There’s a great scene in the movie The Third Man. The villain Harry Lime and his erstwhile friend Holly Martins are on a ferris wheel looking down on the people below. Holly asks Harry Lime, who has been making a lot of money stealing, diluting, selling penicillin, has any regrets about the deaths he causes. Harry Lime tells Martins, “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?” Lime doesn’t see people he sees dots. He never sees the people killed by his penicillin racket. Part of his problem is that empathy tends to decline in direct proportion to distance. And thus the problem with making policies and law: the people affected are distant from the people and process affecting them. Neither the lawmakers nor the citizens ever get a clear picture of things. Distance distorts our perceptions.
On Beacon Hill, people may have their hearts in the right place. They may meet with their constituents regularly. They may hear testimony on their bills and regulations, but they still conceive policy from the ferris wheel. When it comes to education, policy is made almost always from the ferris wheel and the people affected are rarely more than test scores dots.
On another diary, Lisa Guisbond suggested we educate our politicians and candidates on education policy and what we want. What I want is simple: education policy done with me, not done to me.
Please consider this diary a long, open thread. I’ve put some down some issues that the MTA has outlined as important. They are just there to get you started. What is it you’d like to see our politicians and candidates know and do about public education in Massachusetts?
————————————————————————————-
RETELL
The MTA believes that all students deserve teachers who have the training and skills needed to teach them effectively. Our members experience first hand the challenges of teaching English language learners (ELLs) and understand the need for high-quality training in Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) instruction. ELLs and their teachers will benefit if the changes prompted by the U.S. Department of Justice. These regulations have been developed by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education with input from practitioners and implemented in a rational and orderly way.
Common Core & PARCC
Massachusetts is one of 45 states, the District of Columbia, four territories and Department of Defense schools that have agreed to adopt the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts and mathematics. In March 2011, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education adopted the standards as the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks.
Massachusetts is one of 21 states, the District of Columbia and one territory working together to develop a common set of K-12 assessments in English and math based on the Common Core State Standards. These assessments are designed to determine whether a student is college or career ready by the end of high school, to mark the student’s progress toward this goal from Grade 3, and to provide teachers with timely information to inform instruction and provide student support.
District-Determined Measures
The next phase of the state’s new educator evaluation system requires educators to begin identifying and implementing District-Determined Measures – DDMs – of student growth. DDMs must be developed for all licensed educators in all grades and subjects, as well as for all administrators (for example, guidance counselors, physical education teachers, principals, superintendents, reading specialists and art teachers).
Educator Evaluation
Massachusetts districts are working to implement new local evaluation systems. The state framework replaces the evaluator-centered system with an educator-centered system in which you have a role and responsibilities. This MTA Toolkit is designed to help you.
Adequate Funding for Student Success
Two decades have passed since the Education Reform Act became law in 1993; over $4 billion in Chapter 70 state aid now goes to cities, towns and regional school districts every year. Yet, there has never been a systematic analysis of whether the schools have sufficient resources to enable students to meet state standards as embodied in the curriculum frameworks. The MTA is seeking legislation to require a review of the foundation budget.
Public Funding for High Education
Massachusetts public higher education is too important to too many people to be underfunded. State funding for public higher education has declined by more than $700 million – or 42 percent – since 2002.
tracynovick says
I would add to the query on PARCC/Common Core the entire issue of standardized testing and the mountain it has become, in funding, in influence, and in time.
lisag says
I second Tracy’s emotion. Whether we’re talking PARCC or MCAS or any other brand of standardized test, politicians need to recognize that we’ve gone too far in making testing the centerpiece of schooling. I don’t think I can put it any better than former Sec. of Labor Robert Reich did in a recent Facebook post (17,557 other people agreed, at last count).
tracynovick says
and former candidate for Massachusetts governor!
goldsteingonewild says
…wasn’t he also a supporter of private school vouchers? (before he ran for gov).
Mark L. Bail says
particularly in the 1990s, and drowning in neo-liberal thinking of the time.
Paul Krugman once thought Alan Greenspan was a genius.
Mark L. Bail says
with standardization and data. American education is a psychodrama playing out business management ideology.
The idea of managerialism, that large organizations must be managed by data analyzed by managers who are separate class, combined with our penchant for IQ testing to create what we have now. I’ve been doing some reading on managerialism, but my talks with my friend who works for a very large company in Western Mass, convince me, not only that we are imitating the business world, but doing so very poorly. Every time we implement something new, I tell my friend about it and he laughs because they do it in business.
That might sound abstract, but what it means is manufacturing more and more data for more and more administrators to analyze to tell teachers what to do. We are turning kids into factory workers to produce data so management can show that its initiatives are effective.
petr says
The problem isn’t, as you posit, that Harry Lyme or Holly Martins lacks compassion for the dots, whether they move or no, but whether somebody, somewhere, does. Welles tries to induce complicity within the audience by the trick of distance… But distance does not distort our perspective. It simply doesn’t provide enough perspective to create an informed/or and committed understanding and that is the danger: dots are dots, whether seen from a ferris wheel or filled in on a ‘standardized’ test and they are only the barest minimum of information. The rest is what your psyche is willing to fill in…
The real problem… the core of the problem… the inner and outer shell of the problem… is simply that politicians don’t trust teachers. That’s all there is to it. Ain’t nothing else beyond that. I suppose it’s a form of symmetry as the teachers don’t particularly trust the politicians either… so there’s that. But any impediment stems from the politicians willful dismissal of educators efforts: They would rather some numbers on a spreadsheet say that some amount of these dots over here are better than then the smaller amount of dots over there than take the word of an individual teacher that an individual student is ready and able to proceed onto the next phase of his/her education.
