Teaching By Numbers

Deconstructing the Discourse of Standards and Accountability in Education

Peter Maas Taubman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135886288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Over the last decade the transformation in the field of education that is occurring under the twin banners of "standards" and "accountability" has materially affected every aspect of schooling, teaching, and teacher education in the United States. Teaching By Numbers, offers interdisciplinary ways to understand the educational reforms underway in urban education, teaching, and teacher education, and their impact on what it means to teach. Peter Taubman maps the totality of the transformation and takes into account the constellation of forces shaping it. Going further, he proposes an alternative vision of teacher education and argues why such a program would better address the concerns of well-intentioned educators who have surrendered to various reforms efforts. Illuminating and timely, this volume is essential reading for researchers, students, and professionals across the fields of urban education, curriculum theory, social foundations, educational policy, and teacher education.

Chapter 1
Introduction

“I am talking about a climate that each of us knows, in part, but that we dare not generalize about, because we cannot see the whole picture; yet the time has come to start connecting the dots.”

—Lindsay Waters (2004, 7)

When I was a young boy in the early 1950s I enjoyed drawing, and I would often watch the John Gnagy show on our Sylvania black and white television, entranced by how easily he could conjure forms from within a framed blankness. Most of my friends were not interested in the show. If my friends did draw, they did so with the help of a kit that had begun to appear in the early ’50s. It was called “paint by numbers.”

The paint by numbers kits, marketed as a way for everyman and everywoman to produce art as good as the real thing, simulated the creative experience, while offering the security of clear direction. The underlying message was that, given the time and the kit, anyone, with a little practice, could be an artist, although not an abstract artist. Paint by numbers kits avoided abstract designs, which were looked at with suspicion in those early years of the decade. Karel Ann Marling documents in “Hyphenated Culture: Painting by Numbers in the New Age of Leisure” (1994) that by 1954, when an actual exhibit of paint by numbers art was mounted in the Eisenhower White House, paint by numbers kits were turning a hefty profit. By the late 1950s “by the numbers” had replaced “by the book” as a pejorative term for mass culture’s formulaic products, and by the 1960s, with declining sales, paint by numbers kits had become camp.

The title for this book obviously cites that craze that swept the nation. I hope it also suggests how reducing painting to tyrannical numbers can soothe a neophyte’s existential anxiety but at the same time can trivialize the complicated mystery of art. The problem with painting by numbers was not necessarily that it produced bad art or debased the public’s aesthetic sense. In some ways it made the U.S., a nation not known for its appreciation of intellectual or artistic life (Hofstadter, 1962), a bit more involved in the process of making art. On the other hand, it suggested not only that anyone could paint, as long as they mechanically followed directions, but also that satisfying the predetermined outcomes constituted art. The parallels to teaching seem obvious.

There were four main reasons for my choosing the title of the book. First, I wanted to suggest that teaching, teacher education, and education have increasingly been abstracted and recoded as numbers such as test scores, numerical data generated by various measuring instruments, and most of all dollar amounts. These numbers give the impression that what happens in classrooms—extraordinarily complex, psychically tumultuous and potentially both ecstatic and maddening places of teaching—is best understood as objective, transparent, and measurable.

Second, I wanted to bring into focus the widespread belief that all students can learn as long as their teachers follow directions. For a variety of reasons, over the last eight years, teachers and teacher educators have embraced the most mechanistic approaches to pedagogy and curriculum in the belief that these would empower them and help their students.

Third, I wanted to suggest connections among the marketplace, various educational theories and practices purporting to be objective or scientific, and the aspirations of teachers for security, control, status, and meaning.

Finally, I wanted to bring into focus the transformation that has occurred and is occurring in education. To do that, as Lindsay Waters suggests in the above quote, I had to bring into view areas that had remained only vaguely visible. Although paint by numbers was not a matter of connecting the dots, by following the numbers a picture did emerge. In that sense, I too had to immerse myself in the mechanistic discourses and practices that constituted the transformation, so that I could make the connections among a vast array of practices, policies, institutions, organizations, theories, and structures of feeling that constitute the transformation I have tried to map. It may be that in following the numbers, so to speak, I too sacrificed complexity at times for expediency. I hope not.

The subtitle of the book is meant to signal to the reader that my major focus is on the transformation in education that has proceeded under the twin banners of standards and accountability. That transformation, perhaps the most extensive since the rise of public schools, is the main subject of the book. It is a transformation that has been exceedingly hard to map, although one that, as Waters, an executive editor at Harvard University Press, suggests above, everyone senses or knows a part of yet has been unable to fully grasp.

