The article appeared in The Washington Post, “The Answer Sheet” blog by Valerie Strauss. The full essay is offered below.

Why are strong readers being labeled remedial?

By Marion Brady, a veteran Teacher, Administrator, Curriculum Designer and Author.

I began teaching history at the high school level in the fall of 1952. It wasn’t by choice. I hadn’t majored in the subject in college. It had always been just another required hoop to jump through.

But the school was small, and all the teachers had multiple preparations. I was assigned two sections of 11th grade American history.

Some historian (Charles Beard? Arnold Toynbee? Winston Churchill?) is supposed to have said, “History is just one damn thing after another.” That’s how it had always seemed to me, so I came to my two classes determined not to do the usual — assign a few pages in the textbook as homework and spend the next day telling kids my version of what they’d already read.

I wanted us to think and talk together about big, important ideas such as Einstein’s view that technological change was like an ax in the hands of a sociopath. I thought that exploring the blood left on the floor by change — technological, demographic, and environmental — put history to work in a relevant, important, interesting, useful way.

But dealing thoroughly with complicated issues takes lots of time, and I couldn’t bring myself not to cover the standard textbook story.

So I worked out a simple solution. I assigned four or five pages from the book as homework, and the next day, as soon as the kids were seated, I’d give them a written, five-question, short-answer quiz. The questions were easy, since the point was just to keep them “covering the material.” The whole procedure took about three minutes, leaving the rest of the period free for work more challenging than stuffing facts into kids’ short-term memories.

I woke up three or four days ago remembering that procedure and asking myself a question probably triggered by conversations I’m having with Rick Roach, an Orange County, Florida, school board member. You may remember Rick. I wrote about him in my December 5 Answer Sheet blog post — how he took a version of the state’s 10th grade high-stakes standardized reading test and got 62, a score that would have landed him in a remedial reading class. It would also have kept him from taking a class that led to his joining the swim team, becoming its captain, and being named the team’s Most Valuable Player.

What I remembered as I was waking up was that every student I taught in four different high schools apparently knew how to read because they all passed those five-question quizzes. None of the four high schools in which I taught had even one reading teacher.

There are three high schools in the part of Orange County that Rick represents. In those three schools, 30 remedial reading teachers are teaching about 3,000 students!

What’s going on here? What’s changed? Why, a few years ago, was there was no apparent need for remedial reading programs for high school students, and now about one out of three are enrolled in them? Have ability levels dropped that far that fast?

Rick wants answers to those questions, and he’s doing what legislators and policymakers should be doing but are not — talking to teachers and students.

From teachers of remedial reading he hears that relatively few of their students really have reading problems. Those that do are from families in which English isn’t spoken, or they have a genuine learning disability. The rest are average or above-average students. Many are enrolled in honors and advanced placement classes, some even in extremely text-heavy International Baccalaureate programs.

Students in advanced studies spending five to ten hours a week in remedial reading classes? What’s going on here?

From kids, Rick hears that the standardized high-stakes tests they failed were of no interest to them, or had trick questions, or some questions had more than one right answer, or they’re just tired of nonstop reading drills, or they slacked off because the tests were so long, or they weren’t given enough time, or they froze up because they knew their score could hang an embarrassing label on them.

Rick, quizzing kids in a middle school remedial reading program, asked a boy with a Kindle what he was reading at that moment. “Othello,” the kid said. For an assignment? No, the kid replied. He just liked Shakespeare.

A 7th grade kid who owns a Kindle and reads Shakespeare for pleasure is in a remedial reading program! What’s going on here?

Full disclosure: I know next to nothing about teaching reading, I’ve never taught anyone to read, and I’ve done no research in the field. That said, it seems to me there’s an obvious explanation for why so many kids are labeled poor readers.

Here’s my theory: Congress, by way of the No Child Left Behind legislation, targeted reading (and math) for improvement. This handed publishers of textbooks, tests, and test-prep materials a marketing opportunity. Not surprisingly, publishers want to maximize sales. To maximize sales, there has to be a perception of a serious reading problem, and the easiest way to create the perception of a reading problem is to give tests that kids fail.

