TAPPER: But one of the ways that proponents of school choice say that the best way to change the status quo is to give parents, inner-city parents a choice. Why not?
OBAMA: Well, the problem is, is that, you know, although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom. We don't have enough slots for every child to go into a parochial school or a private school. And what you would see is a huge drain of resources out of the public schools.
So what I've said is let's foster competition within the public school system. Let's make sure that charter schools are up and running. Let's make sure that kids who are in failing schools, in local school districts, have an option to go to schools that are doing well.
But what I don't want to do is to see a diminished commitment to the public schools to the point where all we have are the hardest-to-teach kids with the least involved parents with the most disabilities in the public schools. That's going to make things worse, and we're going to lose the commitment to public schools that I think have been so important to building this country.
17 comments:
I'm going to go with a qualified "not crap" (and the caveat that I obviously don't speak for the Organization). And to be honest, I also cheated and looked at his web site.
He hits the right note in my book on standards and the need for an evaluation regime that measures skills rather than test-taking strategies. On charter schools - he makes the case for innovation within the public system, which is good, and so long as their establishment is not used as an end-around against the unions (say, if charters are established in unionized districts, they are automatically accreted into existing units), I'm generally for it (a choice in pedagogical practice is a good thing, IMO - a choice in standards, not so much).
Also, reading his issues page, he expresses a willingness to work with teachers, which I think is a subtle wink at the unions being involved in the evolution of public schooling.
The proof is obviously in the pudding, but the smell of his cooking seems alright by me.
hmmm...I'm always suspicious of any market talk when it comes to schools, especially in the context of competition. As I think we've well established, I am no expert on market talk, but it seems to me that the arguments around competition being an unquestioned good center on two things, increased efficiency and responsiveness to market demand. Yes?
Unfortunately, our conservative brothers and sisters have already done a fine job of establishing teachers and their unions as the main source of inefficiencies in the market, whether it be in the form of luxurious pay, job security, or, as we recently read, in their inflexibility as far as job assignment.
As for satisfying customer demand, I think we can look to our colleges and universities for examples of what happens when students are viewed as consumers of education. Grades will rise beyond all measure, class discipline will go by the wayside (ok, too late), and classes will be increasingly designed to attract students, instead of educating them. Anyone who thinks that academic rigor would be a selling point for schools needs take a look at the average college classroom. Add in the modern-day parent and their unfailing belief that their child is always right and needs to be emotionally coddled and we have a recipe for disaster.
I'm willing to commodify a whole lot of things, but education just cannot be one of them. Competition will need breed success, because children are not customs and education is not a product.
Of course, the great challenge for the left is to come up with a counter-narrative to eduction-as-product. I'm not sure we've done that. Then again, some of us work for the largest teacher's union in the world (claim unverified) and others of us spend a lot of time reading lefty theory. What do you guys and gals got?
I'm willing to commodify a whole lot of things, but education just cannot be one of them. Competition will not breed success, because children are not customers and education is not a product.
Good points. Framing it as "competition" is problematic. That said (with the knowledge that it's pie-in-the-sky), I think there's something to be said for "school choice" in a non-market context where the student and her parents aren't consumers. If you had well-supported schools, welcome to all-comers with additional assistance provided for the neediest to attend the schools of their choice, performing well according to objective standards and subjective judgments alike, would it be a big deal to offer different pedagogical approaches?
I kind of look at it the same way I look at single-payer health care. The government covers your bills, but you get to choose your PCP. If you take care of the issues of access, people can afford to broaden what they seek in a school.
I guess my point is that, yeah, the "competition" rhetoric should go, but we can rescue "choice" and employ it in a more meaningful way.
Incidentally, I have to ask because I wondered if you were heading in this direction - do you see standards as part of the commodification of education?
Well, I think that the idea that there are objective, universal ways to measure "education" or "schools," then yes, I see this as part of the commodification/competition effort. Aren't the statewide tests supposed to exist so that I can have some standard of judging which school would provide the "best" education for my daughter? Heaven forbid that I (or more likely) my wife sit down and talk with a potential teacher/principle/administrator to understand their education philosophy.
I don't think I have any problem with "choice" or even "competition" as it relates to different education philosophies. If you want your kid to grow up to be mal-adjusted in society, by all means, send him or her to a Montesorri or Waldorf school, no skin off my ass. I don't think this kind of choice makes any school better, however.
Well, yeah, if standards are meant to evaluate schools, rather than help establish educational goals for individual children and evaluate their progress towards those goals, then they're next to useless. But we're the only industrialized nation without strong national standards and a common-sense testing regime which makes sure that students (not schools) are learning what they need. On top of that, national standards can keep crap like intelligent design pseudoscience out of our classrooms.
