Testing Our Patience

Back when the latest group of saviors embarked on their mission to rescue education from itself, one of the things we were told was that injecting more and higher stakes tests into the system (anyone remember tests to determine high school graduation, regardless of the student's final GPA?) would produce more rigor and lead us all to that academic nirvana of Total Student Proficiency by 2014. Parents, who were rightly concerned about the quality of education their children received, were sold on the idea that "educational experts" had found the key and it was just a matter of getting around those pesky teacher's unions, and the public school bureaucracies.

Turns out those parents--as my old daddy used to say--bought a pig in a poke. Now here we are knocking on the door of 2014 and we are no closer to 100% proficiency than we were when these educational Harold Hills rolled into town to sell us the academic equivalent of band instruments and uniforms. In fact, if you put any stock in international comparisons, according the the latest PISA results, we've gone backwards.

Teens from Asian nations dominated a global exam given to 15-year-olds, while U.S. students showed little improvement and failed to reach the top 20 in math, science or reading, according to test results released Tuesday. American students scored below the international average in math and about average in science and reading.

Personally,  I think a lot of these international comparisons are nothing more than educational beauty contests, but even if you accept that view, the latest makeover given to American schools has not only knocked us out of the running for the crown, we don't even have a shot at Miss Congeniality. No less a testing poobah than Arne Duncan, who never met a test he didn't like, was forced to admit the bloom was off the rose.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the results a "picture of educational stagnation."

Now remember, Duncan is the guy who recently said, when confronted by criticism of his testing plans by a group of white suburban moms, that the real problem was the tests were showing the kids weren't as smart as their moms thought they were. In other words, the problem isn't dumb tests, it's dumb kids. So with that attitude in mind, you'd think he could come up with a more positive spin on the results of his apparent efforts to test kids into being smart than "stagnation." And also remember, we're less that a year away from when this latest educational reform was to carry us across the threshold to blissful proficiency.

But never one to let the results get in the way of ideology, Mr. Duncan falls back on the tried and true method of ignoring the issue by stating the obvious as if it were an epiphany that suddenly appeared before him:

"We must invest in early education, raise academic standards, make college affordable, and do more to recruit and retain top-notch educators," Duncan said.

 One might ask Mr. Duncan, as the titular top educational expert in the country, why it took so long for him to discover this truth, and as a followup, now that he has discovered it what he intends to do considering Plan A (test the dumb out of those less than brilliant, overly coddled little hellions) has apparently gone down in flames.

Well, we're sure the answer will have something to do with tweaking because the alternative would be for the Secretary, as emperor of education, to realize he's been running around the country naked for the last four years.

And it may not matter anyway because if you look around the landscape, events are moving in a way that indicates the test it 'till in bleeds crowd may be on the road to irrelevancy. To wit:

In Florida

In New York

In New Jersey

In Massachusetts 

In New Mexico

In Virginia

If I may borrow my analogy from the civil rights movement (because I believe education is a civil right) these are the people who are refusing to get to the back of the bus, and out of their actions a movement is being born. I think Howard Zinn said it best:

The good things that have been done, the reforms that have been made, the wars that have been stopped, the women's rights that have been won, the racism that has been partly extirpated in society, all of that was not done by government edict, was not done by the three branches of government. It was not done by that structure which we learn about in junior high school, which they say is democracy. It was all done by citizens' movements. And keep in mind that all great movements in the past have risen from small movements, from tiny clusters of people who came together here and there. When a movement is strong enough it doesn't matter who is in the White House; what really matters is what people do, and what people say, and what people demand.

I am excited and encouraged by what's happening in the country now, but at the same time I am saddened and shamed because as we move to reclaim education from the  testers and the profit mongers we leave behind an entire generation of children for whom school was a sweatshop of irrelevancy and needless suffering.

Spock v McCoy. Coming To A School Near You

Full disclosure: I’ve never been a fan of the Common Core. Standards established by corporations and politicians have always raised suspicions in my mind. Even if done with the best of intentions, the educational outcomes valued by business tend to be centered on producing employees that are literate, compliant and able to follow orders. This conflicts with another purpose of education—a higher priority for education in a democratic society in my view—and that is to produce citizens who are literate, independent and who question everything.