So that’s what they do.

It’s easy. Make the passages to be read boring. Ask questions that have more than one right answer but count only one answer as correct. Throw in a few unfamiliar words or references. Increase the length of sentences. Make the test so long that fatigue or impatience set in. Add a few trick questions. Increase stress levels by setting a too-short completion time. Or, easiest of all, just arbitrarily raise the passing score.

Tests can be designed to yield any failure rate from zero to a hundred percent. Publishers just have to be careful not to make the failure rate so high that test buyers get suspicious.

Add up the amounts taxpayers are on the hook for reading teachers, reading tests, and test prep materials and you’re talking billions of dollars. The market potential when every kid in every state is tested not just for reading and math but for every subject every year boggles the mind. And this at the same time legislators are making draconian cuts in school funding!

Back before the big corporate push to privatize public education, back before corporate heads and politicians began blaming teachers for America’s poor economic performance, back when teacher judgment was trusted and they wrote their own tests, the cost of testing was close to zero. Evaluating learner performance was just part of the job. When I was still in the classroom, I evaluated learner performance all day every day.

I may, of course, be wrong. But is there a better explanation for why so many kids are being labeled lousy readers? That strategy, after all, is just a variation of the one being put to work since adoption of No Child Left Behind — arbitrarily inching the performance bar up a little every year, leading more and more public schools to fail, thereby destroying confidence in public schooling and opening the door wider for privatization.

The cost of what’s happening in Orange County, Florida, and other school systems across America isn’t, of course, just the money being channeled away from instruction and into corporate coffers. They deprive the young of diplomas they’ve earned by completing all their courses with passing grades. They keep talent and potential out of courses and extracurricular activities that enrich education. They make kids hate every subject that has a high-stakes test attached.

And there’s not one shred of evidence that standardized tests are a more accurate and useful measure of learner performance than teacher judgment. Indeed, I’d argue that they’re far less accurate and useful, and therefore a harmful, expensive distraction.

I asked a bunch of nationally known reading experts to explain why standardized tests are timed. Here’s one’s response: “It has to do with the absurd notion of standardizing the testing situation in an attempt to get ‘valid’ results. If everyone takes the test under the exact same conditions, the results are valid information....Yeah, right. And so what we actually do is assess how well a population performs under testing conditions rather than testing what they actually know.”

Rick isn’t letting it go. He’s pulled together an 11-county coalition of school board members and educators to try to find out why kids who can read are wasting time in remedial reading programs. I’m invited to their meetings.

Discuss Quotes to Promote Literacy Development

For the past fifteen years of my teaching career, I have incorporated the use of quotes into my classroom’s morning routine to inspire my students, start the day on a positive note, and build lasting habits of character. Discussing well-known sayings brings out the best in children and helps them focus on important ideas. It is my enthusiasm for this exercise and my firm belief in its effectiveness that led me to write my new book, Changing Kids’ Lives One Quote at a Time and Eight Essentials for Empowered Teaching and Learning, K-8.

In addition to its character-building mission, our “Quote of the Day” conversations also offer a powerful way to promote literacy. When I speak of literacy, I am referring to the specific skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking.

In its pure form the discussion begins when a student volunteer reads the “Quote of the Day” on the board. It is critical at this time to provide approximately thirty seconds of “wait time” so each child can think about the quote, make sense of it, and perhaps even come up with an example of how the quote’s meaning applies to everyday life or connects to a habit of character.

To maximize student participation, the kids follow this “quiet think time” with a brief pair-share, in which each child has an opportunity both to express ideas and listen carefully to the partner’s thoughts. Next, a few volunteers share their interpretations of the quote’s meaning with the entire class. Finally, I close the activity by sharing some thoughts of my own. Whenever possible, I like to share a personal story that brings out the quote’s meaning in a deeper way. Storytelling is a powerful teaching strategy, and kids are likely to remember the stories and the lessons they contain for a long time.

• Parents can follow the basic outline of this procedure when discussing quotes at home with their children. In addition, there are several ways that parents can modify this conversational structure to strengthen literary development.

