A week ago I received an email regarding the same conversation that Mike Klonsky has so eloquently written about on his blog. I am reprinting Mikes work in its entirety. I will also post the rest of the conversation below in the first comment (its a little long but definitely worth the read). Although Mike does a pretty good job of summing up the “small schools” part of the conversation, there is even more to be said about the common ground reached in regards to the common enemy of education the NCLB act.
"If these two can find common ground, why can't we have peace in the Middle East?
Veteran educators Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch are usually at odds, philosophically and practically. But they have opened up a dialogue which has led them to common ground. Neither has any tolerance for the current standardized testing madness. The latest issue of Edweek carries their co-authored piece: "Bridging Differences," which reads like a memo of understanding between the U.S. and China.
They still are miles apart on issues of mandated curriculum, for which Meier has no use.
Unlike Deborah, Diane has long supported an explicit, prescribed curriculum, one that would consume about half the school day, on which national examinations would be based. Diane believes in the value of a common, knowledge-based curriculum, such as the Core Knowledge curriculum, that ensures that all children study history, literature, mathematics, science, art, music, and foreign language; such a curriculum, she thinks, would support rather than undermine teachers’ work. Deborah, while strongly agreeing on the need for a broad liberal arts curriculum, doubts that anyone can ensure what children will really understand and usefully make sense of, even through the best imposed curriculum, especially if it is designed by people who are far from the actual school communities and classrooms. For me, the most interesting point of agreement in this amazing dialogue, has to do with small schools. Meier has long been viewed as the godmother of small schools, the founder of the first of the modern small schools, Central Park East in New York, and a consistant voice in their defense. Ravitch has argued that we should be worried about schools getting "too small" to support her core curriculum. (See my Nov. 9, 2005 blog post: "Diane Ravitch Barking Up the Wrong Tree ").
But they both find common ground in their critical view of the current, often thoughtless, mass-replication approach to small schools.
Deborah is a pioneer of the small-schools movement. Diane, while not an opponent of that movement, has questioned whether such schools have the capacity to offer a reasonable curriculum, including advanced classes. Yet here, too, we both fear that a good idea has too often been subverted by the mass production of large numbers of small schools, without adequate planning or qualified leadership and with insufficient thought given to how they might promote class and racial integration, rather than contribute to further segregation. "
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Most of the stuff Mike writes about is in refference to the small school movement. I highly suggest checking out his blog linked above if you have a moment.
1 comment:
Bridging Differences
A Dialogue Between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch
By Deborah Meier & Diane Ravitch
In the course of the last 30 years, the two of us have been at odds on
any number of issues—on our judgments about progressive education, on
the relative importance of curriculum content (what students are
taught) vs. habits of mind (how students come to know what they are
taught), and most recently in our views of the risks involved in
nationalizing aspects of education policy.
Two renowned educators with often-opposing views, Diane Ravitch, left,
and Deborah Meier, share a lighter moment outside the Tweed Courthouse
building, the headquarters for the New York City school system.
—Todd Pitt for Education Week
Meeting recently to prepare for a debate on the federal No Child Left
Behind Act, however, we found ourselves agreeing about the mess that
has been generated by local and state testing. Both of us agreed that
the public needs far better information about both inputs and
outcomes, without which the public is woefully uninformed and too
easily manipulated. As we discussed what the next policy steps should
be, Diane preferred a national response, and Deborah preferred a local
one.
As we talked further, we were surprised to discover that we shared a
similar reaction to many of the things that are happening in education
today, especially in our nation's urban school districts. Recent
trends and events seem to be confirming our mutual fears and
jeopardizing our common hopes about what schooling might accomplish
for the nation's children. We might, we agreed, be getting the worst
of both our perspectives.
Unlike Deborah, Diane has long supported an explicit, prescribed
curriculum, one that would consume about half the school day, on which
national examinations would be based. Diane believes in the value of a
common, knowledge-based curriculum, such as the Core Knowledge
curriculum, that ensures that all children study history, literature,
mathematics, science, art, music, and foreign language; such a
curriculum, she thinks, would support rather than undermine teachers'
work. Deborah, while strongly agreeing on the need for a broad liberal
arts curriculum, doubts that anyone can ensure what children will
really understand and usefully make sense of, even through the best
imposed curriculum, especially if it is designed by people who are far
from the actual school communities and classrooms.
Yet both of us are appalled by the relentless "test prep" activities
that have displaced good instruction in far too many urban classrooms,
and that narrow the curriculum to nothing but math and reading. We are
furthermore distressed by unwarranted claims from many cities and
states about "historic gains" that are based on dumbed-down tests,
even occasionally on downright dishonest scoring by purposeful
exclusion of low-scoring students.
What unites us above all is our conviction that low-income children
who live in urban centers are getting the worst of both of our
approaches.
