The Big Lies of School Reform

Finding Better Solutions for the Future of Public Education

Paul C. Gorski, Kristien Zenkov, Paul C. Gorski, Kristien Zenkov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781134607488
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Big Lies of School Reform provides a critical interruption to the ongoing policy conversations taking place around public education in the United States today. By analyzing the discourse employed by politicians, lobbyists, think tanks, and special interest groups, the authors uncover the hidden assumptions that often underlie popular statements about school reform, and demonstrate how misinformation or half-truths have been used to reshape public education in ways that serve the interests of private enterprise.

Through a thoughtful series of essays that each identify one "lie" about popular school reform initiatives, the authors of this collection reveal the concrete impacts of these falsehoods—from directing funding to shaping curricula to defining student achievement. Luminary contributors including Deborah Meier, Jeannie Oakes, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Jim Cummins explain how reform movements affect teachers and administrators, and how widely-accepted mistruths can hinder genuine efforts to keep public education equitable, effective, and above all, truly public. Topics covered include common core standards, tracking, alternative paths to licensure, and the disempowerment of teachers' unions. Beyond critically examining the popular rhetoric, the contributors offer visions for improving educational access, opportunity, and outcomes for all students and educators, and for protecting public education as a common good.

Part I
The Big Picture

1
The Pedagogy of Poverty

The Big Lies about Poor Children

Gloria Ladson - Billings

The year 1983 marked a kind of education reform renaissance in the United States with the publication of the now-famous report “A Nation at Risk,” prepared by then-President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education. This document essentially implicated our entire public education system, warning of the dangerous road we were traveling and the seemingly fatal education and economic ends we would meet. It wagged its finger at many aspects of schooling in the United States: the curriculum, schools’ organizational structures, and teachers, to name just a few. However, as the resulting so-called reform movement picked up steam, we quickly seemed to shift away from discussing our joint destinies and shared responsibilities to identifying individual culprits. We went from a nation at risk to a place where only certain children were “at risk.” This notion became so pervasive that “at risk” rapidly evolved into a code phrase for poor students, immigrants, and students of color. Indeed, we began talking about poverty as a “culture” rather than a socioeconomic state of being or injustice (Gorski, 2008).

The big lie that emerged from these events was that poor children were a different breed of human being who could not benefit from expansive curricula and innovative pedagogical strategies. Instead, we were told that “at-risk” children needed “basic skills” and classroom instruction that helped bring “order” to their lives. As a consequence, we began to see education “reforms” that tightly regulated the schooling experiences of poor children, particularly in urban schools. In this chapter, I will provide several examples of the kinds of specific restructuring measures that emerged in urban and other schools serving working-class, poor, and increasingly diverse children that reinforced the notion that they needed regimentation to succeed in school.

At Least They Can Look the Part

One of the early “reforms” that took place in urban schools was the introduction of “school uniforms.” On the surface, a practical and policy shift focused on students’ garb may seem benign. After all, in schools throughout the world—including in the United Kingdom, Japan, Kenya, and Australia—children wear uniforms. Often undocumented is the fact that in what policymakers and now the general public identify as “developing” countries the inability to purchase a uniform often keeps students from attending school. The United States has always prided itself on the notion of freedom of individual expression and appreciated that wearing whatever we want is an expression of that freedom. It is true that private schools and church-sponsored schools in the United States have long required their students to wear uniforms. But public schools have almost always operated with a “common school” orientation, where parents and families maintained control over personal decisions—such as whether or not to participate in a school lunch program, whether to grant permission for a student to attend a field trip, or how to dress their individual child (within the boundaries of the school dress code).

The movement to require public school children to wear uniforms seemed to have reasonable justifications. Advocates claimed that wearing uniforms would help minimize the competitiveness to wear certain styles and brands that made poor students feel less worthy (Gursky, 1996). Wearing a school uniform was supposed to help students focus on their studies instead of becoming preoccupied with superficial concerns like clothing (Brunsma & Rockquemore, 2003). Other claims suggested that wearing uniforms would minimize unruly behavior because all children would just “look like students.” Unfortunately, none of these claims was supported by research (Brunsma & Rockquemore, 1998). They just sounded like good ideas.