• Put one quote per day or week in your child’s lunch and discuss the quote’s meaning after school. Reading a quote at lunchtime is a novel experience for children, and the timing provides kids with several hours to think about the quote to prepare for the evening discussion, which can take place on the ride home, at the dinner table, or at bedtime. For example, with R. Herzog’s quote, “It is better to light a candle than complain about the darkness,” it may take children a while to figure out that the saying is telling them to adopt a problem solving attitude when life’s inevitable frustrations arise, not complain about them.

• Analyze quotes for excellent word choice or interesting word play. With Rudy Benton’s quote, “7 days without exercise makes one weak,” discuss with your child how the word “weak” is spelled. The quote is not referring to a week on the calendar, but to the fact that if we don’t exercise, we will become physically weaker.

• Consider writing a quote or a set of quotes on your child’s placemat and discuss these sayings during a healthy breakfast. Over cereal and fruit, you and your child can discuss Bonnie Hopper’s quote, “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little EXTRA!” Together, you can talk about how consistently giving that extra effort in school, in sports, and other endeavors can make a huge difference in the long run.

• If you’re trying to sharpen your child’s writing skills, consider using quotes for journal writing. Simply choose a quote and ask your child to respond to it using one of the prompts listed below. (More prompts are provided in Changing Kids’ Lives One Quote at a Time and Eight Essentials for Empowered Teaching and Learning, K-8.
  • Describe a time when you or someone you know demonstrated the main idea of this quote.
  • What do you think this quote means? Give examples.
  • Why do you think the speaker said this quote in the first place?
  • Describe how you can use the meaning of this quote to help others.
  • Describe how this quote can help you get along more effectively with other people.

  For example, with Vince Lombardi’s quote, “If you'll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your lives,” children may address the first prompt by describing a time when they finished a writing assignment at school and then continued to revise it to improve the story’s word choice and sentence structure, rather than put it away because they simply wanted to be done.

• Choose a quote and ask your child to say whether (s)he agrees or disagrees with its meaning and then explain why. This type of exercise builds the critical thinking skill of evaluation (the highest level on the well-known Bloom’s taxonomy) and develops persuasive speaking skills. For example, when considering John Hancock’s quote, “The greatest ability in business is to get along with others,” a child may choose to disagree and argue that knowing how to do one’s job with knowledge and skill is more important than getting along with other people. This would likely lead to a very interesting conversation.

  Discussing quotes with children is a powerful, engaging way to build character in children and develop valuable literacy skills. I hope you decide to give it a try.

  Bio
  Steve Reifman is a National Board Certified elementary school teacher, author, and speaker in Santa Monica, CA. He has written several books for educators and parents, including Changing Kids’ Lives One Quote at a Time and Eight Essentials for Empowered Teaching and Learning, K-8. Steve is also the creator of the Chase Manning Mystery Series for kids 8-12. Each book in the series features a single-day, real-time thriller that occurs on an elementary school campus. For weekly Teaching Tips, blog posts, and other valuable resources and strategies on teaching the whole child, visit http://stevereifman.com. You can follow Steve on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/stevereifman.

The article appeared in The Washington Post, “The Answer Sheet” blog by Valerie Strauss. The full essay is offered below.

‘What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate”
By Marion Brady

“What we’ve got here,” as Cool Hand Luke once said, “is a failure to communicate.”

Skimming the reactions to my 12/5/11 The Answer Sheet guest blog, Cool Hand Luke’s observation often comes to mind.

For many readers, the question raised by my account of Orange County school board member Rick Roach’s less than stellar performance on a version of a standardized test given in Florida was, “What’s wrong with Rick?”

Wrong question. Here’s the right one: What’s wrong with standardized testing? Here’s another: What’s wrong with a whole country when it isn’t in open revolt against the assumption that schools should only teach what machines can measure?

How demeaning is that assumption? How much is it costing America in lost human potential?

In a separate Answer Sheet guest blog published last month, I said that standardized tests had no “success in life” predictive power. Rick’s story was just one example of that fact, and my mail says there are hundreds of similar stories. Albert Einstein had one. If you’re reading this, you’re reading something written by someone with yet another example.

