I did not watch the first Democratic
debate on October 13, 2015. However, I
did read and listen to some of the analyses that followed. Among the topics analyzed were income
inequality, health care, the Iran nuclear deal, gun control, Black Lives
Matter, foreign policy, Benghazi, health care, bank bailouts, the economy, and
more.
But one thing I did not learn from the
analyses was the candidates’ thoughts and proposals regarding K-12
education. Why? Because the topic was never addressed. And why was it not addressed? Because, incredibly, ever since No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) was passed in 2001 with overwhelming bipartisan support, there
has been virtual unanimity among both Democratic and Republican politicians on
governmental and corporate education policy and “reforms.” Debate topics on
which everyone already agrees tend not to contribute to an interesting and
fruitful debate.
Nonetheless, I remained curious as to
how the Democratic candidates stood on K-12 education, especially since
millions of students, parents, and educators across the country have been extremely
disappointed with the direction of K-12 education policy during the Obama
years. In the interest of time, space,
and sensibility, I looked into the education proposals of only the Democratic
frontrunners, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Specifically, I wanted to know if the
election of either of them would hold any promise for a change of direction in
national education policy over the last seven years. The short answer is “no.”
Here is what I found.
Hillary Clinton
Clinton’s website (www.hillaryclinton.com)
lists three main objectives concerning K-12 public education. I have read and re-read these
objectives. If anything stands out with
her policies, it is her embrace of the corporate “reform” agenda and her
ability to speak in codes coated with liberal rhetoric so as to cast that
agenda as something any good and obedient liberal would support. Here in a nutshell is the Good and mostly Bad
Hillary on K-12 public education.
Clinton “believes in making high
quality education a priority for every child in America.” Hillary supports continued annual
high stakes tests. She rationalizes
this support as a civil rights issue. As
the “liberal” logic goes, high stakes tests are the only guaranteed way to
bring to light and address the achievement gap between our most privileged
students and our most non privileged students.
At the same time, however, she says there is too much testing, test
prep, and narrowing of the curriculum due to the fact that only math and
language arts are consistently tested.
Madame Secretary, you can’t have it both ways. You cannot simultaneously support and assail
high stakes tests and expect to be taken seriously by enlightened public school
students, parents, and teachers.
Clinton also supports “high academic
standards for all children.” This is
code for the Common Core. The Common
Core are elite, inflexible, universal, whitewashed standards that address only
math and language arts, and in a very narrow and prescriptive manner. What’s more, the Common Core are tailored to
the cultures and academic needs and interests of white, English speaking,
middle class Americans and are therefore far removed from the academic needs
and interests of bilingual children and children of color, many of whom are the
very children Hillary purports to want to help with continued high stakes tests
that are now linked directly to the Common Core standards. Hillary’s support of the Common Core,
therefore, demonstrates a lack of support for the 51% of children of color who
now populate our public schools.
Clinton “wants to support educators.” Hillary believes we need more high quality
educators. This rhetoric plays directly
into the unsubstantiated myth of the Super Teacher promoted by Bill Gates and
other corporate reformers. Those who
believe that Super Teachers are the solution to the education “crisis” and the
growing teacher shortage assume that it is bad teaching that led us to this
perceived education crisis and this very real teacher shortage in the first
place, and bad teaching that has kept us there.
Where will these Super Teachers come
from? Apparently, Clinton is convinced
they are not currently teaching in our public schools. She believes in recruiting the “best and the
brightest” into the profession. This is
code for Teach For America and other teacher preparation programs designed more
to enhance the resumés of their graduates than the scholastic achievement of
the “at risk” students they attempt to teach for an average of two years before
leaving the profession permanently for law school, medical school, or Wall
Street.
According to teacher workforce expert
Richard Ingersoll, recruiting new teachers from the best and the brightest
college graduates—or from the worst and dimmest graduates, for that
matter—misses the mark when it comes to addressing the chronic teacher
shortages now sweeping the country.
