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Progressive politics and Philly's Schools
Submitted by D.E. II on Tue, 03/07/2006 - 4:35pm.
A number of posts on this site have made reference to educational issues. I've wanted to put up a post myself on the relationship between education and "progressive" politics, but felt overwhelmed by the task of encapsulating such a complex topic in a post of reasonable length. Well, I've been inspired to finally put something up by an article I read today in BusinessWeek, of all places (amazing what the boredom of a Stairmaster will lead to). I've given up on the goals of making the post reasonably short and sufficiently comprehensive - but here's a foray nonetheless.
A few years back, I worked as a special education teacher - primarily working with kids labeled as "behaviorally disordered" or "learning disabled." My experiences in that capacity quickly became a lesson in the politics of education.
The connection to Philly's schools and progressive politics after the break
My first teaching assignment in special education was in a rather tony suburb of Boston. Despite the generally very upper-class character of the greater community, there was an interesting poor neighborhood tucked away in the center of the town: the legacy of a pocket of summer resort cottages that had become a community of "bootlegging gangsters" during the depression and prohibition.
One significant aspect of the overall demographics of the student body at the community's schools reflected the unique history of the town. The sub-section of students identified as "special needs" was disproportionately comprised of kids from the "bad side of the tracks." Those special education students that lived in the more wealthy sections of town almost invariably came from "dysfunctional families," and most of the other special needs population comprised African American kids who spent hours each day being bused from their neighborhoods in Boston. The point that I’m trying to make here is that it was striking to see how few of the "special needs" and "underfunctioning" kids came from high income, intact families in the community.
Okay, the demographics I described might not seem surprising. But as I worked with those "special needs" kids, I learned that they were very "bright" by quite a wide variety of standards. Many of them were street-wise in ways that seemed far beyond their years. I remember one student in particular, a boy who was among the lowest achievers by academic standards, who could flawlessly imitate the complex idiosyncrasies of every one of his teachers. He couldn't sit still in a classroom and perform mathematical algorithms for more than two seconds, but watching him fish on the local pond was a study in quiet efficiency and patience - as he carried out what amounted to a sophisticated sequence of "fishing" algorithms designed to out-fish anyone else around.
What I began to see was that the designation of "special needs," was not simply a product of the innate abilities of the students, but more a reflection of the standards our educational system uses to measure "intelligence." The attribute of being a "low achiever" was more reflective of a kid's background than his/her inherent qualities. And it was not purely coincidental that the paradigm used for measuring the students and their achievement reflected the values and qualities of a predominantly wealthy community. Far from being coincidental, it was dramatically political in nature.
The criteria used to judge students in our schools serve the function of perpetuating the status quo of our class structure. Our schools effectively work as a social sorting mechanism. Anyone who doubts that fact should consider the following statistics:
Share of U.S. students scoring above 1420 on the SAT in 2003, by family income quintile: Highest income, 46%; lowest income, 4%.
Share of U.S. students at the 146 top U.S. colleges since 1988 by socioeconomic quartile: Highest quartile, 74%; lowest quartile, 3%
Share of family income needed to pay for college in 2003/04, by family income quartile: Highest income, 11%; lowest income, 47%
Share of students going to college since 1988 by socioeconomic quartile:
Four year college: Highest income, 64%, lowest income, 14%
No college: Highest income, 11%, lowest income, 64%
Share of students with a BA by age 24 since 1988 by socioeconomic quartile: Highest income, 46%, lowest income, 8%
I can almost here Phillyphantom ranting as I type: "What is this guy talking about?" So, am I just a fringe lunatic?
Well, quoting the BusinessWeek article: "[Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst College]…made an impassioned appeal. Elite U.S. colleges such as Amherst, he said, are perpetuating the deep inequalities in American society. They equate success with serving the privileged elite and have largely abandoned talented youth from poor families, he charged. This deepens the country's growing class division and exacerbates the long-term decline in economic and social mobility."
Our system of public education was largely designed to prepare students to function in a hierarchically rigid industrial workplace. Consequently, conformity and uniformity to a limited criteria are valued attributes, and are largely important for success. But are such attributes really what students will need when they get out into the marketplace?