But “no predictive power” doesn’t even scratch the surface of problems with standardized tests. In that November 1 blog, I listed twenty-four MORE problems, any one of which I could write (and probably have already written) an op-ed or newspaper column exploring it, or have treated it at greater length in one of my books.

And the 25 problems didn’t exhaust my list. I didn’t, for example, point out that lots of kids are smarter than the people who write standardized test items, and tie themselves in knots at test time trying to second guess what was in the head of the writer of a particular test item. I didn’t say that the fans of testing and the scientific research on the benefits of standardized testing are in opposite corners.

What I was trying to do in my Dec. 15 blog was call attention to serious problems with the tail now wagging the education dog — standardized testing.

Rick Roach, the school board member who’s now taking a lot of flak for detailing his experience — shares that concern.

As does an army of others. The “Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind” has a list of 153 education, civil rights, religious, disability, parent and civic organizations that think America’s addiction to standardized tests is dragging us in a wrong direction.

See “The High Stakes of Standardized Testing,” by Edward Miller, for a summary of scientific studies on the subject conducted by the National Research Council.

Then read Banesh Hoffman, a graduate of Oxford and Princeton universities, a world famous mathematician and theoretical physicist who worked with Albert Einstein on studies related to the theory of relativity. If you think that someone with his credentials might have something important to say on the subject, go here and click on the cover of Hoffman’s easily read, jargon-free book, “The Tyranny of Testing.” Read the forward by another intellectual giant, Jacques Barzun, and be surprised by the fact that he was writing in 1962, then skim a few random pages from the book.

To those helpful math whizzes who either suggested that Rick resign from the school board or take them up on offers to tutor him in math, I suggest reading “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart, here. And there’s this, “Leading mathematician debunks ‘value-added.’

Finally, those wondering why standardized testing has become the be-all and end-all of education reform, will find food for thought by Googling “Berliner and Biddle, The Manufactured Crisis ,” and “Emery and Ohanian, Why Is Corporate America Bashing America’s Schools ?”

In the opinion of these respected researchers, today’s test-based “reforms” don’t have much at all to do with quality education, or with beating the test scores of Finland and Singapore, or with the claim that test-based reforms are “preparing the young for college and careers.”

As usual: Follow the money.

The article, with one slight omission, appeared in The Washington Post, “The Answer Sheet” blog by Valerie Strauss. The full essay is offered below.

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids
By Marion Brady

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:

“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by those rich and powerful enough to buy magazine covers and Congressional hearings, and bribe cash-poor school officials to let them conduct massive experiments on kids and teachers.

All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.

But maybe there’s hope. As I write, a New York Times story by Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of school principals.

Winerip writes: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state (New York) had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.”

One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan. Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, but is required to attend 10 training sessions.

“It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend those 10 training sessions.

Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended was “two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations.”

A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking. They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.”

My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”

He’s wrong. What they’re being made to do isn’t ethically questionable. It’s ethically unacceptable. Ethically reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.

How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution? Why haven’t they been asked?

As appeared in The Washington Post, “The Answer Sheet” blog by Valerie Strauss

How Bill Gates can be an education hero
By Marion Brady

A couple of days ago I watched and read the transcript of Fareed Zakaria’s CNN primetime special, “Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education.”

Zakaria talks to Bill Gates, whose five-billion-plus investment in schools has bought him a seat at the head table of education reformers.

If I’d gotten any response from my previous attempts to correspond with Mr. Gates, I’d write him again. Here’s a draft of what I might say: Writer Malcolm Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours to become really competent in a job. The day you were born — Oct. 28, 1955 — I was 28 years old. It was a school day, so I’d have spent it teaching in a high school in Ohio. My total time on the job probably now comes to about 80,000 hours. That, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I could be a slower learner than you are.

But I continue to try. I visit schools here and abroad, talk to kids and teachers, write books, op-eds, newspaper columns, and journal articles, and correspond about education with people on every continent.

You’ve even picked up the tab for some of that. Twice, some years ago, an organization you helped finance flew me to their headquarters and asked for advice. I’m sorry to say I wasted your money. In matters educational, I’m what Gladwell calls an “outlier.” They thought my ideas were too unorthodox to take seriously.