As you can see, there’s a built in tension between the outcomes desired by business and those demanded for a just and vibrant democracy, much like the uneasy marriage between Capitalism and Democracy itself. We are, of course, both employees and citizens so the competing claims to educational outcomes both have merit, but lately is seems business outcomes  have been taking over more and more of the territory that used to belong to democratic outcomes.

Perhaps this goes back to the struggle between what John Rury in his book Education and Social Change called administrative progressives and pedagogical progressives. Administrative progressives were “more concerned with issues of efficiency and carefully aligning the purposes of schooling with the needs of the economy.” (143). Pedagogical progressives on the other hand, people like John Dewey, were concerned with “making education more responsive to the needs of children and integrating the school more closely with its immediate community.” (ibid). 

Unfortunately the administrative progressives won, and that brings me back to the Common Core, which, say whatever else you want about it, is certainly concerned with “efficiency and carefully aligning the purposes of schooling with the needs of the economy.” There are a couple of problems with educational standards based on business premises though, the first of which has to do with the raw material. Businesses produce quality products cheaply because they can rely on consistency of the ingredients, yet there is nothing more inconsistent than a class full of students, all with different levels of talent, motivation, interest, experience, language and backgrounds. To apply an external standard to as heterogeneous a collection of raw material as this and expect to produce a common outcome is ridiculous on its face.

The other problem is with procedure. No one cares how the car feels as it moves along the line and has nuts and bolts attached to it, but children are another matter. When emphasis is moved from the individuals in the class to the process applied to them it becomes dehumanized, sometimes to a critical level, where students become educational input vessels who are quality checked at certain stages along the line and, if deemed acceptable are passed on, and if not are shunted off to the scrap heap—sometimes with their teachers and their schools.

It’s possible at this point that some readers have come to the conclusion that I’m against standards. It seems to me the real argument made by those people is that if you aren’t for my standards you aren’t for any standards, which is simply dumb and I’m not going to address it. What I am for are standards based on a flexible model instead of a rigid one. Standards that don’t come from a manufacturing philosophy, but from one that takes in to account the reality of this human endeavor we call education. Standards that reflect the wisdom in the Confucius saying there are many paths to the same destination.

And who better to guide students than a well-trained, engaged teacher who has the vision to see the destination and the wisdom to help students choose the best path. Currently, teachers are viewed as no more than adult versions of the aforementioned educational input vessels who, if they respond appropriately to the methodology are deemed acceptable, and if not, are shunted off to irrelevancy. In actuality though, teachers—just like students—are a heterogeneous collection of raw material containing myriad mixtures of talent, motivation, interest, experience, language and backgrounds and I suspect the efforts to produce a homogenous teacher profile reflective of the Common Core priorities will meet with the same success as the effort to produce a common student outcome—which is to say not much.

So I see the current push back to the standards by parents, teachers and students as the inevitable outcome of what happens when  industrial control inputs are applied to human beings engaged in that very human activity we call educating children. People are funny that way.

Dr. Duncan Misdiagnosis The Patient

I’ve been watching reruns of the television show House recently.  Patients come into Princeton-Plainsboro hospital in varying degrees of ill health. Dr. House prescribes a bunch of tests and treats the patients based on those tests. The patients get worse. More tests, more treatment, more declining patients. This goes on until the last 15 minutes when Dr. House—usually without the benefit of more tests—finally figures out what is really wrong, gives the patients a pill or a shot and voilà! Health restored.

This strikes me as a good metaphor for educational reform.  The “patient” has been in poor health—depending on who’s doing the diagnosing—for 10 years, 30 years, or since the particular diagnostician making the claim graduated. Interesting side note: cuneiform tablets from around 3000 BCE have been found in which the writer complains about students’ lack of skills. 

Like Doctor House, our educational reformers prescribe a battery of tests, but unlike Doctor House, these tests aren’t supposed to provide information leading to the cure, they’re supposed to be the cure. Strangely, the patient gets sicker. Diagnosis: More testing. The patient declines further, so even more tests are called for.

Well, since this is my analogy I get to play the role of Dr. House and tell you that there is no need for further  testing—especially since it seems to be making the patient worse. I know what the disease is, or at least a major component of a multi-faceted, multi-level disease. It’s poverty, and much as I’d like to take credit for that diagnosis, as a profession we’ve known about this disease and its effects on the educational achievement of students for a long time. I did a brief, informal review of the literature on poverty and educational achievement and found research going back into the 70’s that indicated the longer children live in poverty, the lower their educational  achievement.