Also, I don't think that the idea of "choice" is a means by which to improve schools. In my perfect world, all of the schools would have the resources they need to succeed, and choice would exist for parents to select the pedagogical method which best suits their child. If your child has an equal chance of getting a good education in a variety of educational environments made available, it's not necessarily competition.
And really Dave, kids who come out of Waldorf or Montessori schools are maladjusted? You have some empirical evidence that a rational person can use to evaluate that claim, or is this based on your experience with Bear's friend "Irie"?
I agree mostly with Wobs - a qualified not crap.
I think that individual assessment is the most important indicator. However, I also believe that measuring schools with some kind of standard is also important. I think that it is easy for schools to hide--or even simply not notice--the poor performance of particular subgroups without being forced to confront real data. It's not unlike organizing meetings at the ol' 3550 when we would say that such-and-such department was a "strong" department; then, we'd look at the hard data and realize that we had almost no turnout for the last three actions from that department. Not a perfect analogy, but the same general point applies: collecting data and confronting it forces one to look at realities in a particular way.
That being said, I think that the idea of naive standards being applied to schools on the basis of passing some threshold is absurd and was designed to privatize/commodify education. The entire design was meant to starve school districts of funds (forcing them to use staff and material resources for a testing regime) while making the penalty losing funding until ultimately, you are de-certified and an Edison School (Nasdaq: EDSN) can open up in it's place.
On the one hand, schools should be forced to confront the skills of their students, including subpopulations that might otherwise be neglected. The only way I see feasibly doing this is some kind of standardized test (though the format of math/verbal fill-in-the-bubble tests are by no means the only way to standardize tests). On the other hand, coming up with ways of measuring and providing rewards and punishments that does not rely simply on some testing standard "X" and is designed to help rather than hurt public schools is also important.
I guess I should have realized that the social scientists would be in favor of quantifying (somehow) education to gage "results." I understand that "everyone" else in the world does it this way as well, but I wonder about the egalitarian nature of education systems in the rest of the world.
Honest question...answers?
I'm going to temporarily sidestep your question about the egalitarianism of other educational systems for the moment and ask what you mean by "egalitarian." Equal access? Equal chances to succeed regardless of one's social circumstances? There's a lot of ways to evaluate egalitarianism, so knowing what you mean when you ask that particular question would help.
On standards - personally, I'm not looking for a way to "quantify" the "results" of education. I think we all agree that the point of education is to have a student know more than when they started. I think we also probably all agree that at least in terms of K-12 education, students leave with at least a basic competency in skills they'll need to be able to function in the world (be they vocational, critical thinking, or civic skills). What the standards should be, of course, is an open question, but the idea that we, as a society, have a goal or standard that we expect our students to achieve through education and a way to assess progress towards that goal seems pretty uncontroversial. The goal of an assessment regime should be to identify where a student lies in attaining a certain type of proficiency so that teachers can know how to focus their time and energies in helping said student.
that's an lq.
I guess I was shooting for the idea that in the US public school system we don't tend to do explicit tracking of the kids. (I am aware that tracking is done). My understanding (based largely on pop culture references) is that many of our industrialized brothers and sisters operate on a different model.
My understanding (maybe based largely on NEA talking-points) was this was why the US "ranked" so low on the international education comparisons. Not that our best and brightest necessarily was any worse than anyone else's, but that our lowest lows might be lower.
And here Mike's points come into play, but I don't really think we need much testing to understand that our inner-city schools are fucked and/or to find out why. Teacher unions are obviously to blame.
We have strayed quite far from the topic at hand.
A completely different observation might be that Obama needs to stop answering the leading question and answer with his own talking points. "I am in favor of choice. I have always been in favor of it. That's why I support children and parents being able to choose whichever school in their district they want to attend."
i learned a lot from this exchange. i'm not sure enough of my own thinking - let alone other people's - to weigh in yet, but i imagine that when i do i'll seem like some Paris Communard wannabe in a "Cat in The Hat"-style, uh, hat.
Entering late--as usual--but interesting discussion. Question. How exactly does "choice" promote competition and why does choice or competition lead to better schools?
We struggle with the school question in very real ways with our boys (one going into third grade, another going into first grade and another in preschool). We are in a county that has great schools, but within it, the school our boys attend is not considered at the top of the heap by any means. We could decide to move to where those schools are and, of course, have to buy (or rent) a much more expensive home. This would also mean moving to where the population is much more homogenous (read: white).
I could go on about our decision to not move, but my real question is how even if all schools provide great opportunities do you deal with the fact that people live where they do and tend to congregate by class, race, etc. Sure you could have a “choice,” but is a family that is struggling in my neighborhood to make ends meet going to commute over to some other school because they have the "choice"? Some will, sure, but not many. And that really isn't a choice. Where you go to school has to do with so many other socioeconomic factors—school choice is not made in a vacuum.
Consequently I tend to call "BS" on the choice argument.