It’s obvious that much of corporate America’s interest in education is self-serving, best explained by the adage, “Follow the money.” That’s understandable and acceptable until it becomes the tail wagging the education dog.

However, I don’t think that’s where you’re coming from. And, since I don’t accept fees for consulting, and the teaching and learning materials I produce can be downloaded from the Internet at zero cost, it’s clearly not where I’m coming from either. My hand isn’t out with the palm up.

With that out of the way, may I share a few thoughts? I think it’s fair to say that Lou Gerstner— along with you, an early leader of the standards and accountability education reform effort —was right when he wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the reform effort has been a bust. I’d go farther and argue that it’s done, and continues to do, enormous damage to the young, but I won’t go into that here. I just want to offer a possible explanation for that failure, and do it from a business management rather than an educational perspective.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the work of the late Douglas McGregor, but a reminder may help. His 1960 book, The Human Side of Management, is considered one of the most influential books on management principles ever written. In it, he describes two very different assumptions about human nature, labels them “Theory X,” and “Theory Y,” and discusses their implications and ramifications for productivity.

Theory X managers, he said, assume that most people dislike work, avoid it if possible, tend to be irresponsible, and need tight controls in the form of penalties and rewards to keep them from deviating from organizational goals.

Theory Y managers assume that work is natural, satisfying, and rewarding, and that if organizational goals are clear and acceptable, most people, given sufficient autonomy, will take the initiative, seek responsibility, and bring imagination, creativity, and ingenuity to their work.

Read those two paragraphs again, please, substituting the word “learning” for the word “work.” McGregor said that people who are managed in accordance with either theory tend to develop behavior that matches the theory. You know a lot about feedback loops. Give some serious thought to that one, and its implications for, say, performance gaps and school discipline problems.

The educators I think you want and surely need on your side are those who know from years of firsthand classroom experience the costs and limitations of Theory X and the productive potential of Theory Y. But instead of enlisting them, the reform efforts you’ve been promoting, and the promotional strategies you’ve used, drive them up a wall.

Corporate interests, Congress, and state legislatures push Theory X with a vengeance — No Child Left Behind; Race to the Top; standardized, high-stakes tests; teacher pay tied to test scores; school closings; the Common Core Standards; school systems headed by mayors, CEOs, and retired military officers; teachers accused of “the soft bigotry of low expectations;” states prostituting themselves to compete for federal dollars; letter grades assigned to schools; public naming and shaming; constant yammering about “raising the bar” and “rigor!” Every single one of those is straight, undiluted Theory X.

Theory X has brought public schooling to crisis. Theory X will eventually destroy it.

If you want to make a real and permanent difference in what goes on in kids’ heads, accept the fact that you’ve been backing the wrong horse. Use your enormous influence and resources to get policymakers in Washington and state capitols to back off X — dump seat-time rules, required-subject rules, fill-out-a-form-for-everything rules, everybody-on-the-same-page rules, my-way-or-the-highway rules, and begin moving toward Theory Y.

Unleash what America’s schools always had too little of, but the little they once had made our schools the envy of the world — enough Theory Y going on behind closed classroom doors to capitalize on kid and teacher imagination, creativity, and ingenuity.

If you want to see that theory in action, check out the new “studio school” movement in the United Kingdom. Or “project learning” here in America. Just a few days ago, George Wood, superintendent of the Federal Hocking Local School District in Stewart, Ohio, painted a word picture of the possibilities of that idea.

What I’m asking you to do will be really, really hard. Just about everybody — including, probably, most educators—will try to “yes, but” it to death. Of those yes-buts, the one that will seem the most intractable will be insistence that the familiar “core curriculum” — the one adopted in 1893, the one now being locked in permanent place with the Common Core Standards — has to be taught, and doing so takes most of the school day, leaving little time for anything else.

Taking issue with that contention is the main reason I’ve been labeled an “outlier.” For almost fifty years I’ve been repeating what respected scholars have been saying for centuries: Adequate sense can’t be made of the world by chopping it into little pieces and studying the pieces without regard for how they fit together and interact.