Deborah is a pioneer of the small-schools movement. Diane, while not
an opponent of that movement, has questioned whether such schools have
the capacity to offer a reasonable curriculum, including advanced
classes. Yet here, too, we both fear that a good idea has too often
been subverted by the mass production of large numbers of small
schools, without adequate planning or qualified leadership and with
insufficient thought given to how they might promote class and racial
integration, rather than contribute to further segregation.
We found that we were both dismayed by efforts in New York City to
micromanage what teachers in most K-8 schools do at every moment in
the day. While Deborah allies herself with many of the so-called
constructivist ideas about teaching that are now in vogue in New York,
she believes that the very idea of constructivism is mocked by the
city's too often lock-step and authoritarian approach to implementing
such ideas. In our shared view, the city's department of education has
no curriculum at all, just a mandated and highly prescribed pedagogy
in grades K-8, after which time the state Regents examinations—tests
that have been dramatically simplified in recent years—serve as an
implicit curriculum.
We concur that teachers must be free to use their best professional
judgment about how to teach, and we agree on the importance of a
strong professional culture in which teachers are encouraged to
question and re-examine pedagogical assumptions and practices. Deborah
would want teachers to continually re-examine curricular assumptions.
Diane urges the adoption of a prescribed curriculum that includes at
least the central academic disciplines and the arts. She believes that
a policy of letting a thousand flowers bloom without tending is likely
to produce hundreds of weeds and only a few rare flowers. Deborah
agrees; good gardens need tending. She would leave most of the details
to the local school community.
We both recognize that wise teachers have always found ingenious ways
to sabotage any and all demands for compliance. It is hard, if not
impossible, to run a perfect lock-step system when professionals (if
they really are professionals) expect to make decisions and exercise
discretion. Resistance to nonsense is one of the habits that citizens
need to hone in a free society. But much of the sabotage that occurs
behind classroom doors, we recognize, may disguise watering down the
curriculum or evading responsibility.
During our animated conversation, we agreed that a central, abiding
function of public education is to educate the citizens who will
preserve the essential balances of power that democracy requires, as
well as to support a sufficient level of social and economic equality,
without which democracy cannot long be sustained. We agreed that the
ends of education—its purposes, and the trade-offs that real life
requires—must be openly debated and continuously re-examined. Young
people need to see themselves as novice members of a serious,
intellectually purposeful community. We think that it would be healthy
if students listened to and participated in such discussions, and came
to understand the purposes for their schooling beyond the need to
acquire more certificates.
These central convictions, rarely discussed these days, led us to
agree also on the importance of a strong adult role—including parents,
community, principals, and teachers—in the raising of children; on the
importance of knowing young people well, if we are to influence their
futures; on the risk of placing young people in anonymous,
peer-dominated environments in which the adults in authority are
disrespected and hold little genuine power to shape or make decisions;
on the lack of time for faculty members to become professional experts
in either the content or pedagogy of their craft; and on the important
role played not only in schools, but also in American life, by unions,
which not only represent the common interests of their members, but
also serve as a necessary counterbalance to the power of huge blocs of
money.
What unites us above all is our conviction that low-income children
who live in urban centers are getting the worst of both of our
approaches. New York City is a prominent example. No central, abiding
definition of what constitutes a well-educated person unites or
rationalizes the mandates that flow from central headquarters. The
substance of education—history, science, social science, literature,
art, music—never sufficiently honored in most of our schools, is being
sacrificed to narrowly focused demands to produce higher test scores
in reading and math.
Principals and teachers, regardless of their experience, are ordered
to comply with mandates about how to teach—down to the minute in many
elementary schools—undermining not only their professionalism, but
often their common sense. A particular style of teaching has been
elevated to a cult, for fear that teachers might err if given more
leeway to make decisions and do what they think best. Fear is
widespread among teachers, principals, and kids alike, none of whom
have any strong countervailing institutions to count on for support.
The ends of education—its purposes, and the trade-offs that real life
requires—must be openly debated and continuously re-examined. Young
people need to see themselves as novice members of a serious,
intellectually purposeful community.
Almost all the usual intervening mediators—parent organizations,
unions, and local community organizations—have either been co-opted,
purchased, or weakened, or find themselves under siege if they
question the dominant model of corporate-style "reform." All the
city's major universities, foundations, and business elites are joined
together as cheerleaders, if not actual participants, offering no
support or encouragement to watchdogs and dissidents. This allows
these elites the opportunity to carry out their experiments on a
grand, and they hope uninterrupted, "apolitical" scale, where
everything can, at last, be aligned, in each and every school, from
prekindergarten to grade 12, under the watchful eye of a single
leader. If they can remain in power long enough, it is assumed
(although what actually is assumed is not easy to find out) that they
can create a new paradigm that no future change in leadership can undo.