What too few people have considered is the way in which corporate interests benefited from the move to have millions of students in public schools wear mandatory school uniforms. Companies like Sears, J.C. Penney’s, and Kohl’s turned the push for school uniforms into a very profitable enterprise (“School Uniforms Make the Grade,” 1997). In cities like Philadelphia, each school was able to choose its own uniforms. Of course, because Philadelphia serves a large number of working-class and poor students, many families are transient—often moving several times in the course of a year. Each move might mean a shift to a new school, and each new school would likely require the purchase of another school uniform. Yes, corporate interests loved the decision to require school uniforms.

In many of these schools, policing uniform compliance became an administrative preoccupation. In one school in Mobile, Alabama, the teachers complained that much of their time was consumed with determining whether students were wearing their uniforms appropriately. Were the skirts long enough, were the boys wearing belts, and were the uniforms complete (e.g., with the shirt and bottom)? No schools that previously had discipline problems reported marked improvements in student behavior because of these new uniform requirements. But, of course, the prevailing belief was that poor children needed the regimentation of the school uniform to regulate their behavior and, the argument went, allow them to focus more on their academic tasks (Brunsma & Rockquemore, 1998).

What’s the Next Line?

As this and other crisis-minded state and national reform efforts took hold, one of the major and most troubling curriculum “innovations” in high-poverty urban schools was the scripted curriculum. Here teachers were given a “script” of everything they were to say during a reading lesson (Ede, 2006). No innovation or creativity on the part of the teacher was needed or desired. Instead of being thinking, ethical intellectuals, teachers were reduced to state functionaries who did whatever the teacher’s guide prescribed. This form of “teaching” was similar to monitoring a standardized test wherein teachers read verbatim a text that is similar to the following: “You will have 20 minutes to complete this section. Please stop at the end of the section. Fill in the bubbles completely. Erase all stray marks on the page.”

Hearing teachers speaking in that automaton-like manner once a year is something with which most students have become familiar and to which they are even inured. However, the expectation that teachers teach this way every day further reduced them to low-skilled technicians and downgraded low-income students to apparently empty receptacles that did not need to be engaged like their wealthier peers. This kind of “teaching” could not accommodate students’ questions or even the most reasonable and relevant tangents. The learning for poor children in many contexts became prepackaged, predetermined, and rote.

The reduction to scripted curricula was emblematic of the general contraction of the curriculum poor children were to receive. And the imposition of mandated standardized testing for grades 3 through 8 meant that poor children generally had access to a barebones curriculum that focused on reading, writing, and mathematics (Jones et al., 1999). That which was tested was taught. Gone from the typical curriculum taught at schools serving poor children were social studies, science, art, music, physical education, and any form of enrichment (Ede, 2006). The new “script” was determined by the test.

This restriction of the curriculum was a direct response to the call in “A Nation at Risk” for what was euphemistically described as curriculum “coherence.” According to the report, the curriculum had become unwieldy and out of control, resulting in a buffet of offerings with no central core or commonalities. For poor children it was especially important to teach “the basics” or “fundamentals” through stripped-down curricula that were controlled largely by textbook companies and curriculum committees. Individual teachers could no longer be trusted to make curriculum decisions; poor children were entitled to nothing more than rudimentary concepts and pedagogies. This shift was extraordinary in its austerity. Such approaches flew in the face of even compensatory programs such as Head Start or Sesame Street, which provided poor children with context and cultural experiences linked to basic skills such as reading and mathematics (Austin, 1977; Minton, 1975).

Now poor children were confined to a steady stream of “drill and kill” routines in their classrooms. Their entire curriculum and schooling experience were tied to preparing for “the test.” Their schools, their teachers, and their intellectual identities became synonymous with their performances on standardized tests. Schools, which should provide opportunities for widening the world for poor children, were becoming places where their worlds became increasingly constrained and narrow.

Attention!

Largely but not exclusively the result of the school uniform requirements and the narrowing of the curriculum, schools serving students in poverty became places of strict regimentation. Additionally, students in many of the neoliberal-inspired charter school programs were required to walk down the hallways in absolute silence on black lines painted on the floors (Livingston, 2013). In some schools, children and youth were supposed to hold their hands together behind their backs as they moved about the building or waited to travel from classroom to classroom. In the classroom they were regularly called upon to “track” the teacher—a method of always keeping one’s eyes on the teacher (Lemov, 2010). This “methodology” seems almost Skinnerian as teachers hold their hands in the air and ask students to “track.”