So, what does all this have to do with Philadelphia's schools? There have been quite a few comments on this forum related to Paul Vallas' policies, and their impact on our community. While I am not completely unsympathetic to the intent of some who support the standardization of curriculum and the increased use of standardized testing as ways to promote accountability and measure progress in our schools, in my opinion, such policies functionally fall right in line with perpetuating "deep inequalities in American society."
I don't have much expectation that Vallas could make stunning progress in redefining how our city approaches education. Our country's educational practices have remained remarkably consistent despite the efforts of progressive educators over the past 80 years to promote change.
But are there are school systems in our country which have made more of an effort to address underlying factors relating to perpetuating inequalities? And should progressives view claims of Vallas' success skeptically, since they are largely based on the standardization of curriculum and rising test scores (especially given valid questions about how those goals were operationalized)?
The BusinessWeek article deals most directly with the socioeconomic inequalities of college admission systems. Vallas' policies, obviously, have little direct influence on college admissions. But one larger issue that connects colleges to elementary and high school education is that they function together to create the educational barriers that confront students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. In order to tear down those barriers, our city's schools need to reconsider how they evaluate the "success" of students.
Increased funding for vocational training programs would be one way to begin; get students out into apprenticeship programs where they can learn problems solving skills in real-world contexts. That may or may not increase their SAT scores (I would argue that it would), but in addition to providing students important skills that can help if they don't attend college, it would also provide colleges with means to evaluate students beyond such a limited criterion as SAT scores. A progressive educational system should be moving as far a possible away from embracing the destructive mechanism (whether intended or not) of standardized testing.
Just as importantly, give teachers and schools the means to individualize curriculum, not increase standardization. Creativity and divergent thinking, as displayed by so many students in their ability to survive the obstacles they encounter in their communities, need to become integrated into new evaluative criteria, and supported. Standardized curriculum limits the definition of what should be taught and what attributes will be valued.
And despite the disdain that some who comment at this forum have for city funding of social workers to work with kids that have social problems, those kids will not succeed unless the greater community assumes financial responsibility for helping them deal with the social obstacles they face. I'm sure that there is waste and redundancy in the existing social service programs in our schools - but the solution is to work on making them more effective, not to de-fund them. Can any "progressive" doubt that?
All those measures (just to name a few) require increased funding. Just "throwing money at the system," in itself, will not create change. But along with true progressive leadership, increased and equitable funding is paramount.
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Glad to share the lunatic fringe with you
Good post!
I don't think you're a lunatic
Here's my philosophy with respect to poverty abatement in a nutshell and I don't think it's at all inconsistent with what you've said or with being "progressive" in general and it's applicable in the context of urban education: concentrated poverty is the enemy - at the community or school level - and the best way to improve schools or neighborhoods is to economically integrate them so that poor people are left living in areas or sending their children to schools that are isolated pockets of poverty. This isn't to say that the yuppies will come in, gentrify, and save the day, but sort of. Cities - including ours - have declined because the middle and upper middle class moved out, taking their social, intellectual, and real capital with them. We need it back - in the neighborhoods, in the schools, to make things work better. Government program are great when their targeted and deliver results, but it seems to me that real succes in cities is a lot more organic than that and occurs when diverse groups of people - mostly in the socio-economic sense - figure out how to work together to build communities in which all can prosper and thrive. I say money isn't the answer because the poverty of certain inner city schools cannot be addressed through better funding, because the issues making it difficult for kids to learn and achieve go far beyond the classroom into the streets and their living rooms.
Fair enough
Philly Phantom. And I do have points of agreement with your comments. But, to quibble:
"Cities - including ours - have declined because the middle and upper middle class moved out, taking their social, intellectual, and real capital with them."
Part of what I'm saying is that our schools measure poor kids against criteria that will ensure that they won't succeed. Those standards are based in a bias inherent in our schooling system - for example, an over reliance on a certain types of verbal skills and logico-mathematical reasoning* (read Howard Gardner's "Frames of Mind on that issue), the ability to sit quietly in their seats, or the ability to complete basically pointless homework tasks that are much easily done by kids who have their own desk in their own room in their nice big house after they've just had a big fat dinner.
I buy the part about "real capital," but the points about "intellectual" and "social" capital I think are at least partially reflective of a rigged system.
"I say money isn't the answer because the poverty of certain inner city schools cannot be addressed through better funding, because the issues making it difficult for kids to learn and achieve go far beyond the classroom into the streets and their living rooms."