Along with the power to impose practice, we are concerned about the
inability to discuss—or even discern—the nature of the long-term
picture that our corporate leaders have in mind for the city's public
schools. Is the "autonomy zone," which New York City has established
for several score of mostly small schools, the wave of an undefined
future, or is it just a place to park some difficult dissidents to
quiet them while other schools are brought into compliance? New York's
latest plan of "devolution" is once again the work of a small cadre of
corporate-management experts, formulated without public input, not
even from those most affected by it. In Chicago, one of many cities
embarked on similar programs, autonomy is offered to private
entrepreneurs who are invited to "remake" public schooling in
union-free zones. It is hard to know what these experiments portend,
whether they will lead to greater freedom for certain schools, or for
most schools, or whether they are actually a first step towards
dismantling the governance of public education.
New York City also has launched more than a hundred new schools of
choice, especially at the secondary level, including dozens of schools
open only to selected, high-achieving students. Selectivity is hardly
a new practice in New York. Within-school tracking, after all, often
served similar purposes. But the latest reforms contain disturbing and
unacknowledged implications. Many students are assigned to "schools of
choice" that the students themselves have not chosen. When big schools
are closed down, thousands of students are relocated to the remaining
large schools, causing extreme overcrowding since there are not enough
seats for all of them in the new small schools. In some cases, the new
schools have excluded students who require special education services
or have limited English proficiency. And all of this is happening in
the name of equity and "closing the achievement gap" and other
unimpeachable rhetoric.
As we talked, we found ourselves deeply frustrated, even angry, as we
realized that the so-called reforms of the day are too often a
perverse distortion—one might say an "evil twin"—of the different
ideas that each of us has advocated.
We acknowledged that our disagreements are both deep and important.
Diane believes that national standards and a national curriculum would
give everyone access to what only the elites now learn. She argues
that the curriculum most schools teach is already a national
curriculum, but is characterized by mediocrity and superficiality,
based on boring textbooks, and assessed by tests that are as banal as
the curriculum. Deborah agrees about the latter, but believes
individual schools and families must have more, not less, power to
decide not only how to teach, but also what is to be taught, and that
schools must be able to respond to local circumstances, the passions
of students and teachers, and the experimentation required to meet the
astounding demand that "all children shall achieve what only a few
once did."
Both of us also acknowledged that our choices involve risks. A
national curriculum might be unwieldy and superficial ("a mile wide
and an inch deep"—ironically, the charge directed at our current
incoherent and fragmented curriculum) as well as politically
compromised, while a local one might reflect the low expectations of
the local community as well as local foolishness and local biases
(some schools, for example, might teach intelligent design). We agreed
that the measurement of "results"—what constitutes intellectual
achievement—has been badly distorted by current local and state tests,
which undermine high-quality tasks and make a mockery of critical
thinking. But we disagreed on whether a national test similar to the
National Assessment of Educational Progress would be better, or
whether some newly fashioned, open-ended, high-quality test was even
feasible, much less desirable.
Deborah Meier, left, and Diane Ravitch urge more discussion of
conflicting ideas about schooling, making educators models of
democratic engagement.
—Todd Pitt for Education Week
Deborah, more than Diane, worries about the impact on teaching, and on
relationships among teachers and between teachers and their students,
when the authority to examine ends, not just means, is outside
teachers' influence, and how easily the one could end up dictating the
other. She is even more concerned that being able to dictate what is
taught could infringe on intellectual freedom; she prefers a free
marketplace of diverse ideas about what is important and why. She
argues that the imposition of one official version of history, for
example, would override our different views. Why, she asks, do we
assume that "local politics" is necessarily more suspect—more corrupt
or petty—than national politics? This itself, she suggests, is a risky
proposition for a society determined to nourish the democratic idea.
Diane is more optimistic than Deborah about the possibility of
crafting a lean curriculum that avoids any prescriptions about how to
teach, and developing assessments to go with them. She points out that
many other countries (such as Britain, France, and Japan) have done
this without compromising intellectual freedom. In her view,
intellectual freedom may be even more endangered by the continual
dumbing-down of curriculum and tests that is the consequence of
allowing every district and state to define science, mathematics, and
other subjects in its own way, without regard to existing
international standards. If one wants to find an "official history"
that overrides our different views, she argues, just line up the
leading history textbooks, and there it is.
Deborah worries that federalizing education policy would open up new
opportunities for elites to impose their agendas, as is already
happening in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other locations. If
textbooks already do so, she argues for less, not more, reliance on
them. She is prepared to accept the risks of local, parochial agendas
rather than risk the centralized power over ideas. She is concerned
that federal control of education would lead to a further drying up,
in community after community, of any sense of local voice, and the
growth of a sense of powerlessness and alienation from public life.
