Last week, a new mayor was elected in New York, Atlanta reelected its mayor, and elected a new slate of members to the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) Board of Eduction.  What can we learn from the elections in these two cities? Will education in New York set the stage for a large-scale rethinking of the corporate reform model that is driving American education?

Will Atlanta review the trajectory of reform it followed during past ten years which resulted in the Atlanta Cheating Scandal?  Or will Atlanta’s new School Board and yet be hired school superintendent consider systemic reform, rather than the reductionist approach of separate parts, each of which needs to be fixed.

In this post I want to highlight some ways Atlanta might learn from the election here, but in New York as well. Are there lessons to learned? Or is Atlanta too focused on charters, Teach for America, and other corporate intrusions into public education. Indeed, Mayor Reed wants to ask for corporate donations of $300,000 to double the next superintendent’s salary.

In New York, the election of Bill de Blasio as mayor represents an about-face on what needs to be done to improve teaching and learning in the largest school district in the U.S.  In New York, de Blasio’s election is seen as a victory for those parents and educators who have voiced strong objection to the current reform efforts including charter schools, vouchers, considering inexperienced and unlicensed teachers as “effective educators,” the use of VAM scores to judge teachers and the high-stakes test mania.

In Atlanta, the APS faces its biggest challenge in years.  It elected a new school board to replace a board that was seated during the time that a culture of fear (Georgia Governors report) dominated the schools, leading to the biggest test erasure scandal in the country.  Please keep in mind, however, that Atlanta is not the only city where cheating occurred.  The Atlanta Journal not only exposed cheating in the APS, but they reported high-stakes test cheating in many other U.S. school districts, including New York and D.C.

In an article about the New York mayor’s election in The Nation, the authors outlined five areas of reform that they believe will emerge from de Blasio’s election.  The five areas they outlined include: The economy and inequality, Labor, Housing and homelessness, Education, and Policing and criminal justice.

I am going to focus in on education, and use of the authors’ notes to discuss education, not only in Atlanta, but the metro-Atlanta area as well. Is the reform in New York relevant to the Atlanta area?

Purpose of School

The Atlanta School Board should raise the question that Mr. Ed Johnson (a candidate for the APS Board of Education) urged the board to consider, and that is what is the purpose of education in the APS and what role will the board play to help meet these purposes.  In an interview, Ed Johnson was asked what he thought were the biggest challenges for the APS.

His reply was:

Atlanta Public Schools is its own single biggest challenge.  But it won’t look in the mirror to see that it is.  Not even after the massively systemic CRCT cheating crisis and scandal it spawned.  This means APS is an entangled mess of challenges that must not be reduced to just two biggest challenges.  However, two central root-cause facets of the APS mess of challenges are: 1) lack of a Statement of Purpose to serve as a touchstone for thinking, behaving, and making decisions; and, 2) too much of classrooms responding to administration demands and too little of administration responding to classroom demands.

Without having an agreed upon statement of purpose, the APS runs the risk of falling in line with the reform goals and purposes implicit in Georgia’s Race to the Top (RT3). Atlanta is one the 26 RT3 partner districts., which means it receives millions of dollars of the $400 million RT3.   The purpose of schooling, as documented in the RT3 plan is to prepare students for college and career readiness. Student achievement scores are used as the metric for readiness using unscientific target scores. The language for these stated purposes comes directly from the U.S. department of Education (ED).

In research focused on why we teach science reported on this blog, documents like The Common Core State Standards, and the Next Generation Science Standards ignore the Why question, and go directly to the What (will be learned) and When questions.  Why do we teach science, or mathematics, or English/language arts are not addressed in the standards.  We skirt around this fundamental question.

What is the purpose of public education? For example, if we were to ask education leaders why do we teach science, the answer would be rooted in the “economic argument” one of four arguments that were identified in previous articles on this blog.  The four arguments include:

• The Economic Argument
• The Democratic Argument
• The Skills Argument
• The Cultural Argument

The economic argument is by far the dominate reason why we teach science, math and reading, especially in the more advanced and prosperous countries.    It is a pipeline conception, where students are channeled up to post-secondary schools to study science, technology and engineering.  The goal is produce more scientists and engineers to meet the supply demands in science-related fields. The problem is that crises in manpower shortages has been greatly exaggerated and only 2/3s of people majoring in science actually take jobs in science.  The economic argument is not a new force that has triggered “national fear” about science, math and technology.  Please see my discussion of this which started in 1945 with the publication of Science, The Endless Frontier.

