Part 4—The word from the absentee experts: In his new book, I Got Schooled, M. Night Shyamalan presents “the five keys to closing America’s education gap.”
In this recent post, Kevin Drum summarized Shyamalan's ideas.
In her own book, Reign of Error, Diane Ravitch offers eleven solutions. On page 229, she starts with this:
SOLUTION NO. 1 Provide good prenatal care for every pregnant woman.That sounds like a good idea to us! We’ll look at other solutions below.
We don’t necessarily disagree with any of the recommendations from these two observers. Ravitch’s work is more important because she’s more highly placed.
(She isn’t so highly placed as to merit attention from MSNBC. According to the Nexis archives, Ravitch has appeared on the channel’s late afternoon and evening programs exactly once in the past year, for a single segment on the October 4 Chris Hayes program. To his great credit, it seemed that Hayes had actually read Ravitch’s book, as we’ll note below! Manifestly, though, the liberal world doesn’t seem to care about low-income kids.)
We don’t necessarily disagree with any of those recommendations. But even as we read Ravitch’s more influential work, we get a familiar feeling about these writers:
We get the feeling they’ve never been there or done that. We get the feeling that they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
A great amount of our “educational expertise” comes to us in this manner. Here’s how the system works:
Our experts sit in their comfortable quarters, preferably on the campus of Stanford. As they sit, they sift through the incoming.
They examine the kinds of data you can review without ever leaving your home. They may even work with data from our various statewide tests. They may be using such data even now, when even they must understand that a lot of those data are grotesquely compromised.
(For ourselves, we first discussed outright cheating on standardized tests with the Baltimore Sun in 1971 or 1972. We did a full column on this subject in 1981, complete with implausible scoring patterns from individual schools. In the past few years, the nation’s educational experts have begun to catch up with what’s going on. Generally, this has occurred because of the whistle-blowing of non-experts.)
Our educational experts tend to be the last ones to know! Reading Ravitch, we get the sense that she strongly cares, but that she hasn’t been there.
What are the actual problems in urban elementary schools? Those who have never taught in such schools may have little idea. Briefly, let’s discuss the late Dr. Sam Banks, in our view a very fine person.
As of the early 1970s, Dr. Banks was in charge of social studies instruction for the Baltimore City schools.
In the 1950s, Baltimore had been a legally segregated, dual system. Dr. Banks was in the vanguard as Baltimore became majority black in its student population and in its administrative ranks.
In the early to mid-1970s, Dr. Banks created a sprawling, wildly ambitious social studies curriculum for the elementary schools. There was one major problem. Dr. Banks, a superb person who deeply cared, didn’t seem to understand the problems of Baltimore’s elementary schools.
In 1982, we described a problem with his curriculum in the Baltimore Sun:
SOMERBY (2/9/82): [I]n grade after grade, for topic after topic, [Baltimore City teaching] guides recommend textbooks which are clearly too difficult for most city students to work from—books which are completely inappropriate for children who may be several years below traditional grade level in reading. In the first semester of fourth grade, for example, the two most commonly cited textbooks are Daniel Chu’s “A Glorious Age in Africa”—a textbook with a measured eighth-grade reading level—and Frederick King’s “The Social Studies and Our Country”—Laidlaw’s sixth-grade textbook.Long before Amanda Ripley, there we were, discussing “rigor!” But we knew what we were talking about. For the most part, Ripley doesn’t seem to.
Few fourth graders anywhere will be able to profit from textbooks as difficult as these. In an urban system like Baltimore’s, this selection is particularly surprising—and dooms any attempt to teach the social studies curriculum in a rigorous, systematic way.
The results of this situation are all too predictable. Baltimore teachers find it difficult—indeed, impossible—to find readable textbooks with which social studies and science can be taught to their numerous below-level readers. The result may be that such children are not taught social studies and science at all.
Back to the basics: You can’t ask fourth-graders to read eighth-grade books, especially if the kids are reading on traditional second- or third-grade level. Rather, you can ask them to do that. But they won’t understand what they’re reading, and they’ll learn to hate “learning” and school.
Dr. Banks lives in our memory as one of the most caring people we’ve ever met. But in our view, he didn’t seem to understand some of what happens in low-income elementary schools.
That’s the same impression we get when we read Shyamalan, Ripley or Ravitch. Due to her rather peculiar stature as the leading liberal in this area, Ravitch’s work is important.
At least in principle, some of the work in her new book is very good. Example: Early on, she lays out a lot of information about the rise in scores on the NAEP over the past twenty years.
(In our view, she does less well with international tests. She belongs to the cult of Finland!)
In some very basic ways, we’re less impressed with Ravitch’s eleven solutions. Below, you see her early summary of same, which she goes on to detail in later chapters.
We strongly disagree with the very first thing she says:
RAVITCH (page 6): We know what works. What works are the very opportunities that advantaged families provide for their children. In homes with adequate resources, children get advantages that enable them to arrive in school healthy and ready to learn. Discerning, affluent parents demand schools with full curricula, experienced staffs, rich programs in the arts, libraries, well-maintained campuses, and small classes. As a society, we must do whatever is necessary to extend the same advantages to children who do not have them. Doing so will improve their ability to learn, enhance their chances for a good life, and strengthen our society.For the full text of the fuller passage, you can just click here.