Again, I agree to an extent. But better schools are needed to be a piece of a multi-pronged approach to solving the larger problem of entrenched and "concentrated poverty." And more money is needed to make schools better - the most obvious examples being that better salaries can attract better teachers, more money can reduce teacher/student rations (could the be a more obvious variable that would improve schools?), and more money can provide better facilities and supplies, etc.
*that's not to say that certain types of verbal skills and logico-mathematical reasoning are necessarily culturally specific. But kids who grow up in homes where those elements are more prevalent are more likely to succeed according to those measures - and those measures are not necessarily the only, or even the best ways to measure "intelligence" or the ability to function successfully in the world outside of school. In fact, measures such as SAT scores don't even correlate very highly with students' ability to do well in college - despite the fact that they are almost universally used as admission criteria.
Agree but Don't Quite Get How it Works
I buy into what your saying that judging poor kids (or quite frankly kids of any socio-economic class) is sort of rigid and "rigged", but what do we replace these kinds of performance measurements with? This is paternalistic, I admit it, but I want to push back on the "social" and "intellectual" capital piece; failing neighborhoods suffer from having a critical mass of individuals - adults - who haven't and continue to make bad decision with respect to both their personal and public lives. This is because anybody with the means to move has gotten out...check out N. Philly and how the population has emptied out over the decades as middle and upper middle class blacks fled to better neighborhoods or out of the City completely. I know this isn't very "progressive", but personal responsibilty is really much more important to solving social problems than we on the "left" like to say publicly. This is a sweeping generalization, and not everybody in a failing neighborhood fits this mold, but a "critical mass" does exist that brings the entire neighborhood down, infects it's culture, demoralizes its people, and brings down its economy. Looking forward to the shitstorm that rains down on me for my last comment :)
I do understand what you're saying, I just don't see it clearly or see how "regular" people who aren't insightful and reflective will ever embrace this kind of perspective.
Making Better Choices Requires Having Better Choices
Philly Phantom wrote:
It is certainly the most important and often repeated talking point of conservatives on almost any issue to characterize the left as ignorant of the importance of personal responsibility in social ills but it is just plain wrong. What you mean to say with phrases like “money isn't the answer” is that in your mind personal responsibility is the whole answer. Children coming to school eager to learn is not enough! Teachers being well paid is not enough! Smaller classes are not enough! You need both personal responsibility and a system that works.
No sentence is a more fitting description of your view of poverty than your sweeping generalization. Go to school hungry, live in fear of violence, be told that you are poor because your mother lacks “personal responsibility”, look forward to a future where employment involves a long commute on bus to earn an income that leaves you living in poverty. Would you find that demoralizing? Of course this isn’t your characterization is it, the picture you slyly paint is of indolence and bad choices. Making better choices is both about making the right choices and about having a better set choices to make.
OK
I agree with your last sentence...having better choices is important, but I think that comes with living in economically integrated communities that are not vast islands of poverty, which is why I think that gentrification is generally a good thing - it puts people of means in places where they heretofore had not been. Bringing all of this back to the subject of the original post, the reason why all of this seems important to me is that I don't know of any urban place in the country that has been able to pull off this poverty abatement thing well without simply having a good a good socio-economic mix of people, working together, going to the same schools, living in the same neighborhoods, etc. When the cops are at your door, when the social worker is in your living room, when you come to school hungry, when your parents aren't engaged in your scholastic life, you really start out at a disadvantage. I don't see how you reverse that unless you're exposed to a different and "better" world, again - coming through greater economic integration - rich, poor, and middle class living and working with and near each other.
And just a point about the right and "personal responsibility", yes - they say it a lot and they're full of crap (mostly), but they live in Radnor. I've lived in the city long enough to know that people make a lot of dumb choices and one way we can help them - to show them we really care about them - is to collectively and respectively let them know that they need to make better choices and to take responsibility for their destinies. I know, very simplistic. By the way, what are we both doing up so late?
back to schools
I could spend some time debunking Phil Phantom's flawed logic (didn't I tell you about Phantoming around here? who are you?) but that would take too much away from DE II's post.