And so this is my real question--really. How do you ensure that every school regardless of population has what it needs to address its particular group of students? Every time we talk about choice or competition or any other market term (am I agreeing with Dave here?!) we aren’t talking about the right question—deep commitment and investment.
Father steps off his soapbox.
(BTW—enjoying the posts even though my lefty credentials are surely not up to snuff!)
here's the thing as i understand it - and as mentioned, i'm not sure i do: aren't most school districts funded from whatever property taxes can be wrestled out of neighboring residents? wouldn't any real "equality" have to begin with doing away with this fucked-from-the-get-go, divisive starting point?
or is that move so unfeasible as to make this post even less relevant than my recent "Cat in the Hat_ hat" screed?
i am still having a hard time coming up with a sense of "standards" that won't function primarily as a rack to hang workers on. mebbe some kind of staffing ratios akin to those some people are trying to win the RNs in Oregon?
the problem is our post-Reagan propensity for framing any and all social service debate from the point of view of the Taxpayer, with all of the moralizing talk about "accountability" that entails. so long as we succumb to that brand of "common sense," our "standards" we'll always play out along the lines of "performance-based incentives."
shucks, it just so happens that racketeer Sizemore's rolling out an "incentive pay" measure this very Autumn.
Legit points, Craig and Dave, on the choice issue. I can put off my advocacy for universal access to heterodox pedagogies until we fix the problem of universal access to decent education.
I guess I don't have a good answer to your question right now, Dave.
Ok - last time I'm going to weigh in on this thread.
lex - re: standards
I used to be a lot squishier on "standards," but as I see it, there are three compelling reasons for having them.
1. To ensure that public school students meet a minimum threshold of skills they'll need in the world. Honestly, this is driven by attacks on science education. I don't want even one student to graduate from a public high school under the impression that "intelligent design" and other pseudo-scientific crap qualifies as actual science.
2. To be able to assess student progress towards goals. Again, I don't think this is controversial - we want to know in what areas our kids need help, and assessments in relation to standards is vital int his respect.
3. To be able to assess teacher effectiveness, not in some punitive sense, but to identify areas where further professional development might be useful for teachers. The goal of standards should be used to help teachers improve their skills. It is accountability (an let's be honest - given the resources that go into public education, accountability is something we should expect), but if implemented properly, it should help raise the quality of the profession by identifying skills in need of further development rather than punishing those whose work needs improvement.
Wobs -- too bad that was your last post, because it was a doozy.
The problem with "minimum threshold" and "progress toward goals" is that these both bring politics into the mix. You somehow seem to be believing that having minimum standards would spell trouble for creationism. I think we'd have just the opposite effect.
Left alone, the biology teacher is going to teach evolution. Overseen by an elected school board setting "standards," the biology teacher is going to be issuing statements designed to undermine the "theory" of evolution and hint that more complete answers might be found at your local churches.
As for professional development...(please read the following in a John McEnroe voice. 'Fro McEnroe, not breakfast cereal-pitching McEnroe) are you serious?!
There is no way that assessment for development would not be used as a tool to punish "bad" teachers. Go watch Season 4 of The Wire again and then come back and tell me what those teachers need is assessment so that they can work on their skills.
Ok, Dave. So you baited me back into the conversation, but only because you're so wrong ;-).
No shit that setting standards is an inherently political process, for education or otherwise. Workplace safety standards are political. Does that mean we shouldn't have them? Of course not. The trick is to make the mechanism which establishes standards work in the broader public interest - no small task to be sure. But the standards should be national (to eliminate the parochialism of local school boards) and composed of education experts, rather than pols (and again, I acknowledge that the selection of said experts is political).
Your contention that left to their own devices, biology teachers would only teach evolution is dangerously naive and just flat-out wrong. The reason legislatures are trying to pass so-called "academic freedom" bills for science education is to protect the not-insignificant number of teachers who want to teach ID.
I haven't seen The Wire (I do want to), but to use a piece of fiction (even if it's convincing in it's gritty realism) seems a bit silly. Will standards be used to get rid of "bad" teachers? Yeah. But there's a world of difference between "you didn't meet our standards, you're fired" and "we've identified some areas where you're not performing up to standard - we're going to provide you with the training and resources to bring you up to standards, but if you don't show progress towards this goal over x amount of time, there'll be consequences." I don't know about you, but I want to know that our education system is identifying skill deficiencies in teachers, working to fix them, and, yeah, getting rid of teachers who still think that watching "Donald Duck in Math Magic Land" (awesome as it may be) once a week constitutes mathematics instruction. If holding people accountable to commonly agreed upon standards is done transparently and with guarantees of due process and paid opportunities for remediation, isn't that a good thing?
To be clear, standards alone aren't going to ensure that kids are learning what they need to know. But if we don't know where we want to go and what kind of progress we're making in getting there, the whole educational effort is going to be futile.
Post a Comment