Recently, there was an article that appeared  in the Post Tribune about the effects of poverty on school achievement which, for the purposes of my analogy can serve as a description of symptoms for this national disease.  Patients suffering from this malady often share the following history:

In a recent report by Cornell University, “The Role of Planning Skills in the Income-Achievement Gap,” researchers used longitudinal data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development to establish a significant link between early childhood poverty and weak math and reading achievement in the primary grades, regardless of IQ.

Previous research has shown that income-related gaps in academic achievement start as early as kindergarten and continue through high school. Those gaps are amplified by low levels of intellectual stimulation and few healthy relationships with adults in the home. But this is the first time the income-achievement gap has been explained with the behavioral measurement of ability to plan efficiently, from such a young age.

Now, I think that even though Dr. House is a medical doctor and not an educational specialist even he could see that kids who suffer from “low levels of intellectual stimulation and few healthy relationships with adults in the home”  don’t need more tests to learn better, nor are you going to improve the skills of students who come from an environment  “which includes constant high levels of background noise, the overvaluation of entertainment as a respite from the exertions of survival, a strong belief in destiny or fate because choices are in low supply, and polarized thinking in which options are hardly ever examined (again, because so few tend to be available)”  by subjecting them to high stakes exams, wouldn’t you agree  Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education and head diagnostician for America’s schools?

Today is a great day! I have looked forward to this day for a long time--and so have America's teachers, parents, students, and school leaders. Today is the day that marks the beginning of the development of a new and much-improved generation of assessments for America's schoolchildren. Today marks the start of Assessments 2.0.

 

Oh. Well, uh…guess the only people getting healthy around here are the ones that own test making companies.

When Is A School Not A School? When It’s A Profit Center

Privatization  \pri·vat·i·za·tion \prī-və-tə-zā-shən\ n: The process by which a public good is dismantled and sold for private gain. See also: commodification. 

OK, so that’s not the definition you’ll currently see in your Webster’s, but if the education reformers have their way it soon will be. No matter what direction the so called reform comes from and no matter what level it’s aimed at, all the solutions to what ails education in America today have one thing in common: taking money from public institutions and putting it in private pockets.

Giving up on public schools altogether? Let’s open some privately owned ones—funded with taxpayer’s money of course. Want more accountability? Need more tests. Someone has to produce those tests and score them of course, and for that they’ll want to be paid—handsomely. Oh and by the way, you’ll need to buy some programs linked to those tests so you can prepare students to take them. And don’t forget to buy the latest textbooks that coordinate with the new curriculum.

And the latest iteration: Want to know if a new teacher should be licensed? Don’t ask the university that trained him or her, pay us to decide.

The idea that a handful of college instructors and student teachers in the school of education at the University of Massachusetts could slow the corporatization of public education in America is both quaint and ridiculous. Sixty-seven of the 68 students studying to be teachers at the middle and high school levels at the Amherst campus are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by Stanford University with the education company Pearson.

And for those of you who may be naive enough to assume that because Stanford University is involved the resulting process will have a degree of educational validity—fuhgeddaboudit. I’ve been invited to participate those types of “partnerships” and mostly teachers are brought in for cover, and their input, while effusively appreciated, is largely ignored. I was part of the team that created the original state writing assessment here in Michigan. We put together an instrument that we felt reflected best practice in the field. When we weren’t being told our suggestions were too expensive we were being told what we were attempting to measure couldn’t be measured, which brings up an interesting subtext to all this and that is the rather unexamined premise that if it can be measured it has value, along with a coda, if it can’t be measured it doesn’t have value. Might be worth looking into a little more thoroughly, but that’s a post for another time. As for the high stakes writing test here in Michigan, within about five years, almost all of the recommendations we did manage to get through the process had been abandoned.

Want more proof?

Pearson advertises that it is paying scorers $75 per assessment, with work “available seven days a week” for current or retired licensed teachers or administrators.

That’s right teachers, your career has a market value of $75. Puts all those years taking classes, doing internships and student teaching in perspective doesn’t it, knowing that after all that somewhere a person will be paid less than $100 to decide if you're qualified to teach or not.

