secretary of Edu-cation and an architect of NCLB. She designed the punitive system of high-stakes tests. She made the Kool Aid, but unlike many around her, she soon saw how toxic it was.
Ravitch has joined with influential educators and Democratic activists to form The Network for Public Edu-cation (NPE). Donna Brazile and for-mer Ohio Governor Ted Strickland are founding members. NPE de-scribes itself as “an advocacy group whose goal it is to fight to protect, preserve, and strengthen our public school system, an essential institu-tion in a democratic society.” http://www.networkforpubliceducation.org. Recent news briefs on NPE’s website include complaints from Ohio about “Common Core Test Mania,” a de-fense of teachers in response to Time Magazine’s cover story on those “Rotten Apples,” and a critical look at Chicago’s charter school leg-acy. NPE endorses local school board candidates who are chal-lenged by Koch-supported rivals.
In short, NPE is the progressive, pro-public schools, pro-public employee advocacy organization many Demo-crats have been looking for. Take a look at the website, like them on Facebook, follow them on Twitter. Support them if you can. And next time you get your photo op with the President, tell him the good news.
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