Great work! I like the first person, experiential approach to the topic of school performance. And you are reaffirming such a basic point: schools need to be funded at a level to be able to compensate for economic disparity in the community,
I wonder though a bit about your call for more teacher-based creativity in curriculum. I think the standardization of curriculum for purposes of "teaching to the test" is pretty problematic, but i think some kind of core curriculum, vetted by curricular experts, is key. Especially young teachers don't have the experience or skill to manage classroom behavior, deal with individual personalities and create comprehensive curriculum.
Beyond this issue, I'd like to hear more about your perspective on Philly and Vallas in particular. For instance, our rate of low-income student matriculation to college is pretty low, so even with the improvements in place for evaluation that would allow more kids to go to college, i think there are challenges at the elementary level that have to be dealt with. What do you think we should do there?
The Phantom Never Sleeps!
Philly Phantom I agree very much that neighborhood matters. Neighborhoods integrated by race and ethnicity, age, occupation, income, and family size would solve many problems. Bad policy has created islands of poverty which have become self-perpetuating. I think we need a different term for what you are hoping for than gentrification. At least as I think I understand it, gentrification means high income households move into an area bid up housing prices and rents which eventually drive everybody else out. Perhaps you could write a separate post on the main page expanding upon the following sentence:
In particular I would be interested in the places you feel are doing this and what set of policies they are following. Since you never sleep you could knock this out in very short order.
I would conclude with a caution that even if you got a better socio-economic mix in the schools there is a tendency as I think D.E.II discusses of kids being academically segregated by socio-economic status even within the same school.
on curriculum
Ray, I'm not suggesting that you take a brand new teacher, hand them a piece of chalk, pat them on that back, and say, "go gettum' kid."
The place where we agree is that teaching to the test should never be considered valid curriculum - although increasingly its all teachers can really do. But rather than standardizing curriculum, new and veteran teachers should be given support for curriculum development.
Sure, it makes sense to have a general scope and sequence of which fundamental concepts be covered in which years. But the idea that curriculum design should be centralized and conducted by "experts" only reinforces misconceptions about the active nature of quality education. Standardized curriculum says to the teachers that teaching is a rote, passive process. Administrations tell them precisely what to teach and when to teach it, because they're trying to make it "idiot-proof," as if somehow that would ensure that there aren't any slackers. In addition to the fact that such an approach won't work to eliminate slackers, it also sends exactly the wrong message to students about education: their teachers are idiots, and teaching is a passive process where you do what someone tells you to do. Education should be a collaborative effort on the part of administrators, students, and their teachers to create a richly contextualized curriculum that has personal relevance and meaning to everyone involved. Also, standardizing curriculum means that there's no room left for creative, alternative projects - such as apprenticeship programs. There was a constant problem with the students I worked with in that they were prevented from engaging in activities that capitalized on their strengths, made them excited, and provided them with meaningful skill development because the had to fulfill curricular requirements that were designed for some mistaken concept of a "model" student.
Asking teachers to get more involved in curriculum design would certainly be overwhelming for many teachers. But why? Well, certainly in part because as our schools exist teachers have way too many students in their classrooms, have to constantly worry about "covering the material" and how their students will score on standardized tests, and have to spend so much of their time dealing with the social problems of their students because the school aren't adequately staffed with social service providers.
And one more point on that issue. Have you turned on right-wing talk radio lately? Take a look at which elements in our society really promote standardized curriculum. For the most part, it's right wingers who complain about those liberal hippie teachers that want to indoctrinate our youth with their Communist ideologies. Instead, they want "geography taught in the geography classroom," i.e., they want to have curriculum rigidly structured and limited in terms of what "should" and "shouldn't" be taught. Remember the book "Cultural Literacy?" Standardized curriculum can include multi-cultural components (as happened recently in Philadelphia), but please don't ignore its potential to serve the purpose of those who rail against multi-cultural education.