Ingersoll has stated emphatically to anyone who will listen that it is
far more effective to find ways to retain knowledgeable and experienced
teachers than it is to recruit new teachers who, by definition, are far less
experienced and knowledgeable and who have historically left the profession at
rates of 50% before their first five years.
But the myriad school reforms begun under Presidents Reagan and Bush I
with a Nation at Risk, continued under Hillary’s husband with Goals
2000, and under Presidents Bush II and Obama with No Child Left Behind and
Race to the Top, have done more than anything else to drive the best,
brightest, the most expert, and the most experienced veteran teachers from the
profession. If Hillary continues the
education “reforms” of the past five presidents, there will be few
knowledgeable and experienced veteran teachers to retain.
Hillary also supports more teacher
“training.” This is code for reformist
brainwashing. As any public school
teacher can tell you, what used to be called professional development or
collaboration is now called training.
Unlike professional development and collaboration of the past, which was
controlled almost entirely by teachers, today’s “trainings” consist of school
administrators and representatives from the corporate world taking over the
agendas of teacher meetings and indoctrinating teachers with the latest
corporate “reforms.” Some really smart
person once said: Training is for
animals; education is for people.
Clinton “wants to improve student
outcomes.” Yes, this is code for
“outcomes based education,” the corporate reformers’ model for education. Think widgets on an assembly line where all
widgets are identical, proceed along the assembly line at the same speed, and
all end up on the same shelves of Target or Wal-Mart. Outcomes based education means curriculum is
narrowed to include only subjects and lessons that produce finite and discreet
quantitative answers that can be measured using standardized methods, such as
high stakes tests. What’s more, the
outcomes are directly linked to teacher effectiveness, the assumption being,
the greater the student achievement on standardized tests, the more effective
the teacher, and vice versa. No other
factors are considered when it comes to determining student outcomes and
teacher effectiveness; not poverty, language, immigration status, domestic
violence, parents’ levels of education, the quality or existence of a school
library, environmental dangers, school nutrition, length of daily recesses,
etc. It is all about teacher
effectiveness as determined by standardized measures of student achievement.
Bernie Sanders
Bernie Sanders’ main web page (www.berniesanders.com)
lists the following as major campaign topics.
As you can see, K-12 pubic education is nowhere to be found.
Income
and wealth inequality
College
tuition debt
Big
money and politics
Decent
paying jobs
A
living wage
Climate
change and the environment
Racial
and social justice
Fair
and humane immigration policy
LGBT
equality
Fighting
for our veterans
Reforming
Wall Street
Real
family values
The
Iran nuclear weapons deal
After posting this list online, I
received a tip from an educator and Sanders supporter who directed me to www.feelthebern.org. Who knew?!
On that site, I found a rather in-depth discussion of K-12 public
education that contained positions I, as an educator for over 30 years, both
support and oppose. I have therefore
decided to discuss Sanders’ education proposals in terms of the Good Bernie I
would support as opposed to the Bad Bernie I would oppose.
Good Bernie. Among
the positions I support is Sanders’ opposition to the excessive testing
and punitive practices of NCLB. In his
own words:
“I
voted against [NCLB] in 2001, and continue to oppose the bill’s reliance on
high-stakes standardized testing to direct draconian interventions. In my view,
[NCLB] ignores several important factors in a student’s academic performance,
specifically the impact of poverty, access to adequate health care, mental
health, nutrition, and a wide variety of supports that children in poverty
should have access to. By placing so much emphasis on standardized testing,
[NCLB] ignores many of the skills and qualities that are vitally important in
our 21st century economy, like problem solving, critical thinking, and
teamwork, in favor of test preparation that provides no benefit to students
after they leave school.”
Sanders’
website goes on to say “Instead of NCLB, Bernie has called for a more holistic
method of education that gives teachers more flexibility and students more
support systems.”
Sanders also supports teachers’ unions,
collective bargaining, and increased teacher pay. He opposes all right-to-work
legislation.
He is strongly opposed to private
school vouchers which, as he correctly points out, redirect public funds to the
private sector. Furthermore, Sanders
opposes income disparities between rich and poor districts and will work to
reduce or eliminate those disparities, though he doesn’t say how the federal
government might do this.
