What the Presidential Candidates Should Say About Education

More than 50 million children attend public elementary or secondary school in the U.S. The fact that so many voters spend so much time thinking about what happens to their kids in school means that the topic of education—specifically, what comes between preschool and college—should be a priority for a presidential candidate¹. And the focus should transcend political and economic considerations in order to address how our children are being educated.

The standard positions of political progressives are, in my view, worth repeating and embracing: support for public education, which is a cornerstone of a democratic society; adequate pay for teachers; a commitment to equity and integration; and so on. But many people who talk this way ignore or even endorse policies that are troubling to many thoughtful educators.

In a word, many political progressives are not educationally progressive—or even mindful of the difference.

That's why we need to call attention to—and offer a plan for changing—how the current narrative in education is shaped by the same corporate perspective that colors mainstream views of taxation, health care policy, and other issues. The models, methods, and metaphors of business predominate in talk of "school reform." And this is uncritically accepted by too many left-liberals.

The standard story sounds something like this:

We need to educate our students to be competitive in the 21st-century global economy. Alas, they (and our schools) have fallen behind their counterparts in other countries. We must hold students and teachers accountable by raising the bar, employing tough and uniform standards for what is taught, measuring the results with frequent testing, and using rewards and sanctions (for states, districts, schools, teachers, and students) based on those scores.

Every single phrase in that paragraph is misguided. As a whole, it is ripe for a challenge even when it isn't packaged with the rhetoric of privatization and competition that so often accompanies this narrative—promotion of "school choice" with vouchers (mostly Republicans) or charters (both Republicans and Democrats).

Here's what the presidential candidates ought to say instead:

1. It's time to affirm that the primary value of schooling can't be measured in dollars and cents.

Education should be about supporting a vibrant democracy and doing right by our children—nourishing their curiosity, helping them fall in love with ideas, promoting both the capacity and the disposition to think critically. That's very different from what we hear from most politicians and corporate executives, who frame education as an economic "investment," the point being to instill in students whatever skills and attitudes will enrich their future employers.

2. It's time to stop judging high-quality schooling by whether we're beating other countries who are also trying to improve education.

Talk of "competing in the global economy," when applied to education, not only reduces learning to crude financial terms; it also treats people who live elsewhere as rivals to be bested rather than as potential collaborators. To rank countries by test scores is to treat education as if it were an athletic event where the point is to be able to yell "We're Number One!" This implies that we want children in other countries not to learn effectively—a stance that is both intellectually and morally bankrupt.

Incidentally, for whatever these comparisons (and the exams that drive them) are worth, U.S. students actually do reasonably well, contrary to popular belief. But it makes no more sense to talk about the "quality of American schools" than it does to talk about the quality of American air. An aggregate statistic is meaningless because test scores are largely a function of socioeconomic status. Our wealthier students perform very well when compared to other countries; our poorer students do not. And we have a lot more poor children than other industrialized nations do.

For example, U.S. schools with fewer than 10 percent of students in poverty ranked first among all nations on PISA tests of reading a few years ago, while those serving a predominantly low-income student population ranked about fiftieth. The problem isn't bad teachers who need to be "held accountable;" he problem is poverty.

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3. It's time to stop defining high-quality schooling by its difficulty level.

Macho talk about "rigor," "tougher standards," and "raising the bar" confuses harder with better. What we give students to do can be too difficult as surely as it can be too easy—and the main effect of overvaluing rigor is that the system is rigged to make sure some of them must always fail. (Worse, those who fail are disproportionately low-income children, children of color, and children whose first language isn't English.) Judging a school, a teacher, a book, or a test on the basis of whether it's sufficiently "rigorous" is like judging an opera based on whether it contains enough notes that are really hard for the singers to hit.²

4. It's time to stop defining high-quality schooling by how similar it is from one district or state to the next.

The corporate model is all about standardization: a one-size-fits-all set of mandates that amounts to creating a centralized power over ideas and assumes teachers are not capable of working with their students to plan a curriculum. This trend reached its apotheosis with the Common Core, which was essentially adopted because a billionaire named Bill Gates thought it was a good idea and bankrolled it. Are all kids entitled to a great education? Of course. But that doesn’t mean all kids should get the same education. Uniformity is not the same thing as excellence—or equity. In fact, one-size-fits-all demands may offer the illusion of fairness, setting back the cause of genuine equity.

5. It's time to stop defining high-quality schooling in terms of its specificity.

Harold Howe II, the U.S. commissioner of education under President Johnson, was once asked what national standards should look like if we had to have them. He summarized a lifetime of wisdom in four words: they should be "as vague as possible."

Instead, a corporate approach to school reform—based on B.F. Skinner's outdated behaviorist model of learning—consists of transmitting a long list of narrowly defined facts and skills to children. This list features material that most of them will not need (given that virtually any information can be summoned on a phone) and that even successful students may not care about, remember, or be able to use.

6. Most of all, it's time to stop defining educational "success," "achievement," or "accountability" in terms of scores on standardized tests.

These tests are used to monitor and enforce compliance to top-down standards and also as indicators of progress. The result has been untold damage to children, schools, educational excellence, and equity.

The less someone knows about how children learn (and how learning can be assessed), the more likely it is that he or she will insist on the use of standardized tests—and then proceed to cite their results. The reality is that these tests mostly serve to make dreadful teaching appear successful. As a rule, they measure two things:

1. How much time has been taken away from meaningful learning in order to train students at taking tests
2. The size of the houses near the school

As much as 80 percent of the variance in test scores—the difference between schools, between districts, and even between states—can be explained purely in terms of socioeconomic status. Tell me how much a kid's parents earn and I'll predict her score with chilling accuracy. To use those scores to evaluate teachers or schools is therefore not only unhelpful; it's unethical. Politicians and economists like to talk about student achievement—aggregate data based on the results of fill-in-the-bubble tests. Good teachers, by contrast, are concerned with students' achievements—the ideas and accomplishments of specific children over time.

The damage of widespread and continuous testing is compounded if the tests are high-stakes, which means the results determine whether students are allowed to graduate, or how much teachers are compensated ("merit pay" is one of the most egregious features of corporate-styled school reform), or how schools are funded. This pressure, which is the engine of both Bush's No Child Left Behind Act and Obama's Race to the Top, has driven many of our best teachers out of the profession since they want neither to be mere technicians nor to be blamed for factors outside of their control. (This exodus of talented educators is yet another way that a demand to "raise standards" has actually made schools worse—especially schools in low-income areas, where the scores are lowest.) It has led to poor students dropping out. It has taken second-rate schools and turned them into third-rate test-prep factories.

An emphasis on "accountability"—again, adopted by Democrats and Republicans alike—blames students and teachers for what are primarily problems of unequal opportunity and inadequate funding. Low-income and minority students are thus punished twice. And their failings are measured with tests that are neither reliable nor valid instruments.

The last national politician who embraced these principles was the late Senator Paul Wellstone. As the thunderclouds of NCLB were gathering, he declared, “Making students accountable for test scores works well on a bumper sticker and it allows many politicians to look good by saying that they will not tolerate failure. But it represents a hollow promise. Far from improving education, high-stakes testing marks a major retreat from fairness, from accuracy, from a quality, and from equity.” It is time to carry on that fight.