And I’ve said that problem can be easily solved, that systems theory as it developed during World War II can weave together, logically, all present and future academic subjects and fill in the gaps between them to form a much simpler, more efficient and effective, less time-consuming (and less expensive) general education. Here’s one example. If you’re willing to give the example more than a cursory glance, do so not looking for math, science, language arts and social studies instruction. Instead, think of school subjects simply as tools for making better sense of the world and how we experience it — as means rather than ends.

“Human history,” said H.G. Wells, is “a race between education and catastrophe.” The more than five billion bucks you’ve spent thus far trying to improve American education suggests you think as I do, that catastrophe has a big lead.

Be a real game changer. Be a hero. Promote Theory Y with the same enthusiasm you’ve brought to Theory X. Given institutional inertia, you won’t live long enough to see all or even most schools change very much. But from even limited success will come the kids best equipped intellectually and emotionally to save us from ourselves.

Progressive Democrats of America Palm Beach County Chapter
Invites You To...
Discussion/Presentation on Public Education in America
Where Are We Now and Where Are We Headed

August to June: Bringing Life to School. Clips with Discussion...22 minutes of glorious scenes followed by conversation. Discuss education change with the Teacher featured in the film, Amy Valens. August To June and you, all in Palm Beach County on Thursday, October 27, 2011.

Progressive Democrats of America, Palm Beach County Chapter Invites You To....
A Presentation and Discussion. Public Education in America
Where we have been? Where we are now? Where we are headed?
Featuring excerpts from acclaimed film August to June, Bringing Life to School followed by a discussion with filmmaker/featured teacher, Amy Valens.

Let's broaden the national conversation...public education beyond test scores!

Thursday, October 27, 7 - 9 pm
Friends Meeting House
823 North A Street
Lake Worth, Florida

Refreshments following the program.
Admission is free to all.

For further information: email progdemspbc@aol.com or call 561 367 9077

Please Join Us.
See 22 minutes of glorious clips. Discuss education change with the Teacher in August To June, Amy Valens.
Pupils, parents, grand parents, and persons without progeny, All are welcome!

Progressive Democrats of America, Palm Beach County Chapter
For further information: email progdemspbc@aol.com or call 561 367 9077

Marion's elementary school alma mater in Mason County, West Virginia

This treatise was written by our own EmpathyAndEducation.org Net Neighbor Marion Brady, a veteran Teacher, Administrator, Curriculum Designer and Author. It first was published at The Washington Post, Answer Sheet blog Posted at 5:00 AM ET, 12/15/2010 Marion Brady’s latest book is What’s Worth Learning? from Information Age Publishing.

By Valerie Strauss
Standardized snake oil
By Marion Brady’s
I was, generally speaking, a fairly well-behaved kid. I’ve no reasonable explanation, then, for burning a hole in the wall of the one-room school I attended in the late 1930s.

It wasn’t an original idea. A precedent had been set by somebody who’d come and gone before I arrived at Union School the previous year as a third grader. He (I can’t imagine it was a “she”) had heated the steel rod used to stoke the fire in the stove until it was red hot, pressed the end of it against the white-painted interior wood wall near the entrance door, and pushed until it burned all the way through. The result was a very neat black hole about the size of a marble.

The blackened area around the hole looked a little like fetching eyelashes.

One cold winter morning, arriving at the tiny school after the nearest neighbor had added fresh coal to the fire and gone, but before anyone else had arrived, it occurred to me that a similar hole three or four inches to the left of the existing hole offered an interesting possibility. Using a black crayon, I could add eyebrows to good effect.

I got the hole done, but not the eyebrows. Sixth grader Naomi arrived, saw the still-smoldering new "eye," and waited at the door to tattle to the teacher.

Confronted by high authority, my eyes-with-eyebrows project seemed less than wise, much less funny. I vaguely recall responding to Miss Woods’ observation that I could have burned the school down by mumbling something about the big community tin drinking cup hanging on a nail beside the nearby water cooler. I think I suggested that it provided the necessary insurance against disaster.