It is an essential aspect of the commodification of education that teachers be devalued. After all, in order for "educational entrepreneurs" to sell their products a need has to be created--that's just Marketing 101. Since teachers are such an visible part of the process it's only logical that this need be created by convincing the customer that teachers are ineffective, inefficient and may actually be destructive--as least as far as they take money from the kids by wanting things like salaries and benefits. It is also important that the fix for this need come from outside the schools, that's why teacher training has to be attacked as well. After all, if we supported teachers, and the training of teachers, there would be no reason to buy teacher proof curricula; no reason to buy tests from outside vendors, or  software programs that take the place of classroom instruction.

On a more fundamental level, this switch from the democratic values that created public education to the priorities of the market economy means the long term goal of education in creating skilled, literate citizens capable of maintaining and improving our democracy has been replaced by the short term, myopic goal of improving the quarterly balance sheet.

In a larger sense, capitalism has become cannibalistic and is devouring the very body that created it, or perhaps it is more accurate to say what used to be a symbiotic relationship between our economic and political structures has become parasitic and what Franklin Roosevelt called the "real safeguard of democracy" (education) is being slowly bled away.

This Is The Result Of "Relentless Positive Action"

So Rick Snyder, "One tough nerd" was elected governor of Michigan in 2010 and one of the top items on his agenda was a "reinvention" of the public educational system. OK, so with a republican legislature he's pretty much in position to get what he wants in terms of this "reinvention." Three years in, let's see how he's doing:

 Buena Vista Schools close early

Last week, the Buena Vista School District fired all of its teachers and closed its schools because it had run out of money. Because the district accepted money from the state for a program it was no longer providing, the state is withholding the district's school aid for at least three months.

Budget deficit forcing school officials to close Albion High School

The Albion School Board voted last night to close the district’s high school.
Beginning this fall, the mid-Michigan district will only serve students in grades K through eight.

Ann Arbor schools to cut high school busing, charge kids for 7th hour

Parents of Ann Arbor high school children will have to find another way for their ninth- through 12th-graders to get to school come fall, and students interested in taking a seventh-hour course could have to pay up to $500 per semester...

 There are two things you need to realize about this situation, one: These schools are canaries in the educational coal mine. Districts all over the state are struggling. There will be more stories like this.

Two: From Snyder's perspective, this is not a bug, it's a feature. The whole direction of his plan from the beginning was to deemphasize brick and mortar public schools and replace them with privately run online schools. Privately run, but funded with public money that is. In fact, Buena Vista, Albion and Ann Arbor are indications that his plan if anything, is working too well. The public schools are disintegrating before the privately run infrastructure is fully in place.

Of course Governor Snyder isn't totally to blame for this--or perhaps from his perspective we should say he doesn't deserve all the credit. Bad decisions and incompetence are rampant from the school board level on up, but his spineless leadership coupled with the Republican legislature's animus toward public schools, or more specifically public school teachers, has created an environment in which all of the destructive forces, whether they be economic, or ideological can flourish while support for and commitment to the ideal of public education in a democratic society withers.

And while the slowly--or in some cases not so slowly--carcass of public education in Michigan is picked clean by the greedy and the opportunistic, children are having their future stolen from them. In a truly enlightened society this would be a crime of the first order. Instead it's just another group of entrepreneurs taking advantage of a business opportunity.

The shame is on all of us.

Simple Solutions To Complex Problems

I just got done watching Bill Gates' TED Talk on improving education titled "Teachers Need Real Feedback" and my first question was why do we assume that because a person is rich they are also smart? OK, maybe Mr. Gates is smart when it comes to computer operating systems, well if you don't count Windows ME, but that doesn't make him any more knowledgeable than anyone else when it comes to other fields of endeavor like, say education.

But lack of expertise never stopped anyone with the wherewithal to buy access  from inflicting their opinions on the rest of us, so here comes Mr. Gates who starts his talk by inferring that the feedback teachers get from their students isn't "real," that the only feedback that counts as "real" is apparently that which they get from their administrators which consists solely of the word "satisfactory," which he, correctly, believes is unsatisfactory.

Now, anyone who has been within a couple of parsecs of an operating American school these days will probably instantly recognize a couple of problems with Mr. Gates' premise, as the one thing teachers are not suffering from is a shortage of feedback. Books, materials, institutional support, sure, but feedback, no way.