So that readers don't have to wait until the later chapters of this book, here is a summary of my solutions to improve both schools and society.
Children need prekindergarten classes that teach them how to socialize with others, how to listen and learn, how to communicate well, and how to care for themselves, while engaging in the joyful pursuit of play and learning that is appropriate to their age and development and that builds their background knowledge and vocabulary.
Children in the early elementary grades need teachers who set age appropriate goals. They should learn to read, write, calculate, and explore nature, and they should have plenty of time to sing and dance and draw and play and giggle. Classes in these grades should be small enough—ideally fewer than twenty—so that students get the individual attention they need...
As students enter the upper elementary grades and middle school and high school, they should have a balanced curriculum that includes not only reading, writing and mathematics but the science, literature, history, geography, civics, and foreign languages. Their school should have a rich arts program, where students learn to sing, dance, play an instrument, join an orchestra or a band, perform in a play, sculpt, or use technology to design structures, conduct research, or create artworks. Every student should have time for physical education every day. Every school should have a library with librarians and media specialists...
It’s hard to disagree with any of those prescriptions. We agree! Children in the early elementary grades should to read and write!
The problem is, everyone has always known. The question has always been this:
For kids who may be struggling in school; for kids who may be years “behind;” for the many beautiful kids who don’t come from “homes with adequate resources,” how can actual urban teachers accomplish those obvious goals?
Ravitch says such kids should get prekindergarten classes. (We agree!)
After that, she says teachers should set “age appropriate goals.” As they advance, children should get a “balanced curriculum” with a “rich arts program.” Later, she says this at the start of Chapter 24:
SOLUTION NO. 3 Every school should have a full, balanced and rich curriculum...We agree with that! But at no point does Ravitch say what a “rich curriculum” ought to like for a fifth-grader who may be years behind, and confused and discouraged, in both reading and math. Meanwhile, concerning those “age appropriate goals,” riddle us this:
Two first-graders may be exactly the same in age but light years apart in development. What is the age-appropriate goal for them? And if a fourth-grader is two years behind in math, should the teacher set goals which match his or her age? Or should the goals match his or her state of development?
Somewhat blithely, Ravitch says “we know what works.” Sitting at Stanford or in New York, it’s amazingly easy to say that.
But that sandwich offers empty calories; that sadly familiar statement is fluff. Nowhere in 325 pages do we find Ravitch explaining what actual teachers can actually do to get better results in the classroom:
What if children don’t “learn how to listen and learn” in those prekindergarten classes? What should teachers do then?
From her perch atop Olympus, Ravitch simply says “we know” that those pre-K classes will “work.” But she never explains how to make them work, or what to do next if they don’t.
We’ve come to strongly dislike such writing, which is quite widespread. Beyond that, Ravitch’s writing is jumbled, self-contradictory, routinely confused. We can tell that Hayes must have read her book because at one point in a fairly short segment he actually asked her this:
HAYES (10/4/13): So, two different ways of thinking about critiquing testing, right? One is the presence of tests in themselves. The other is not having the right tests.Dude! Indeed, from page to page, from graf to graf, Ravitch constantly seems to self-contradict, on that specific topic and many others.
Sometimes it seems, in your book, you kind of move between those two different— There’s parts of the book where you say we need, children need to not be worrying about testing, particularly when the young need to be creative and playful. But at other times, you seem to be saying testing is important, we’re just doing the wrong testing.
You can always make the adjustment for Ravitch, imagining what she must have meant. That said, fifty years into this discussion, her overpowering fuzziness can make her book infuriating to read. Fifty years in, how can this possibly be the best work the liberal world can produce?
Ravitch’s eleven “solutions” are the kind you can dream up in your office. That doesn’t mean they’re bad ideas. It just means they won’t likely be solutions, and it means that, in many key ways, she doesn’t really seem to know what she’s talking about.
Of her eleven solutions, Solution 3 is as close as she comes to prescribing what urban teachers should do. We think this is basically useless:
SOLUTION NO 3 Every school should have a full, balanced and rich curriculum, including the arts, science, history, literature, civics, geography, foreign languages, mathematics and physical education.We agree with that! That's what we were saying in 1982, in the passage we posted above. (“The result may be that such children are not taught social studies and science at all.”)
But what if you have a bunch of fifth-graders who are several years behind in math, and confused? What textbook do you use with them? What curriculum should you follow? What should “age appropriate goals” look like in that case? Does any study guide exist for children in that predicament?
Those are the questions real teachers must answer. Ravitch, the best we pseudo-liberals have, has no apparent idea.
This just in from the Common Core: We’ve never understood how grade-level standards are supposed to work for kids who are years behind.
We’ve also never seen anyone explain that basic point. Nor do we know how such kids are helped when we make our standards tougher.
Whatever! As with Ravitch, so with the Common Core. These are some of the standards in reading for grades 2-5:
Grade 2: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.2.4a Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding.Apparently, the student is supposed to be able to read a grade-level text!
Grade 3: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.3.4a Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding.
Grade 4: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.4.4a Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding.
Grade 5: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.5.4a Read grade-level text with purpose and understanding.
But what if the student isn’t reading his grade-level text with purpose and accuracy? What does the teacher do then?
Like Ravitch, the standards don’t seem to say. Why do we feel that the Common Core standards were worked up in somebody’s office?