How Washington is undermining the Bay State’s high education standards
By Jim StergiosApril 3rd, 2010
We did not miss out on the Race to the Top primarily because of the fact that we have not yet adopted the Common Core standards that are still in draft form. But that is the easy give for the Patrick administration. First, the Patrick folks don’t want to do the hard work necessary to address the major failing in the application — the lack of any sense as to how they would evaluate teachers using student and other data.
That would take imagination, the expenditure of political capital, and good blocking and tackling. They lack all of the above.
Adopting the Common Core standards is an easy one for an administration that has been willing, as Charlie Chieppo and I noted in a piece in the Wall Street Journal today, to weaken
the state’s emphasis on objective assessments by giving so-called 21st century skills like “global awareness” and “cultural competence” equal billing with academic content in its standardized tests.
But the question I have for Arne Duncan and the president is why are they immune to empirical evidence? Why is the Race to the Top application premised on a failed strategy, a kumbaya strategy, and a clearly inferior strategy? That is, why are our federal leaders racing to support “turnaround school” scenarios that have almost uniformly failed across the country; to insist that we secure union support when the unions, together with superintendents and school committees, have most often opposed hard reforms (including standards); and to arm-twist us to adopt national standards that are markedly inferior to our state standards?
Such wisdom from Washington. Forgive me if I yawn.
Entry Filed under: Education
2 Comments Add your own
1. Mary Gregor | April 6th, 2010 at 3:30 pm
If found your piece in the WSJ interesting. However, you didn’t mention the school choice aspect of reform and its impact on the improvements in Massachusetts education. Although this is only public, not private school choice, districts were forced to confront their shortcomings or lose students – usually the motivated ones. Allowing parents and students to walk out on an underperforming school staffed with clueless or arrogant administrators gives them the opportunity to attend a school with better curriculum and a more serious approach to learning. For my family, it was a godsend.
2. Eduardo del Solar | May 4th, 2010 at 9:04 am
That is, why are our federal leaders racing to support “turnaround school” scenarios that have almost uniformly failed across the country.
Don’t blame the feds. Here in Boston Court St will screw thing up quite well when applying more of the same top down management strategies that continue to ruin school systems in our nation.
Even though the BPS has no evaluations for teachers, they now claim the selection to keep teachers in turn around was based on performance evaluations that do not exist (based on Globe story) to select the teachers!!! Turn around schools will fail because of incompetent LOCAL, not federal, burrocrats.
to insist that we secure union support when the unions, together with superintendents and school committees, have most often opposed hard reforms (including standards);
We are against reform because reform or deform based on top down corporate principles has failed everywhere. We did not need Diane’s book to prove that. Do we need Chief Knowledge Officers that have never been in a classroom telling skilled teachers how to teach?
Bottom line is schools will continue to fail as long as buy in from teachers is excluded from the teaching process. Big kudos to Mass unions for rejecting the Race to the Bottom funding!
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