I noticed another problem with Mr. Gates' argument as well and that is his use of PISA test results as a basis of comparison. He points out, rightly, that American students placed 15th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math. The inference here is that American students don't achieve levels of competence as advanced as their international peers, but when you ask educators of high placing countries how they do it, their answer generally has little to do with a concern about achievement. For example, Finland consistently ranks at or near the top of PISA results, and when asked for an explanation, Dr Pasi Sahlberg, General Director of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation, Finland and previously Senior Education Specialist with the World Bank as well as the Director of the Centre for School Development, Helsinki, said, “We have systematically focused on equity and equality in our education system, and not so much on excellence and achievement like many other countries have done.”

In fact, analysis of the PISA results in 2006 found that "less than 10% of the variation in student performance was explained by student background in five of the seven countries with the highest mean science scores of above 530 points. PISA demonstrates that equity and performance are highly related."

Well, these little tidbits appear lost on Mr. Gates who goes on to explain the teacher feedback system in Shanghai, the highest performer on the latest tests. He talked about how new teachers there are exposed to experienced teachers on an almost daily basis through observation, weekly study groups, and a network of shared exchanges, conversations and interdepartmental communication. Admittedly, that sounds to me like a good deal. New teachers are immediately and completely submerged in the conversation of their profession and constantly and consistently exposed to a range of techniques, expertise and support. So how does Mr. Gates propose to transfer this system to America? Let's make a video!

Next we are whisked off to a secondary classroom in what appears to be a racially monochromatic suburb somewhere in the wilds of Iowa where we meet English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling who video tapes herself in class, then uses the tapes to self critique. Not bad as far as it goes, but it seems to be missing that whole sharing thing the teachers in Shanghai are getting.

Mr. Gates' solution to the collaboration problem is to put a camera in every teacher's classroom across the county, although he does admit that some teachers may find this a bit disconcerting. No matter because, as he says,  if you need to improve the way you teach fractions, "you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions."

Well, yes and no, Mr. Gates. If I'm teaching in south Chicago, where I'm worried about if the heat will work through the winter, or if my students will make it home safely--that is if they have a home to go to--watching Ms. Wessling walk her kids through a peer editing exercise on their iPads isn't likely to teach me the lesson you seem to think it will.

To put it another way, when I was younger I wanted to be a professional baseball player. Al Kaline was my hero and every time there was a game on TV there I was, glued to the set watching his every move. Long story short, it didn't make me a better fielder, or a better hitter. Actually, it occurred to me later, after it became obvious I wasn't going to be a professional baseball player, that all of those hours I spent sitting in front of the television watching games might have been better spent out practicing. Further, I would suspect that one of the reasons the program in Shanghai is successful is that those teachers have built a community through collaboration, interaction and trust and that is more fundamental to their success than their ability to watch each other.

See, Mr. Gates, improving educational outcomes is a challenge that requires solutions, not a solution. While technology can play a part in those solutions, it cannot create the diverse communities of committed teachers who must take their students where they are and attempt to move them forward.

Varmits In The Pantry

Here in Michigan Governor Snyder has been meeting to plan out the future of public education (in secret up until a few days ago) with a group of 20 some individuals, most of whom were not educators. The group apparently called themselves the Skunk Works, an allusion to Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs which was born in June of 1943 and brought to life aeronautical innovations like the P38 Lightening, the F-104 Starfighter, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk and the F-22 Raptor, to name a few.  As you may imagine, their work was conducted in secret as well.

Developing strategic and tactical military hardware though, is not the same as improving public education, so I would like to suggested another, more natural allusion for this group and that is Mephitis mephitis, or the common striped skunk, often referred to as a polecat because quite frankly what Snyder is doing stinks. Commenting on the nature of the polecat, Mark Twain once observed:

From the beginning of time the polecats have quite honestly and naively regarded themselves as representing in the animal kingdom what the rose represents in the vegetable kingdom. This is because they do not examine.

Because they do not examine. Nor do these Michigan skunks want to be examined because they are busily at work driving the last nail of commodification in the casket that will house public education. It will then be buried in a grave of bafflespeak about innovation and high achievement over which will be placed a tombstone that reads "Here Lies Public Schools. Many Sacrifice For The Profit Of Few."