She didn’t buy it. I was sent home and told to come back with my mother or father, or both.

In the years since I burned that hole, I’ve stayed connected to schools and schooling as a student, teacher, administrator, college professor, writer of texts and professional books, contributor to academic journals, education columnist for newspapers, blogger, visitor to schools around the world, and consultant to publishers, states and foundations.

And for the last 20 years, I’ve done my best to burn holes in the myth that standardized tests are a means to the end of improving America’s schools. I haven’t the slightest doubt that if the testing tail continues to wag the education dog, it will kill the dog and with it the ability of future generations to cope with their fates.

It’s not that America’s schools don’t have really serious problems. They certainly do. And I’m not talking just about big, inner city institutions surrounded by blight, encircled by barbed wire, entered through metal detectors, patrolled by cops, and churning out dropouts, future prison inmates, and other social problems.

There are many of those, but I’m not singling them out. As a mountain of research makes clear, what ails them is primarily long-term poverty and the myriad problems poverty spawns. That’s a matter I’m not qualified to write about, but for those who think test scores actually mean something important, I’ll note in passing that Finland always ranks near the top, and their child poverty rate is less than 3%, while America’s rate is over 20% and climbing rapidly. Those who believe skilled teachers can level the education playing field enough to erase that difference in the quality of the material they’re given to work with aren’t just not in the game, they’re not even in the ball park.

Yes, include those blighted urban schools as a target of my criticism, but include also America’s many well-ordered schools in quiet, leafy suburbs. Include schools in top-scale ZIP codes that have been adopted by venture capitalists who see to it that every hint of a need is instantly met. Include schools where, before opening bells, Benz, Bentley, and BMW doors swing open and kids slide out to be greeted by name by headmasters and faculties. And include schools where chauffeur-driven limousines deliver their body-guarded charges because school policy forbids noisy arrivals by helicopter. (Yes, there are such schools.)

Consider as failing every school – public, charter, private, whatever – that assumes that corporately produced, standardized tests say something important about something important. Using test scores to guide education policy makes about as much sense as using the horoscope of whoever happens to be Secretary of State to guide US foreign policy.

That standardized tests are a useful tool for guiding education reform is a myth, pure and simple – a myth constructed from ignorance and perpetuated by misinformation, or conjured from hope and reinforced by cherry-picked data.

I grew up in Appalachia where the old adage, “You can’t make a silk purse out of sow’s ear” was familiar speech. Standardized tests are a “sow’s ear.” The only things they can measure accurately are random bits of information stored in short-term memory.

But even if every kid remembered everything taught, it’s hard to imagine a more wasteful use of teacher and learner time and taxpayer money than preparing for and taking standardized tests.

When the world changed little or not at all from generation to generation and nearly everyone was illiterate, unaided memory was essential. What needed to be known existed in the memories of the elders, and the young, living in that static world, either learned it from them or suffered the consequences.

That era is long gone. It’s over. Finished. It began to end when writing was developed, and its demise proceeded with the invention of the printing press, cheap books, photography, moving pictures, television, the Internet, search engines, and other means of information gathering and archiving. In today’s world, tests of unaided memory are about as useful as (insert another Appalachian slang expression having to do with the anatomy of boar hogs).

Standardized, subject-matter tests are worse than a waste. We’re spending billions of dollars and instructional hours on a tool that measures one thought process to the neglect of all others, wreaks havoc on the minds and emotions of teachers and learners, and diverts attention from a fundamental, ignored problem.

That problem? Longshoreman and college professor Eric Hoffer summed it up a lifetime ago. Because the world is dynamic, the future belongs not to the learned but to learners.

Read that sentence again. Then read it again. Even if standardized tests didn’t cost billions, even if they yielded something that teachers didn’t already know, even if they hadn’t narrowed the curriculum down to joke level, even if they weren’t the main generators of educational drivel, even if they weren’t driving the best teachers out of the profession, they should be abandoned because they measure the wrong thing.

The future belongs not to the learned but to learners. American education isn’t designed to produce learners, and the proof of that contention is the standardized test.