So it’s not, particularly, a ‘weird obsession’, as you yourself point out in the use of ‘The Third Man’ as a rhetorical device to make your point: distance gives us leave to insert our own perspective.
Mark L. Bail says
problematic in this way: we see dots, but we need to make a decision. We use what information we have. Politicians use what they have. The problem I always ran into was not my perspective, but the perspective of others giving me a skewed picture.
I was on the Housing Authority at one point. I had good people complaining about the director, who surely wasn’t perfect. People wanted her to take a more active role in the tenants lives, listen to their problems, solve the many disputes between them. Some of these people were in their second childhood and made things up to get attention. At first, I had a huge bias toward the director. As I learned more, I started to connect and fill in the dots. The state only paid the director for 16 hours of work. She worked more than that, but she was doing a part-time job that required even more hours. I was getting an incomplete perspective, even though I had a lot information. The lessons for me: 1) hypothesize, but don’t conclude until you have a lot of information 2) never take anyone else’s word, until you’re ready to conclude.
Most politicians, I suspect, don’t think like me or more notably Nate Silver. They often don’t have the time. They are surrounded by lobbyists and other politicians.
SomervilleTom says
In my view, at least a part of the desire for standardized tests, performance measures (of both students and teachers), and all the baggage that comes along with them is that parents are less and less willing and able to stay engaged with their children and their children’s school experience. At least some of our families are, as a result, significantly expanding the scope of public education (all within a flat or decreasing budget, of course).
When our dinner-table conversations included what our children were doing at school — assignments they liked, subjects they hated, teachers who were a pain in the butt, peers who were struggling — my wife and I had more insight into our children’s public school experience than ANY evaluation could provide.
That can only happen when there ARE dinner-table conversations with the children. The family needs a dining room and a dinner table, and needs food to put on the table. The family needs a regular time each evening to have that meal. The children need to be there and home, and the family needs the structure that assures that. It’s hard to accomplish that if the parents are doing shift work, are working out of town on contract assignments, or if the parents themselves are out on the street.
I fear that some part of our focus on “public education” is a perhaps unconscious and unintentional expectation that our schools will take on roles that are better suited for the home and family. All this while too many of us simultaneously object to the increased funding (and therefore taxes) that accompanies such an expansion of scope.
Mark L. Bail says
households definitely put a hole in society. I’m glad that women now have a choice whether to work or not, and I know two guys who stay home or work part-time because their wives are so successful in their careers. The other thing is that people tend to have their kids scheduled into a million different activities as if play were work.
The fear channeled into our school systems and our children drives ridiculous amounts of homework, which then minimizes or eliminates quality time spent with children. I’m glad to say that my wife has been able to work part-time and our kids get plenty of attention. I feel for kids whose parents are too busy and/or too tired and have to spend their quality time fighting with kids over homework or worse, projects.
Christopher says
…my motive to test comes from making sure that everyone is on the same page so to speak regardless of zip code and that the US isn’t constantly embarrassed when compared to other countries, many of which test without the handwringing. Tests are evaluations, not ends in themselves, but if we up our standards we need to make sure those standards are being met.
carl_offner says
I sympathize and agree with the points made here. But I also think there are some bigger things going on. I keep meaning to write something about this. But in the meantime, and in a nutshell:
1. I’m not at all sure that parents ever really did keep up with what was going on in schools. When I was teaching Junior High in the early 1970’s, it was very clear to me that the vast majority of parents had no clue as to what we were trying to teach or why. (Just one example — there are many more: when I was teaching 7th grade mathematics, I had innumerable students tell me that their parents couldn’t help them with their homework because “they don’t understand modern math”. Well, what we were teaching wasn’t “modern math” — it was the same sort of word problems that those parents had had when they went to school. And they couldn’t do them then, and they still couldn’t do them. And these problems weren’t all that complicated in any case.) In my experience, parents were actually mainly concerned only that their kids were behaving.
2. What *has* changed over the last 50 years or so is this: the economy has become much more precarious. When I went to school, I don’t remember anyone really worrying about not getting a job after they got out of school. That’s a big worry now. And I think that parents are driven much more even than they used to be, to seeing schools as pure job training, and low-level job training at that. So I think that’s one thing that’s going on. But I don’t think that this is what is actually driving the “no child left untested” movement.
3. I think that those parents are really being used by forces heavily invested in economic inequality — well-funded groups like “Stand for Children”, people like Bill Gates who fund groups that attack unions and dumb down education, the charter school and privatization movements — who really don’t like public education to begin with. Who would like to see a very small group of well-educated people at the top and a very large group of minimally trained (basically rote-learning trained) people at the bottom — people trained to be employees rather than citizens. These are the groups and people who push “data-driven” measurability, and reduce education to test prep, and drive good teachers out of the profession.
Christopher says
If you just want blue-collar jobs then technical schools would be all the rage. I usually think of testing precisely to ensure higher level knowledge in math, sciences, and history, to get everyone well-educated.
Mark L. Bail says
across the board. Schools driven by testing–most urban schools in Massachusetts, but many others as well–shortchange kids on the conversations and creative activity that higher-achieving schools take for granted. The desire to ensure increased higher learning thus reduces higher learning because it either can’t be tested or isn’t deemed worth testing.
I agree with Carl’s analysis 100% as well.
carl_offner says
…and I’d just like to take the opportunity to mention that one thing you wrote in your initial post has been rattling around in my mind ever since I read it: “What I want is simple: education policy done with me, not done to me.”
This is a really profound point. Thank you for making it.