Gales of reformist destruction

GothamSchools reports that the New York City Dept of Education has announced a new round of school closings.  Diane Ravitch has this to say ("Obama and Duncan Launch NCLB 2.0"):

What we are witnessing now is the culmination of the plans of the education entrepreneurs who are driving national education policy at the highest levels. They are not educators. They do not understand how to help or support a school, so their first instinct is to close it down and start over. I think that is called creative destruction.

This is exactly right.  One sees the paradigm shift unfolding everywhere.  Whether it truly represents a regress or not is hard to say, because it would be difficult to conclude that many bureaucratic school overlords of yore were actually much help.  So if they now admit that it is their job to destroy schools, at least they are coming clean about it.

Yet the new "reformers" whose aim is to transform our urban school district in market-like ecosystems have their own hypocrisy.  However much they admire the market mechanism as a means of sorting out the wheat from the chaff, they do not actually like how the market mechanism works when it comes to schools.  They discover that parents and children are not, in their view, sufficiently discerning consumers.  The schools that they think should disappear do not disappear.  Their favored new schools do not get the massive influx of kids.  So they have to make what they call "tough decisions" -- meaning the decisions for others who they believe are incapable of making the right ones themselves.  That ugly old school gets closed, leaving the kids nowhere to go but the new one.

The result is a top-down, bureaucracy-driven system no different in any way that matters from the one it is replacing.

Rhee takes credit for improved NAEP scores, bashes teachers

In a news conference at the National Press Club on the release of the district-level NAEP math results, Michelle Rhee took the opportunity to crow about the wonderful results for DC (big improvement in 4th grade, some improvement in 8th).  Rhee's bit comes around the 46th minute.  (It will be worth several vomit-inducing moments if you watch long enough to see Michelle choke on a question from a WaPo reporter around minute 50.)

It's a bizarre performance.  She leads with some advice she received from Warren Buffet: that the way to improve urban public education would be to eliminate private schools and assign all kids to public schools by lottery.  There's something to that, of course, although it would mostly start a stampede of well-heeled white families out of cities -- the few that are left -- and into priveleged suburban enclaves, but Rhee somehow twists into a story, not of race and class segregation, but of adults failing to cooperate.

She seques from that non-sequitur into a riff about the need for using test scores to hold teachers accountable:

[When I came to DC, it] was showing only 8 percent of students performing at grade level in mathematics, if you were to look at the performance evaluations for the adults, you would have seen that the overwhelming majority of them were rated as doing an excellent job, exceeding expectations.

How can you have that kind of disconnect — when only 8 percent of students are at grade level and the adults are running around thinking they are doing an excellent job?

Well, here's how: on the NAEP, considered the gold standard of educational assessment, DC NAEP scores have been consistently improving since 2003.  Michelle, it seems like DC teachers have been doing a great job, yet you never seem to tire of spouting off about how they suck.  How can you have that kind of disconnect?

Adults vs. Kids

The always perceptive Claus von Zastrow comments today on the common refrain of education deformers that they are doing what is in the best interests of kids, not adults. 

I was struck by that line when I first heard it after I crossed industries and got into education a few years back because, obviously, the interests of kids and the adults who work with them are not irreconciably opposed.  Common sense dictates that if you want adults to put their hearts into their jobs, you've got to treat them decently, which means compensating them fairly and treating them with respect.

I think almost everybody who gets into education does so mostly for idealistic reasons.  It's not hard to make money if that's what you mostly care about.  But it's a stupendously boring way to live one's life, which may explain why billionaires like Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and  Bill Gates turn their attention to "public service" after many years of chasing the almighty buck.  What they and their ilk probably don't realize is that lots of people never saw the romance of making lots of money to begin with.

At any rate, the point is that the idea that most teachers are mostly interested in protecting themselves is ludicrous on its face.  If they weren't genuinely interested in leaving a better world behind than the one they stepped into, they'd be in a different profession.  What possible credibility can anyone give to the likes of Broad, Bloomberg, Gates, Gerstener -- who spend virtually all of their adult lives amassing their own personal fortunes -- that they somehow care more about kids than the rank-and-file teacher who actually stands in front of a classroom every day?

I'd love to hear how that crowd would squeal if the government stepped in and confiscated their billions and turned it over to programs serving underpriveleged kids.  Undoubtedly, we'd hear vocal protestations about how they were entitled to their loot.