Sanders opposes the Student Success Act
(SSA) which can be construed as a warmed over version of NCLB that includes
many of the worst elements of RTTT and other Obama era “reforms,” including
annual high stakes testing and the redirection of public funds to the private
sector.
However, like all complex bills in which political
compromise is operative, the SSA contains many provisions my like minded
colleagues and I would consider positive, such as alternative assessments for
students with severe disabilities, relabeling “limited English proficient
students” as “English language learners,” and a prohibition on federal
government coercion as a means to force states to adopt national standards and
curricula. In opposing the SSA, Sanders
is also opposing provisions within it that address elements of NCLB he finds
the most objectionable.
Finally, Sanders supports the expansion
of after school programs.
Bad Bernie. One area
in Sanders’ education policy where I have some concerns is his support of
privately run “public” charter schools, although he tempers his support of them
with admonishments regarding accountability and transparency, two areas where
many charter schools are woefully inadequate.
Another area of concern is Sanders’
continued support of annual high stakes standardized testing. While he does say that testing has become
excessive, he does not question the validity of the tests for measuring student
achievement. Nor does he question their
usefulness to classroom teachers.
Educators across the country see no good at all in privately funded,
off-the-shelf, standardized measures of achievement and would prefer they be
abolished altogether. There is no
indication on Sanders’ website that he would support the abolition of high
stakes standardized tests.
The Bad Bernie becomes more evident in
a recent vote on the Senate floor. In
July of this year Sanders and most of his Democratic colleagues voted in favor
of the Murphy Amendment to the Every Child Achieves Act. According to education expert and blogger
Mercedes Schneider, this amendment would have revived or worsened the worst and
most punitive elements of NCLB. Needless
to say, this does not square with Sanders’ vociferous opposition to the legacy
of NCLB. At the very least is represents
political ignorance; at worse, hypocrisy.
But perhaps my greatest concern about
Sanders’ education policy is his support of the Common Core. His own website states,
While
Bernie has neither outright endorsed nor opposed the Common Core, he voted in early
2015 against an anti-Common Core amendment that would “prohibit the
federal government from ‘mandating, incentivizing, or coercing’ states into
adopting Common Core or any other standards.”
Without
going into a discussion about the Common Core, let me just say that his
opposition to the anti-Common Core amendment is indeed an endorsement of the
Common Core. What’s more, his support of
the Common Core stands to undermine many of his other positions on education,
including his support of children living in poverty, an expanded curriculum,
reduction in standardized testing, and so on.
Like the opt-out movement, opposition to the Common Core cuts across
partisan lines: it appeals as much to
Tea Party conservatives as it does to those on the liberal left, albeit for
very different reasons. If Sanders’ were
to oppose the Common Core, he could win votes from across the political
spectrum. The Common Core is a rapidly
sinking vessel. Sanders would do well
to jump ship now.
Conclusion
My liberal, Democratic
colleagues and I have been very, very disappointed with President Obama’s
education policies and have spent most of his presidency fighting them. Neither Clinton’s nor Sanders’ education
proposals differ much from those of Obama (or from those of most of the
Republican candidates, for that matter). We are equally disappointed with the myriad issues neither candidate addresses or on which neither takes a stand: the growing parent-student opt out movement, punitive teacher evaluations, school grading, teacher "merit" pay, the needs and rights of English language learners and bilingual education, culturally responsive curricula, and so on. These are the issues teachers, parents, and students are most concerned about. These are the very issues that the candidates seem to be ignoring even in their inchoate attempts to address K-12 education.
Consequently, if either of Clinton or Sanders is elected president, we cannot expect much change from Obama's education agenda. Instead, we will very
likely have to prepare ourselves for at least four more years of the same
punitive, corporate education “reforms” their predecessor has so shamelessly
promoted over the last eight years. And
while it is true that Sanders’ proposals hold more hope for public education
that do those of Clinton, we should know by now what to expect of promises of
Hope.