Education Week - May 8, 2013 - 16

EDUCATION WEEK

MAY 8, 2013

www.edweek.org
TEXAS: Teachers, students,

Eric Gay/AP-File

parents, and school
administrators rally at the
state Capitol in Austin to
protest the amount of testing
in schools and to demand
restoration of funding to
public education.

Debates
Marked
By Vitriol
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

concerned about the quality of the
common math standards. “There’s
a dialogue in the education community here about the standards
themselves. That dialogue did not
get to happen in 2010.”

‘More Screaming’
Elsewhere, policy issues and
proposed changes are provoking
angry responses locally that then
reverberate nationally.
In Chicago, parent and teacher
groups are protesting plans to close
a record 53 schools. In Charlotte,
N.C., and Providence, R.I., students,
parents, and other activists have
dressed up as zombies to protest
standardized testing. Teachers in a
Seattle high school in January refused to give district tests.
Blogs and Twitter have helped
carry those messages beyond
those particular cities.
“There’s vastly more screaming
in every imaginable medium,” said
Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of
the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a
Washington think tank that favors
charter schools, as well as common
academic standards and testing.
Local school board races, which
usually draw little attention, are
now on the front lines—including
in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and
Nashville, Tenn. Groups such as
StudentsFirst and large donors
such as former New York City
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein
have invested large amounts in
selected local races. (Big-money
candidates haven’t always won.)
“They’ve either promoted or
bought into the theory that if you
just shake things up, things will
get better,” Randi Weingarten, the

president of the American Federation of Teachers, itself a force in
politics at all levels, said of such
players. “But instead of addressing the issues head-on, they fight.”
Just last week, Ms. Weingarten, in a speech in New York City,
called for a temporary halt to all
high stakes tied to the common
core to give educators time to implement the standards.

Issues Obscured?
The rhetoric around these fights
is becoming sharp, even personal.
In Alabama, one critic of the
common standards warned state
lawmakers that the federal government was developing technology to read students’ faces during
tests to determine what they ate
at home, according to media coverage of a legislative hearing.
During a rally in front of the U.S.
Department of Education’s headquarters last month, a MiamiDade County, Fla., teacher leading
an effort to get parents and students to “opt out” of standardized
testing leveled a racial insult—
from the main stage—against Ms.
Rhee, who is Asian-American.
“I fully understand the sentiment that is coming from parents
and teachers and schools around
the frustration with testing,” Ms.
Rhee said in an interview. “But
the bottom line is, the answer is in
the middle. Tests are not evil. That
reasonable point of view is what
gets lost.”
She added: “Let’s not turn this
into a debate about how I want to
corporatize education. The polarization is not helping.”
As he addressed the American
Educational Research Association in San Francisco last week,
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne
Duncan was booed for his stands
on a number of issues, including
testing. Later that same day, he
got a warm reception at a “summit” of the NewSchools Venture
Fund, which raises money from
philanthropies to seed education

entrepreneurs, charter organizations among them.
The problem is that “the legitimate debate about these issues—
and there is one—gets lost,” said
Chris Minnich, the executive director of the Council of Chief State
School Officers, which helped lead
the initiative that produced the
common standards.
The role of private philanthropies in promoting education
policies and initiatives has also
been a flashpoint.
Educators and activists point, for
example, to the Gates Foundation,
which has helped drive teacher-effectiveness programs and common
standards, and the Walton Family
Foundation, which has funded charter schools and groups that advocate
parent-trigger laws.
Education Week, a publication
of the nonprofit Editorial Projects
in Education, has been criticized
for receiving grant support from
Gates, which currently helps underwrite coverage of the education
industry and K-12 innovation, and
Walton, which helps support coverage of parent empowerment.
(The newspaper retains sole control of the content of that coverage, its editors emphasize.)
To be sure, the pace of change
accelerated when President
Barack Obama took office and
put Mr. Duncan, a former Chicago
schools ceo, at the helm of the
Education Department.
Armed with nearly $100 billion in education aid from the
2009 economic-stimulus package
passed by Congress, Secretary
Duncan used $4 billion to entice
states into embracing common
standards, charter schools, and
teacher evaluations tied to student test scores through his Race
to the Top contest.
He’s advanced that general platform more recently by granting
states waivers from compliance
with many of the core tenets of the
nclb law if they adopt the Obama
administration’s preferred improvement ideas—even as education

