Uh-oh Arne Duncan!

OK, I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus here, what with winter breaks and winter flus and winter doldrums and winter personal lives (would you believe, teachers have personal lives?!).  But I’m making my way through the educational headlines for the last week, and along comes this doozy from Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education in USNWR:

Duncan says the federal stimulus for schools would give him unprecedented leverage to innovate and improve schools. The stimulus provides for $15 billion in discretionary funds that he says he will give to states that agree to implement the following three pieces: expanding early childhood education, creating better student assessments, and improving teacher quality. “If we can bucket all these together and work with set of states with significant resources to make this happen, I think it’s a game changer.”

In the first place, I gotta say, what’s with school bureaucracies and discretionary funds?  Brewer got a $45000 discretionary fund credit card; Arne Duncan gets $15 billion in discretionary funds, and I can’t get $50 in discretionary funds to buy a friggin pencil sharpener that really I swear and promise my students will use EVERY SINGLE DAY?!

Whew.  Rant over.

I understand that $15,000,000,000 is just pocket change in the scheme of the $150,000,000,000 that’s being targeted towards education, but let’s look at the 3 pieces that Arne Duncan thinks will make a big difference.

1. Expanding early childhood education

Great.  Hurrah!  No quibbles here.  OK, one quibble.  Can we make sure it’s high quality early childhood education that also includes a parent component, like the Harlem Children’s Zone? (PLEASE check it out Episode 364 of This American Life for a great portrait of what early childhood ed can accomplish).

2. Creating Better Student Assessments

Here’s where the uh-ohs begin.  4 little words.  3 big problems.  Let’s start with the first.  Creating.  Who will create these assessments?  In the past eight years under NCLB, the who has always been the educational-industrial complex: those huge powerhouses like The Princeton Review, Pearson Educational Measurement, and Houghton Mifflin who got multi-billion dollar contracts from school district bureaucracies and the state and federal governments to create massive standardized assessments that the companies and bureaucrats could then have endless partnership meetings to analyze.  LAUSD alone gives testing companies millions of dollars for these tests, and it pays its in-house educational bureaucrats and out-house educational consultants millions and millions more to pore over these tests.  We teachers spend thousands of hours administering these tests, thousands more grading them, thousands more discussing them, and thousands more preparing kids for them.

(Though you wouldn’t think that based on what the Princeton Review wrote in their press release when they got the LAUSD contract: [S]aid Kevin Howell, EVP and General Manager of The Princeton Review’s K-12 Services division. “We stood out throughout the competitive process because we weren’t just selling a product. We sold our ability to help teachers spend more time on teaching and less on administering, preparing and scanning tests.”

Thank you, Princeton Review!

Last week, contrary to what the LA Times reported, we teachers didn’t refuse to administer the tests.  We administered them and hand-corrected them, instead of submitting them to the Princeton Review for scantronning.

Are these tests that great?  As with anything, there’s good and bad, but mostly, they’re costly and unnecessary.  And the district orders hundreds if not thousands more of them than is necessary and instructs us to throw the extras away, because next year there’ll be a slightly different version.

Good for the kids?  No.

Good for the teachers?  No.

Good for the companies? YES!

Good for the educational bureaucracies?  YES!

Does Arne Duncan want to keep feeding this testing complex?  I hope not.

So what is a better assessment and who should develop it?  I think that’s a whole separate post.  More on that soon. But let me give you a hint. It’s the person who’s doing the work anyway, and it won’t cost a cent to do it.  But then, the education game is really all about money, isn’t it?

3.  Improving teacher quality

How can you be against this?  Of course we should improve teacher quality.  Studies have shown that having a high quality teacher is the single most important factor in student achievement (then again, studies can be made to show anything, can’t they?).  What does this mean, though?  Again, this is a whole separate post, but I do wish when Arne Duncan says things like this, he clarifies what he means.  Otherwise, it’s starting to sound a whole lot like the same old same old.  No Child Left Behind. i.e. No Company Left Behind.

And, let’s not forget, No Bureaucracy Left Behind either.

Here’s another great quotation from the Princeton Review’s LAUSD contract press release:

“Periodic Assessment is a major component of our District’s Theory of Action,” said Ronni Ephraim, LAUSD’s Chief Instructional Officer, Elementary. “LAUSD chose The Princeton Review because of their customized proposal to meet our District’s need. We were not looking for another “provider.” The Princeton Review expressed a real desire to be our partner.”

Theory of Action?!!  More like Partners in Crime.

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