We’ve been led to believe that our national security and the nation’s economic growth is somehow directly related to student achievement test scores in math and science.  It just isn’t so.

Comparative data used from TIMMS and PISA achievement scores has undermined the teaching of science, mathematics and reading, and is used in policy debates as if the results are flawless. The argument goes that if we can boost the test scores of 15 old boys and girls, the nation’s economy will grow. This results in a narrowing of curriculum and more time in class. The new national frameworks (Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards) are good examples of reform rooted in the economic argument.

There is more to a public education than reaching for benchmarks that have no basis scientifically.  Telling parents that their kids have to score at some predetermined level is not only absurd—it is not valid.  These benchmarks are based on standards, which are subjective decisions made by committee’s of experts.  As Diane Ravitch clearly shows in her book, Reign of Error, the people who write the standards make their judgements about what students should know, and how well they should know it.  As she says:

None of this is science.

Why are we doing this?  Is it because we have limited ourselves to thinking about the lowest common denominator when it comes to thinking about what schooling can be in a democratic society?

Struggling Schools

A new plan is needed to support struggling schools. The state plan is use student achievement scores to name struggling schools (also, schools that are doing well, by the way.) The use of this system is demeaning to students and teachers, alike. Instead of using high-stakes exams, which do not help teachers to change instruction, and which should offer students feedback that might help them understand the content of the exam, we should be working with teachers to devise and carry out formative assessment approaches which have been found to actually affect student learning. To continue with high-stakes is a huge waste of resources and talent.

Communities of Learning

In New York, the new mayor has said that a “strategic partnerships in high-poverty neighborhoods is needed. Schools in these areas need social workers, psychologists and health clinics to address the broad array of problems that accompany poverty (approximately 70 percent New York’s public school children come from families near or below the poverty line).” This is a an important consideration that the Atlanta Board of Education should have high on their list of priorities.

New Waivers

The school board should ask for a waiver from the Georgia Department of Education on the use of VAM scores, and the Keys Teacher Observation package. Neither of these systems is reliable or valid measures of teacher effectiveness. Although the Legislature has mandated the use of VAM scores as 50% of a teacher evaluation, the research to support this for each teacher does not exist. To continue with this plan is unconscionable. Atlanta needs to take the lead by requesting a waiver, and at the same time develop a plan that would result in a fairer and more effective evaluation program.

The APS should also ask for a waiver on high-stakes tests in mathematics, science and English/Language Arts for at least three years.  During this time, the Georgia Department of Education should consider new and fairer ways to evaluate students, teachers and schools.  Evaluation should be based on a richer and fuller conception of schooling that rockets past the tired and old refrain of measuring achievement in math and reading.

Hire Professionally Licensed Teachers

Hire certified teachers, and make an effort to staff struggling schools with experienced teachers. One way to make use of the flood of TFA teachers is to place them in struggling schools under the mentorship of experienced teachers. TFA interns would also be enrolled at GSU or other Atlanta area colleges to complete courses for a teaching license. Early childhood and elementary internships should be facilitated in K-6 grades. Interships for secondary teachers should include an term at a middle school and a term at a high school.

Charter Schools

A word on charters: these schools received more attention than any other education issue during the campaign (and a disproportionate amount of support from the outgoing mayor), even though they serve little more than 6 percent of New York’s children. Mayor de Blasio will have to reduce some of the conflict between charter and public schools over issues like co-location so that he can create a more cooperative environment and focus on improving the schools the vast majority of children attend.

Like New York, Atlanta has embraced charter schools, and it proponents see them as the solution to struggling schools (if they are not closed).  It is a mistake to continue to think that charters, which often are staffed with inexperienced teachers, are a sustainable solution to improving education.  Too often, bargains have been made with outfits such as Teach for America and The New Teacher Project to staff struggling schools.  We’ve ignored the research on charter schools that shows them to far less effective than “regular” public schools.

Atlanta has an opportunity to learn from its past and also to look to the sentiments of educators around the country who are rejecting the corporate model of schooling which is not in the best interests of students and their parents.  What do you think about this?