This alienation, she fears, is a more potent danger to democracy than
any real or imagined loss of academic purity. She fears the arrival of
federally approved texts and programs, all in the name of improving
scores on nationally normed tests. She argues that federal control
would lead to the same meddling and dumbing-down on a national scale
that we now see at the local and state levels, and would increase a
trend toward the privatization, as opposed to the localization, of
school choice. Teachers cannot pass on an imposed curriculum that does
not connect to their own or their students' understanding, Deborah
argues, and trying to do so distorts the very ends that such a
curriculum seeks: thoughtful habits of mind.
Diane points out that the federal government has traditionally been
the guarantor of equity in school affairs, because it is not ensnared
in local politics. Any federal standards would aim to lift the
performance of all American students, and to equalize life chances
between haves and have-nots. If curriculum and standards were
federally determined, rather than determined by the states, she
argues, there would be no reason to require that texts or programs
receive federal approval. In her view, the current system of low
standards or no standards affirms a reign of mediocrity and
legitimates the inequitable distribution of knowledge. However,
national standards need not be federal standards, and they need not be
compulsory. They might be developed by private groups, such as the
College Board, and made available to schools that accept these goals.
Even if national tests were administered by the U.S. Department of
Education, as the NAEP tests are, Diane believes that experience has
shown such tests to be less subject to the politics of dumbing-down
than are local and state tests. At the very least, she argues,
everyone would get accurate—or at least comparable—information about
student and school performance. That, in itself, would be a huge
improvement over the current situation, in which many states have
lowered their standards to declare nonexistent gains in student
learning.
The so-called reforms of the day are too often a perverse
distortion—one might say an "evil twin"—of the different ideas that
each of us has advocated.
Deborah considers NAEP to be flawed in ways not dissimilar to most
standardized tests, and she regards its cut scores and norms as
equally politically determined and, at present, absurdly high. She
notes that the view of the federal government as the guarantor of
equity was the product of a particular time and place in our history,
and sees no reason to assume that the federal government is likely to
be better intentioned about education policy now, or in the future,
than local communities are. She believes that certain conservatives
favor national standards and testing because they are in power. Diane
points out, however, that most conservatives are adamantly opposed to
any national standards, while President Clinton actively supported a
national system of standards and testing. In any event, she reasons,
the development of national standards and tests is a project for the
next decade, and should be outside partisan interests or control.
As for NAEP's norms and cut scores, Diane contends that the
assessment's standards are entirely nonpolitical and benchmarked to
international standards. Deborah thinks that Diane's hopes for
unbiased, apolitical benchmarking are well-intentioned but inaccurate
as a description of all the current tests, including NAEP. Having
abandoned the normal curve, she believes, we're stuck with the
fallibility of human judgment.
The establishment of a national curriculum and national testing has
its dangers, Diane concedes, but the consequences of preserving the
status quo may be even more dangerous for the nation's future. On this
point—opposition to preserving the status quo—both Diane and Deborah
agree. The question becomes one of difficult trade-offs and differing
judgments of which dangers are worth risking. Putting these
disagreements out onto the public stage is, we believe, essential to
democratic decisionmaking.
So this is where our conversation left us—at the heart of a conflict
that is not so much over our ideals, our hopes for our own children,
or our dreams for America, but over the trade-offs we are prepared to
risk, in the short run or the long run, to achieve our common vision.
As the lunch ended, Diane said to Deborah, "I would be glad to see my
grandchildren attend a school that you led." Our macro-level
differences do not interfere with our mutual respect for each other's
work. That itself is something we hope our schools can help teach
young people.
Our differences helped us consider ways to rethink our ideas and find
places where those holding different views might compromise, and
perhaps learn to live under one umbrella. What we hope to model is the
idea of democratic engagement, the notion that citizens need to think
about and debate their beliefs and values with others who do not
necessarily share all of them. We want the issues connected to
schooling to be a matter for discussion among all people who care.
We don't have it in our power to solve the problems that confront
American education—not those that take place within the schoolhouse,
much less those that have a direct impact on children's ability to
learn, such as their unequal access to health care, housing, and
myriad other life necessities. But we hope that we have it in our
power to provoke the thinking that must precede, accompany, and follow
any attempt to reform—perhaps, even better, to transform—our schools.
Deborah Meier has spent four decades working in and writing about
public schools. She was the founder of a network of small public
elementary and secondary schools in New York City and Boston,
including the Central Park East schools in East Harlem. She currently
is a senior scholar and adjunct professor at New York University's
Steinhardt School of Education.
Diane Ravitch is an education historian and a former assistant U.S.
secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush. She was
appointed by the Clinton administration to serve two terms on the
National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises the National
Assessment of Educational Progress. Now a research professor of
education at NYU, she is a senior fellow at both the Brookings
Institution, in Washington, and the Hoover Institution, in Stanford,
Calif.
Vol. 25, Issue 38, Pages 36-37, 44
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