Guest: Reporter and author Linda Perlstein
With all the heavy news of the past few weeks, we start the day on the lighter-side with Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and his amazing voice transformations. It seems that being from south St. Paul gives you a bit of a twang at the right venue. Watch video from Sam below and check out this link for some word by word comparison.
Breaking: The UN Security Counsil has authorized a No Fly Zone over Libya. Russia, China, Germany, India and Brazil abstained from the vote.
Japan has raised the severity level of a nuclear crisis at a quake-hit nuclear power plant as attempts at cooling the reactors by dumping water from helicopters and spraying water from firetrucks are not working as well as they would like.
Linda Perlstein, Public editor for the Education Writers Association, former staff writer for The Washington Post, and author of Tested joins us to discuss charter schools , teacher unions, and the Obama’s “Race to the Top”.
Check out Linda Perlstein’s book Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade.
•Anti-teacher climate humbles the conservative husband of a Cleveland educator – As discussed in today’s post-show.
11:35 am
SammyCam is up.
12:02 pm
Another stellar example of the Washington Post’s team.
12:09 pm
Why is Sam wasting time with this defender of the status quo?
5:09 pm
The conversation Sam had with Ms Perlstein aped the tenor of the internal dialog, best I can tell, occurring between educators themselves, policy makers, institutes’s and parents. In service of “full disclosure”, I neither work within, depend upon nor have children in any school system. I’m an interested, outside observer.
The dialog, as I see, is little more than buzz of undifferentiated echoes. The most pertinent questions that are not being addressed nor brought into the discussion are these:
1 – What is/are the outcome objective(s) of primary & secondary education in America?
2 – Can new “good ideas” prove to be scalable across the entire public education system – presently serving ~52,000,000 kids 5-19yrs?
3 – The system of public schools is among the largest “externality” enjoyed by and benefiting US businesses. Should the funding mechanisms facilitating this public largesse be modified?
There are certainly many others questions to be posed, of the type I define as being outside the current of today’s national “dialog”. I hope this comment motivates others to add to my list – and to critique it as well.
I’m electing to leave my own questions unanswered for now in the hope (expectation?) that others will dive-into this invitation to chat.
In closing, Sam – get Ravitch! She’s a tough nut to interview, having seen her in a variety of forums, but she’ll be more definitive in addressing issues and questions than Ms Perlstein.
6:41 pm
“There are certainly many others questions to be posed,”
Yup, good rant William and there certainly are.
my main bitch is that the confusion spoils a huge amount of potential at every level.
3:40 am
Thanks Jim. Excellent word, confusion. Its likely truest, simplest description of the problem within and circling about the education system.
Not to get all “business/marketing” on the education insiders, publicly or privately employed, but it seems to me that if one has little demonstrable understanding of what the “educated” public school graduate will apply her/his learning to – then one has constructed a decade long hoop-jumping exercise at ~$15,000/head/year.
Best I can tell, without making a small project out of divining data, about 26% of HS graduates go on to college – and only 50% of those graduate. That’s today looking backwards. Today, looking forward, is IMHO a less “college-y” landscape due to financial considerations mainly. Cuts in programs means fewer slots, slash & burn fin-aid at all levels, tuition increases across the board with public/state schools going up more faster and ROI factor for debt-laden BA/BS holders entering workforce may have past tipping point as disincentive – the last showing its negative bite on law school/med school application volume which to my mind is as sure a fore-shadowing device as any in a Flannery O’Conner story.
Or, do HS grads go right into job market where PER for the cohort is abysmal and unempl. rate teases 10%?
In short, the big question for me, or as I see it, is to what end is the K-12 process aimed at accomplishing as a socio-economic feeder system? Don’t get wrong, I went to college @ 30, paying out of pocket (with aid) for a private liberal arts edu in East Asian Hist and Philosophy – not logically speaking a vocationally robust choice.
I’m very interested in your thoughts and those of others. The contextual conditions that shape by present views are exemplified by the private “college” (e.g.: U-PHX, Culinary Inst., ITT,…) explosion which is by all telling a tax-payer funded disaster that’s 85% fraud and 15% successfully employed degree recipients. To me, this phenomenon is another foreshadowing of the K-12 system’s endgame if “charter” and “test-centric” reforms continue to influence if not lead the reform dialog.
Lastly, setting aside what is a valuable and necessary look at the social/cultural/economic value of robust liberal education curricula, I see almost no correlation in much of the education reform dialog that speaks in any meaningful or factual way to the Tab-A/Slot-B relationship between basic education and employability – let alone any honest understanding/acknowledgment that employment dynamics today forward are different than yesterday backward. If Perlstein is interested in a “good new idea”, may I suggest education policy specialists spend time with service/retail biz middle-managers to get a first-person look at the nature of work in an economy increasingly dominated by those “industries” and less manufacturing, engineering, legal, medical, or other similar career fields.
Having spent a better part of the past decade as a marketing and strategy consultant to high tech makers and financiers, I can say that the fastest way to get nothing done at the highest possible cost is to be confused, as individuals and an organization, as to what your “product” is, what is is to be used for and who exactly will be using it. People are not products, but the analogy holds when considering education as a process that converts a raw resource into a functional resource. “Teaching to the test” helps none of the students, few if any teachers and certainly not StarBucks, Wal-Mart, IBM or Genzyme.
10:00 pm
Get Diane Ravitch.