The sad thing about this kind of regimentation is that it is reminiscent of only one other type of institution: prison. Neoliberal notions of educating the poor rely heavily on keeping them managed and under control. There is no belief in the intellect or imagination of economically impoverished children as the keys to their educational futures. And we could certainly never consider their cultures as resources for promoting academic achievement. They are being prepared for a life of compliance while their upper- and upper-middle-class peers engage in higher-level thinking and innovation. Upper-middle-class children are groomed to be entrepreneurs and innovators (or at least technically sophisticated enough to hold good-paying jobs), while poor children are coached and drilled to continue occupying low-skilled, poor-paying, service-sector jobs (Wilson, 1987).

The insistence on strict regimentation and order reinforces the notion that poor children are living chaotic and unruly lives and that schools are their last hope for redemption—the one place that could bring order to their lives. The contrasts between U.S. society’s acceptance of these lies and other industrialized nations’ embrace of vastly different assumptions and practices are stark. In a recent visit to Sweden I went to a school for “newcomers” (the term for recent immigrants). I was struck by the freedom with which students moved through the corridors. No one asked if they had hall passes. In the cafeteria, small children were allowed to serve themselves from the steam tables. Despite the students’ poor performance on the state tests—owing primarily to their lack of fluency in the Swedish language—the teachers offered a full curriculum that included science, social studies, the arts, physical education, sewing, and shop classes. The humanity of the children remained intact despite the trauma of fleeing from war-torn (e.g., Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia) or economically weak (e.g., Greece) nations. These students were seen not as prisoners in their new country but rather as children with the same developmental needs as their wealthier peers.

Does Your Mother Love You?

Another feature of schooling for poor children relates to the ways that their parents and families are regarded. Many of the schooling opportunities available to urban students treat poor parents as if they do not love or know how to care for their own children. Evidence of this perspective is seen in the requirement for parents to sign “contracts” regarding the monitoring and supervision of their children’s schoolwork (Coeyman, 1999). It is hard to imagine asking middle-class White parents to sign a document attesting to their willingness to manage and oversee their children’s school-related activities. Neoliberal schooling strategies presume that poor parents and families need lessons about how to be responsible, caring adults rather than tutorials about how to deal with hostile and inflexible bureaucracies.

Sadly, the not-so-subtle ways that schools discriminate against the poor is not lost on the children themselves. A few years ago I was in a school composed of poor, working-class, and middle-class students and witnessed a little Black boy crying in the corner of the cafeteria. When I asked him what the problem was, he sobbed, “I don’t want to be in that line.” His reference was to the fact that children receiving free lunch were required to get in one line, while those who brought a lunch from home were to get in a different line. Bringing a lunch from home symbolized the fact that you had someone at home who cared enough to pack you a meal. A lunch from home made you special.

In another instance, a local newspaper ran a story about an upper-middle-class woman who fixed a hot lunch for her teenaged children and 10 or 12 of their friends every day because the school cafeteria was “too chaotic.” Not surprisingly, her children’s friends were all also White and middle class. The “chaos” emanated from the Black, brown, and Southeast Asian immigrant students who were making up an increasing proportion of the school’s population. The newspaper article was lauding this mother for being a “good” parent.

The idea that poor parents or poor children’s extended family members do not know how to parent has a long tradition in education research. Early childhood research suggested that poor mothers did not know how to talk to their children. Comparisons of how many words poor parents utter and the number spoken by middle-class parents to their children have long been conflated with evaluations of “good” parenting. “Good” parents negotiate with their children and offer them choices, and “bad” parents are seen as too directive and authoritarian. “Good” parents ask if children would like to take a seat. “Bad” parents tell children to sit down!

These Children Can’t

Lies about poor children are framed by assumptions about their intellectual lives: poor children are defined by what schools believe they cannot do rather than by their potential. Both anecdotal and research reports are filled with descriptions of thoughtful teachers attempting to do innovative and creative curriculum projects with poor children (Boykin & Noguerra, 2011), only to be thwarted by others who insist that “These children can’t do that!” These unchecked assumptions of student incompetence echo throughout urban school systems and those serving poor and increasingly diverse children and turn classrooms into no more than high-cost babysitting services. The presumption that children can learn has to be the premise on which we base our practice. When we do not hold tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART I The Big Picture
• PART II Curriculum and Assessment
• PART III Teachers and Teaching
• PART IV Schools and Policy
• Contributors
• Index