America’s system of education is designed to clone the learned. And motivated either by ignorance or greed, the wealthy and powerful, using educationally naive celebrities as fronts, are spending obscene amounts of money to convince politicians, pundits, policymakers, and the public that this is a good and necessary thing.

Thus far, they’ve been wildly successful. If they’re not stopped, those now sitting in our classrooms won’t just witness America’s descent into Third World status, they’ll accelerate it.

On a somewhat lighter note, and in the spirit of the season, below is a link to a free gift – a complete, down-loadable book. It’s not my new What’s Worth Learning?, but it’s perhaps more appropriate for days made busy by holiday preparation: The Road To Hell.

Also republished by online news/commentary organization Truthout, December 19, 2010

Originally Posted by Deborah Meier at 6:36 PM Monday, August 15, 2011
This is my speech at the Save Our Schools Rally, Saturday, July 30, 2011, on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C.

One thing that is interesting is that only mad dogs, Englishmen and teachers could imagine having a rally at noon in Washington DC, in the middle of the summer. But I am willing to be a mad dog and a mad teacher.

There are some advantages to being old, and that is that you have been there before. As Diane Ravitch reminded us yesterday, even in my one limited life this is about the fifth major crisis caused by teachers. But I do think there is something special about this crisis.

We are in a crisis, but not the one they are talking about. We are in a crisis about human relationships, and a crisis about the survival of democracy. That is what we are fighting for. The word public is even in the word republic. There can’t be a republic if there is not a public, and there can’t be a democracy if there is not a republic.

The latest great idea for solving the public school problem is to abolish it.

We are fighting for saving the idea and the existence of a public school system in the belief that the only alternative we are being offered is one whose faults we know are greater still. That is a marketplace, unevenly stacked between competing consumers. That is what is being offered to replace the public school system.

There could not be a worse idea.

Oddly, some of those who are the most active in promoting this idea are the very people who created the last crisis of the free marketplace.

Isn’t that intriguing? They hope to use it to increase their power, not to increase our power. What infuriates me the most is that they do it in the name of civil rights. This last economic crisis wiped out virtually half of the wealth that existed in the Black community, built up over the last 40 years, wiped out in the housing crisis. We have done more damage to the poor, the Black and the Latino communities in this economic crisis than, believe me, I did in first grade.

Yes, this attack on public education is being used as a distraction from many of the other problems facing us, but more than a distraction it is undermining everything I have spent the last eighty years (I started a birth) struggling for. Only Russia today has a greater concentration of wealth than the United States. Think of that. Only Mexico, in the European/American world, has a higher percentage of children living in poverty. We are a little bit ahead of Mexico, and way behind the rest of our competitors.

We would not be facing any of these crises of budgets next year if those top one percent who control 25 to 30% of the our wealth paid the same taxes that you and I pay.

We are at fault for something however. We should have started this much earlier!

Every single one of us is at fault for not having done that. Thank god a few people said, “Let’s start even if it is the middle of summer, even if we do not know what we are doing, even if we won’t get the millions we would like to get.” It has to start, all of us start.

I think our joint motto is “Schooling for ruling.” We want a school system that teaches us all how to be rulers of our own nation. To do so we need a reform movement that helps democratize, not privatize, the schools we have, which are flawed. They are flawed for not being democratic enough, rather than being flawed by not be privatized enough.

We are a motley crew. Another thing I have learned with age is to stop fighting against the things I cannot change, like my big feet. I used to dream of having long straight hair that would gracefully float in the wind. And now I make the most of having a mop.

We have to make the most of who we are. We may be splintered. I am speaking on behalf of three or four different organizations, each of which is in a state of crisis itself. But that is our plus. We are used to that.

We are not going to wait for some foundation to provide us with the funds. We can unite around some common demands. We each in our own way can do the job.

I want to say one personal word. I have been extraordinarily lucky. I have had 45 to 50 years of living in classrooms and schoolhouses in America’s public urban schools. They have been the greatest experience in my life. I fear there will be fewer of you younger people who will be able to say that if we stop taking teachers seriously.

To view this speech, see Deb Meier at SOS March

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