research paints a mixed picture
about whether such measures as
charter schools and merit pay have
much effect on student learning.
For supporters of those ideas,
a frequent argument is that the
“status quo” isn’t working either.
In an interview, Mr. Duncan
shrugged his shoulders at the
backlash against high-stakes
testing and common standards,
declaring that “if a state wants
to dummy down standards, they
have every right to do that.”
His ideas for improving education—from tying teacher evaluations to student test results to
embracing charter schools—have
clashed head-on with many who
gave President Obama major political support. Like unions.
“You have to give credit to
President Obama and Secretary
Duncan. They challenged their
core constituency,” said Patricia
Levesque, the ceo of the Foundation for Excellence in Education,
an advocacy organization started
by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
“But you also have so many governors who made education reform a priority ... and the growth
of education advocacy groups,” she
said. “There’s a lot more bipartisanship on education.”

Scope of Dissatisfaction
If Ms. Ravitch—one of education’s most prominent speakers
and writers—is the face of the
progressive, anti-corporate reform
movement, then Pearson has become the face of the antagonist.
The giant testing and publishing company, based in London
and New York City, is being hammered over what some educators
and activists see as its undue influence on teaching, learning, and
testing.
In one recent example, in Texas,
critics upset in part with Pearson
are trying to persuade lawmakers
to scale back standardized testing
in a state that served as inspiration for the nclb law.
“Our social mission as a company and everything we do is
about improving people’s lives
through learning. The public trust
is fundamental,” said Shilpi Niyogi, the executive vice president
for public affairs at Pearson. “So
we absolutely take the protests
and the concerns and the level of
anxiety out there very seriously.”
Whether these education debates are taking place only on
the fringes or among policy elites,
or represent a growing, broader
backlash, is unclear.
Polls paint a complicated picture
of teacher sentiment, for example.
On the one hand, there is evidence
morale is low. Just 39 percent of
teachers reported being “very satisfied with their jobs,” down 23
percentage points in five years,
according to the 2012 MetLife
Survey of the American Teacher.

But on the flip side, teachers
give themselves high marks for
their general well-being, ranking
No. 2 behind physicians for their
physical, emotional, and financial health, according to the 2013
Gallup-Healthways Well-Being
Index. That means, for example,
that teachers report having a lot
of daily positive experiences.
While a majority of the public
supports using student achievement as a factor in teacher evaluations, an even greater proportion reports having confidence in
teachers in general, according to
the 2012 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup
poll.
As a more anecdotal indicator,
a 2011 Save Our Schools rally in
Washington—organized by educators and others unhappy with
high-stakes testing and other
policies—drew about 3,000 people,
but subsequent protests drew far
fewer. The “opt out” protest against
standardized testing at the Education Department last month drew
a couple dozen people.

Other Priorities
For Larry Ferlazzo, a teacher of
English-learners in Sacramento,
Calif., and many of his colleagues
at Luther Burbank High School,
the common core—in English/language arts and math—is accepted
as the new way of doing things.
But, he said, “if you ask teachers
and principals what [are] the most
important things that can be done,
new standards would not even
make the top 20. How about social
services, new technology, and time
for teacher collaboration?”
For students and parents, at
least in Mr. Ferlazzo’s classroom,
daily concerns are pretty basic.
“They’re more concerned about
paying the rent this month,” said
Mr. Ferlazzo, who also writes a
blog for Education Week Teacher.
Jonah Edelman, who co-founded
Stand for Children, agrees that
parents, for the most part, have
other fundamental concerns. He
helps organize parents in states to
support policies such as the common core, preschool funding, and
new teacher evaluations—and the
organization supports candidates
in local and state elections.
“At the parental level, there’s
less ferment,” Mr. Edelman said.
“The parents we work with want
the same thing as all parents
want. They want high-quality
schools that will help their kids to
be successful.”
But more and more parents,
who may not have the political
clout of large unions or companies,
are starting to get active.
“I do feel like we are at a point
where large numbers of people are
completely fed up,” said Pamela
Grundy, a parent of a 6th grader in
Charlotte, N.C., and a co-founder
of Parents Across America, which
is fighting high-stakes testing and
other “corporate reforms.”
“The key is the money, which
we don’t have nearly as much
of,” she said. “We have to do more
grassroots campaigns, and it takes
more time.”
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Education Week - May 8, 2013

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