Yes, the teachers’ unions have tried to resist current reforms. Why? Teachers are against them. There is no definitive research showing these approaches work. In fact, a good deal of research mitigates against the current crop of privatizer’s ideas: break unions, eliminate due process (tenure), constant standardized testing, etc.
These other countries that outperform the U.S. in raw data like Finland and Japan are highly (almost completely) unionized. High performing countries correlate with high unionism and low performing countries correlate with lower unionism.
As for the over reliance on high stakes tests, Finland moved away from the testing and data systems to school site based testing to guide the teachers instruction. They also went from a huge list of standards to a smaller set of core standards. After these “reforms” (that went completely against the reforms that Duncan, et. al support) Finland came out on top internationally. Here is an article about Finland’s schools: http://www.annenberginstitute.org/vue/pdf/VUE24_Darling.pdf
10:12 pm
If the unions are against reform what do they suggest?
The California Teachers Association is spearheading one of the largest and most successful reform called the Quality Education Investment Act.
From CTA: CTA’s Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA), passed into law in 2006 thanks to CTA-sponsored legislation and the settlement of a lawsuit between CTA and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, will help schools that are serving a higher percentage of low income, minority and English learners to close the achievement gap. Nearly $3 billion will go to K-12 schools with Academic Performance Index (API) scores in the bottom two deciles over the next seven years to reduce class sizes, improve teacher and principal training, hire more school counselors, and give local school districts the flexibility to support programs that best fit the needs of their students. Community colleges will also receive a portion of the funding to expand career and vocational education. This legislation settles the lawsuit that CTA won against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger after he refused to repay the billions he borrowed from schools in 2004-05 and repays public schools all the money owed under Proposition 98.
In May, 2007 the California Department of Education announced the 488 schools that were approved for funding by unanimous vote of the State Board of Education in May.
Some of the goals of the program include:
Reducing K-12 class sizes
Having qualified teachers in all core subjects
Increasing the number of credentialed counselors in high schools
Establishing district-wide teacher quality index to ensure equitable distribution of teacher experience
Quality training programs and time for collaboration
http://legacy.cta.org/issues/current/QEIA.htm
10:14 pm
The privatization/reforms are being shoved down our throats by Non-Educators Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, Bill Gates, etc. Michelle Rhee has a scant three years experience which including her taping a student’s mouth shut. She did not have proper teaching credentials but an emergency credential through Teach for America. These people are not education professionals. Just like medicine suffers when business takes it over, so does education.
3:31 am
Listening to Linda Perlstein qualify and vacillate her way through that thoroughly unsatisfying conversation made me think immediately of Chris Hedges’ characterization of liberals in “Death of a Liberal Class.” Seems like she’s being a good liberal that believes whatever the new consensus happens to be. There’s nuance, and then there’s ridiculous, and then there’s Linda Perlstein taking the long way around to say nothing for an impressive amount of time.
i don’t know her work, but this seems like trademark NPR liberalism – view from nowhere, perfect world, a little more compromise will make all the fighting go away. If they believe something, they’ll scarcely mention it and overcompensate to defend the opposite view. At one point in the interview, she actually said something like ‘they set up the terms of the debate, so i’m just going to have to follow them.’ After that, she proceeds to go ahead and teacher-bash, using the lukewarm-liberal-approved method of pretend-handwringing and rattling off selective data that affirms the status quo’s goals in a gentle, reasonable tone.
At least Friedman mixes up his metaphors and makes a fool out of himself so we’re not bored. This was really awful. Not Sam’s fault, she just wouldn’t/couldn’t give any question he asked a straight answer.
4:11 pm
In response to some of Sam’s questions she literally said, well “some people think this… and some people think that…” Wow – she is a poster child for today’s journalism.
10:41 am
Perlstein gave us all an education in caginess.
5:03 pm
Sammy didn’t even say “happy st. patricks day”. what an asshole.
9:18 pm
Sam, thanks for at least trying to elicit some coherent responses from this interviewee. I’m a high school teacher in California. I agree with the comment from happygoodthing that the current non-educators who are driving education “reform” are detrimental to education in America. Our district just adopted the TAP system for several of our elementary and middle schools. This teacher accountability program is run by the National Institute for Excellence in Teacher (NIET), which is funded and operated by the Milken Foundation, which was founded by Michael and Lowell Milken. Michael Milken, of course, was called the Junk Bond King, was convicted of securities fraud in 1989, and served time in prison. This is the “education” shop that our district has decided to funnel millions of federal grant funds to, much of the money for conferences and consultation fees. The rest of the money goes to merit pay for teachers, which is pretty clearly a union-busting maneuver.
Ms. Perlstein’s response to your questions pressing her on using standardized testing as a measure of teacher effectiveness was the sort of mushy cop-out answer most uninformed commentators make: sure, it’s not a very effective measure, but it’s what we’ve got so let’s use it. That’s like saying that I know that smacking my child on the head with a 2 x 4 isn’t a very effective parenting tool, but it’s what I happened to have at hand so why not? Standardized tests provide no accountability on the part of students. They, to their credit, have figured this out by the time they get to high school. The school where I teach adds all kinds of collective incentives, but they can’t really enforce any real consequences on the individual level. Kids know it doesn’t matter to their grades, graduation, or transcripts. So we have this hugely ineffective, unreliable and costly system, which was never designed to test for teacher effectiveness. The kids know it, the teachers know it, the principals know it. . . and I’m sure that the people like Gates and Milken know it, but they’re happy to use the status quo to sell their products on the market, and bureaucrats and politicians are willing to look the other way as long as they get credit for “reforming” education.