High School Graduation and College Attendence
In 2004, 10,331 kids graduated from Philadelphia High Schools, the highest number in over a decade. Based on 2003-2004 date from the Penn. Dept. of Ed., 67% of these kids plan on attending a two or four year college, 3% are heading off to a specialized associate degree-granting institution, and 4% plan to attend a non-degree granting postsecondary school.
seems awfully polemic
maybe I was unclear: i don't believe in standardized curriculum like what Edison uses where literally there is a text that gets read out loud to students and teachers are not allowed to deviate.
i do believe that teachers needs guidance on what to teach and how to teach it. for instance, i do not believe that phonics is a good way to teach people to read. i also believe that good math and science instruction includes a lot of writing and cross-pollination of skills
These kinds of best practices don't come out of thin air (as we well know from looking at our city's economic development model or lack thereof): there is a need to people with special expertise and time to pay attention to research and other methods to create the curricular foundations. Many districts, including Philadelphia, DO create teams to write curriculum that include teachers. This could be improved obviously.
However, the biggest obstacle, in my mind, for urban teachers is unmanageable class size and a lack of admin support- both of which generally come from lack of funds. Every school needs to be able to create small classes and have enough assistant principals and leadership team types to support learning.
questions
First of all, total numbers don't necessarily tell us anything. What about percentages of Philly's students that actually graduate. Has that percentage increased under Vallas? If so, agreed, that's an important measure.
And what about relative numbers on percentages of graduates that attend college or other post-secondary education?
There can be
a long way between giving teachers guidance on what to teach and how to teach it, and standardized curriculum.
I also question such methodologies as basing reading instruction on phonics (as opposed to more of a "whole language" orientation), and I agree that good science and math instruction should involve "cross-pollination" of skills. And teachers who use less progressive methodologies, not out of choice but out of ignorance of alternative pedagogical perspectives (I am skeptical of educational "experts" - we can all think of teachers that use old-fashioned methodologies to great effect) should be moved to better their approaches by school administrations. I'm not saying that administrations should abdicate their role to provide guidance and inform teachers about research into the science and art of teaching - or to evaluate the effectiveness of how well teachers do their job.
But guidance is not necessarily the same thing as standardized curriculum. And I guess the relevant question is where does the rubber hit the road in Philly's public schools as a result of Vallas' policies. I don't really know, because I'm not teaching in Philly's schools. But I have heard from some teachers that their ability to really connect with students, and to make their teaching a creative process, have been circumscribed both by the recent focus on standardized testing AND the increased standardization of curriculum. I don't know if many public school teachers read this forum or might respond - but I think that to really understand the effect of Vallas' policies we need to have the input of teachers.
Also, I'm questioning the widely-held belief that standardizing curriculum really leads to accountability, or increases the efficacy of measuring teacher performance.
The comments that one teacher has made on this forum indicated that because of preferential funding and lack of attention to safety issues, he felt that Vallas' administration has been a failure in terms of increasing his ability to meet the needs of his students.
Philly Public Schools
Good to see that the debate on the schools is still going on. The oversized classes In Philly (which Vallas claims to have reduced) are a problem not only because of numbers, but the abilities of the students. Social promotion is alive and well in the Philadelphia School District.
As an elementary school teacher I have to teach on at least four different grade levels even though I am technically teaching one grade level. This means I am teaching basic phonics to some kids while I'm teaching main idea or sequencing to others. We are constantly testing these kids (including giving reading tests that provide data which we don't even use). It takes months, if not years, to get children tested. Even once they are tested there is no gurantee of any extra support. As a result teachers are expected to teach "Guided Reading" groups where they work with four or five kids on one goal while the rest of the class works at their desks. In the overcrowded classrooms this unrealistic. There is an untrained aide who is tries to keep on top of things, but we end up having to supervise while trying to teach our small groups at the same time. The reason for this is the decisionmaking policies of politicians that ignore the experience of teachers.
Educational policy is driven by the financial desires of the administration. The 30% cuts we are currently experiencing are directly connected to the budget overruns of the administration. When they built the new administration building they ran 22 million over their budget. The public was told the district was 20, then 24 million in debt. Cutbacks began shortly after that announcement. Nevels claims the new administration building would "help" the children. We're still waiting to hear how it is "helping" anyone other than the politicans and their appointees.
In this new administration building there are empty rooms for each of the schools in the district. They are suppose to be for school meetings even though we have never had any such meetings or knew about any such meetings. While these empty rooms gather dust teachers are trying to navigate through their crowded classrooms. We reach into our own pockets to buy the very things the district claims to have given us (copy paper, markers, pencils, etc.)
The percentage of graduating students has little to do with actual learning. It is more a case of "smoke and mirrors" are the part of the decisionmakers in power.