Obama's education plan: visionary or delusional?

Leslie, interesting analyses of both McCain's and Obama's plan.  According to Matt Miller, The United States spends more money than nearly every other nation on schools, but out of 29 developed countries in a 2003 assessment, we ranked 24th in math and in problem solving, 18th in science, and 15th in reading."

In his book "The 2% Solution", Miller suggests that we need to offer better pay to attract better people into the teaching profession and particularly in math and science and for the poorest schools.  This need is conditioned on unions allowing pay-for-performance and making it easier to fire the worst teachers.  Miller points out that Bill Bennett, Reagan's Education Secretary,
offered this deal to the Teachers Union in the 1980's but the union
rejected it. 

He also suggests to replace school boards and local control (which unions dominate and disable superintendent's abilities to cause change) and funding (through inequitable property taxes) with national standards to toughen NCLB so that states and schools can't simply "race to the bottom" by making their tests easier to show "progress" as they are doing now. 

Both candidates seem to agree with Miller.  Obama will loosen union control gently through pay-for-performance, a nod to charter schools (though not much more federal funding), and his insistence on an 11 month school year and longer class days, all of which I support.  McCain's confrontation with unions is more forceful through competition both at the level of schools and at the level of teachers (fire the bad ones!) though without additional federal money.  While I don't think Obama's plan is bad, I'm a McCain supporter and based on Secretary Bennett's experience in the 1980's and the continuing poor performance of our schools, I favor McCain's approach (though I wish it were as rich in detail as Obama's).  

My biggest critique of the Obama plan, and frankly, in your defense of it, is the constant attacks on high stakes tests:  "teaching to the test," "filling in bubbles," "turning our children into little test takers."  Instead, you want a teaching regime of a "range of measures to test inquiry and
higher order thinking skills including inference, logic, data analysis and interpretation, forming questions, and communication" and Obama offers as an example an assessment in which students "design and conduct investigations, analyze and present data,
write up and defend results." Presumably, a teacher could "teach to the assessment", students would learn the scientific method but not much core science knowledge.

In his book "The Schools We Need," E.D. Hirsch argues that such assessments sound great but wind up being subjective.  He offers the example of students writing papers as an example of their writing abilities rather than taking tests where students select the grammatically correct phrase to complete a sentence.  The problem with the writing is that students write better on subjects they know very well and different teachers assess the same student's paper differently.  Like it or not, high stakes tests are the most objective assessment of student performance.  Perhaps a combination of tests and assessments are the way to go.  Students would have to demonstrate mastery of domain-specific core knowledge and then also demonstrate the ability to apply that knowledge.  If I could only have one, I'd want the students to have the core knowledge.

After all, it is the testing regime with which we compare our education with those around the world and decide that we are lacking.  If we envy other countries, shouldn't we emulate their best practices: core curriculum with standards tested on for each grade level, more equitable funding from school to school, and more performance for our school dollars?

Teacher's know the importance of differentiated learning, but we don't give them the resources, tringing and autonomy they need to bring what they know into the classroom. It's particularly egregious given the money and energy teachers spend on continuing education. It is insane, and politicians seem to be clueless about it. 

Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor ( http://blogher.org/blog/kim-pearson )|Professor Kim ( http://professorkim.blogspot.com/ )|

If this is Obama's educational plan, then I am filled with hope once more.  Thank you for the detailed post.

In response to Kim, most teachers -- at least the ones that I knew while teaching -- recognize the need to address different learning styles.  When I began teaching, it was in an urban area.  Probably more than 30% of my students were kinesthetic learners.  But often my hands were tied as to what I could do in the classroom.  Actually, they were most tied at the elementary school level.

At the middle school level, I was told that I just needed to teach the standards and was often given a great deal of leeway in how they were taught.  And more importantly, they were taught on a timeline that I had established, not some administrator.  I had built in cushions so that I could spend more time on any one topic I knew that I could.  In teaching elementary school, one often has to stick to a schedule that someone else has created.

If these changes actually happen, I might be inspired to re-enter the classroom.

I learned a lot from this post. Thanks so much for the clear, detailed explanation and critique.

A few thoughts:

1. You are dead-on about the need for clarity about formative assessment. Fortunately, there are a lot of good models out there.

2. The school leadership academy idea could be developed from a model such as New Jersey's professional development schools, which seem to work well, from what I've read. But I have a lot of questions about the funding and evaluation of such a program.

3. One item that is missing from all of the candidates' education plans is the need for greater support for cultural responsive teaching that reaches students with varied cultures and learning styles.  It's estimated that as many as 30 percent of our students are kinesthetic learners ( http://www.latitudes.org/articles/learn01.html ); our current schools fail them miserably. This is one reason I am so interested in videogames and simulations as educational tools.

Kim
BlogHer Contributing Editor ( http://blogher.org/blog/kim-pearson )|Professor Kim ( http://professorkim.blogspot.com/ )|

Thank you so much for laying it out so people like me can follow and then go read more for ourselves. Personally, I think that putting more into early childhood education is a good idea because much of how we view the world is formed then, but also I wonder if we shouldn't also put more money into middle school. I think I've read that early childhood is not the only period in which humans experience brain growth and mental and physical changes that give an opportunity to absorb more information and change thinking patters. Don't know where I read it, but I think I saw research that says preteen years are another time that we morph by leaps and bounds even in our brains. However, I'm no scientist.

What about more retroactive education for parents who goofed off and now realize they need lessons just to work with their own kids but lack the resources to do it alone? Smarter parents might make for smarter kids. ;-) I know that opens up an entirely new discussion.

I sometimes wonder if No Child Left Behind reflects Bush's academic shortcomings. He was a poor student and perhaps was so misguided in youth that he decided learning is all about whether you passed a test. He's never struck me as someone who loves knowledge for its own sake or who sees value in having critical thinking skills.  McCain's not the sharpest pencil ( http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/95C0AAF1-2C19-413E-B... ) in the drawer either.  Thank God for administration advisors, I suppose.

Again, thanks for a thorough examination of Obama's education plan.

Nordette ( http://blogher.org/blog/nordette ) is a Contributing Editor with BlogHer.com whose personal blog is hosted on another site at this link ( http://bigsole.blogspot.com ). Most recent BlogHer post, Baby and Me Behind Bars ( http://www.blogher.com/baby-and-me-behind-bars-num... ).

( http://blogher.org/blog/nordette )

Thanks for your thorough and detailed post, Leslie!  I agree strongly with your emphasis on "option B", encouraging and rewarding good teachers rather than punitive sanctioning entire schools or districts for not meeting the ever-increasing test score improvement goals. 

I also agree with you that restructuring schools to encourage team teaching is a great sign. 

About parent involvement, I have seen my own local district make great strides, by consistent behavior in communicating with parents in Spanish and English, providing simultaneous translation at meetings from the individual level to the school board meetings for the district, and providing or organizing child care during those meetings. After school homework help programs are useful especially if they are structured to use parents for tutoring help alongside the teachers. I think those and other "parent volunteer" positions should be paid part time positions. In other words it is crucial for every school to have a pot of money specifically earmarked to pay the most dedicated of parent volunteers rather than assuming that every school including the poorest has a pool of parents who will do a lot of unpaid labor.  

And rather than try to retrain parents to restructure their lives around sitting down to do homework with their children, create structures within the school that allow for collective action to do this.  

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Liz Henry ( http://www.blogher.com/haystackprofile/viewprofile... )
lizzard@bookmaniac.net ( http://liz-henry.blogspot.com/ )
Contributing Editor, World and Latin America
( http://www.blogher.com/blog/liz-henry )