Of course in a state where even the Superintendent of Public Instruction can say, in public, with a straight face,  "Education for education’s sake is silly" it shouldn't surprise anyone that the resource Thomas Jefferson looked to "for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man," should be turned into an ATM machine for the connected few. Writing in the Detroit News, Dale Hansen describes the true motives of this Skunk Works precisely:

“Skunk works” was the code name give to secret meetings between the governor and a group of 20 individuals...Not surprisingly, the skunk works project aims to take more money away from public schools and funnel it to private organizations using what smacks of a voucher program.

For a little bit of historical perspective, the last time even a modified voucher proposal was brought before Michigan voters (in 2000) it was turned down by 68% of those casting ballots.

You can see the need for secrecy.

If we could just call an intermission to this little school improvement Kabuki for a moment and look at the facts, it is clear we know what the primary cause of low school performance is. We've known it for over forty years. Mr. Hansen again:

Ironically it is the very capitalism that Republicans hold up as the answer to our lagging test scores that is the problem. Data shows that the biggest problem with education is poverty. If you do an apples to apples comparison using test results from American schools with 10 percent or less impoverished students, the U.S. comes out on top. In schools with a 10-25 percent of the student body living below the poverty line the U.S. is third best in the world.

But poverty is about what people don't have. What's driving this bunch of skunks is about what schools do have, namely money, and they want it. In Governor Snyder's defense though, he doesn't seem concerned about poverty in any regard, not just among school children, so in this he is at least being consistent.

The Lockheed Martin Skunk Works was secret as a matter of national security. I would argue that public schools are also a matter of national security and clandestine groups plotting secretly to dismantle and sell them piece by piece are not different in design from terrorist cells, for they also plot the downfall of the nation. The fact that Snyder's group wants to do it with an accounting ledger rather than a bomb is only a difference of degree.

Civil disobedience was not the problem. The greatest danger was civil obedience*

Democracies are famously bad at coping with change. My own theory is that when you allow citizens to have a voice you set up the potential for a much more responsive government that is closer to the lives of people, yet the institutions created by that very government have a vested interest in the status quo because the status quo conserves their power and as Michel Foucault tells us, institutions have as strong an instinct for self preservation as individuals do. So right off the bat democracies have a built in contradiction, on the one hand valuing the voice of the people, who live close to the unpredictable fires of modernity, while on the other resisting that voice in order to maintain institutional privilege and control.

The Senate's failure to pass even a weak form of gun control legislation in spite of overwhelming support among the public is but the latest example of this inherent democratic contradiction at work. In an earlier time of governmental deafness Howard Zinn asked what is to be done when a representative government stops being representative. His answer crystalized the solution to this political design flaw:

The good things that have been done, the reforms that have been made, the wars that have been stopped, the women's rights that have been won, the racism that has been partly extirpated in society, all of that was not done by government edict, was not done by the three branches of government. It was not done by that structure which we learn about in junior high school, which they say is democracy. It was all done by citizens' movements. And keep in mind that all great movements in the past have risen from small movements, from tiny clusters of people who came together here and there. When a movement is strong enough it doesn't matter who is in the White House; what really matters is what people do, and what people say, and what people demand.

I might quibble a bit with Dr. Zinn here and say that it is government edict that puts the period on the sentence started by citizen discourse, as in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for example, but essentially he is correct. Change in a democracy must make its way from the distant fringes of society to the center of power, a long, arduous and in no way certain journey.

Which brings me to the point of all this, and that is the increasingly loud and numerous voices being raised against the corporatization of public schools. While there have always been those who have warned about the movement from public education to privilege education, their voices were mostly drowned out by the educational-industrial complex. Now however there appears to be a chrous growing. Some examples:

Republicans, of all people, have come out against the Common Core, calling it “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control” education.

People are beginning to notice that Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee, once the Emperor and Empress of educational change, have no clothes.

Parents and students are beginning to organize a resistance.

Legislatures are revisiting their assumptions about the efficacy of one size fits all.

So how far along the road from radical idea to institutional policy have we come? I'm not sure. These roads are not straight and they don't always go directly to their destination, plus this situation is a little different because neoliberal forces drove us from a more traditional idea of what public education in a democratic society was and we're trying to get that back.

Still, it's hard not to see that something is changing and a movement is growing. That's the promising news. The reality is that we're still a long way from where we need to be, and quite probably have lost an entire generation of children to the industrialization of education, a mistake for which the price will take years to determine, and even longer to pay.

*Howard Zinn (paraphrased)