To bring the transformation into focus, I paradoxically needed to “deconstruct” or critically analyze—take apart—the rhetoric used by government officials, media pundits, CEOs, educators, psychologists, and educational policy makers. I wanted to highlight how eerily similar the rhetoric of those pushing for the privatization of education and the surveillance of teachers was to the rhetoric employed by those committed to public education and teacher autonomy. Meant to achieve antithetical ends, the rhetoric paradoxically produced the same dismal picture: incompetent teachers and dysfunctional teacher educators were jeopardizing the future of the nation’s youth, economy, democracy, and race relations, and unless major changes were implemented the nation was headed for disaster. The changes consisted of the implementation of standards and systems of accountability.

The title refers to the “discourse” of standards and accountability. Although there is no one monolithic discourse that constitutes the transformation we are witnessing in education, and although that transformation spreads through the implementation of a series of regulatory practices at the macro and micro levels, I wanted to suggest my sense of the totality of these. It is that sense of the transformation’s hegemonic status, its blanketing of an area—education—that had previously emerged as heterogeneous, that I was gesturing toward with the use of the singular.

The book grew out of my experiences over the last twelve years teaching and administrating at Brooklyn College’s School of Education and for the last five years consulting at a small urban high school in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. The work was also influenced by the many years I spent teaching high school English in New York. I came to higher education late in life. Whereas I received my doctorate in curriculum theory in 1980, and although I continued to publish, I didn’t become a professor of education until 1996.

Most of my writing until the 2000s struggled to understand how social identities, personal histories, and the elusive workings of the psyche, the irrational, and the body shaped my own teaching and life in classrooms. Rubbing Foucauldian analysis against Lacanian psychoanalysis, I tried to make sense of the mysteries of desire and impersonal mechanisms of control as these meet in teaching and curriculum. An English teacher, I looked to the humanities for insight. I never would have dreamed that one day I would write a book about the screaming absence in education of any attention to the inner life of teachers or the wisdom offered by the humanities. After all, I had started teaching in 1969, and over the next three decades experienced the major issues in education in terms of personal freedom and consciousness raising, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Civil Rights movement, feminism, the gay rights movement, and the struggle for economic equality. By the mid-1980s and through the 1990s the utopian energies that animated these movements had subsided, but they were still able to mobilize for what turned out to be a terrible final battle in the canon wars that swept through the academy and the media. When I arrived at Brooklyn College in 1996, that battle was still going on and the field of education was still very much involved.

At Brooklyn College’s School of Education, under the leadership of Madeleine Grumet, faculty members conversed about aesthetic education, the politics of identity, and the pairing of liberal arts and sciences courses with education courses. Such interdisciplinary and multicultural interests were not confined to Brooklyn College. The American Educational Research Association (AERA) titled its conferences in 1996, 1997, and 1998, respectively, “Research for Education in a Democratic Society,” “Talking Together in Educational Research,” and “Practice and Diversity and Citizenship in Multicultural Societies.” Division B of AERA, Curriculum Theory, whose membership at the time was expanding, as opposed to today, when it is declining, was clearly dominated by theories and approaches to research that reflected an interest in the arts, the humanities, feminism, gender studies, multiculturalism, and critical pedagogy. Furthermore, in the 1990s the Journal of Teacher Education, the Harvard Education Review, Curriculum Inquiry, and Teachers College Record, to name a few of the more prestigious journals in the field, devoted considerable space to issues related to the politics of identity, the arts in education, autobiographical research, and even queer theory, postmodernism, deconstruction, and poststructuralism. Between 1995 and 2001, The Review of Research in Education, AERA’s yearbook on educational research, published numerous articles on equity, politics, race, gender, identity, constructivism and critical literacy. There were no articles on standards, testing, or outcomes-based education. So in the waning years of the twentieth century there was a space for alternative understandings of teaching and education, although the discourse of standards was metastasizing across the nation. And then it all changed. And it seemed to change almost overnight.

I would not have felt compelled to write this book had I not witnessed first hand, in my work as an administrator and teacher, the devastating effects of the reform efforts under discussion. I felt I had to join with others (see for example Pinar, 2004) who believe as I do that the national conversation on teaching and teacher education is terribly askew. Someone once asked me, after a paper I had delivered, whom I was arguing with. This book is making an argument, which in its simplest form is that we need to talk about teaching, teachers, and education in much more nuanced and capacious ways than we currently do. But to do that we need to understand how and why we arrived at the place we are today and to clear a space for such discussions.

More specifically, I am arguing with those who maintain teaching is analogous to medicine, assert the goal of education is to prepare students for a global economy, claim teaching is a science, and insist measurable student learning should be and is the objective of good teaching. I believe strongly that we need to exorcise the superegoic voice of the learning sciences, which has helped lure us to the state in which we find ourselves today and to free ourselves from CEOs, who presume to know how best to approach teaching, the curriculum, and education. Driving the transformation I describe in this book is the desire for money, but that desire has disguised its mercenary intent in the purported altruism of standards and accountability.

Certainly one might reasonably ask how the transformation I map in this book differs from previous efforts in the U.S. to reform schools or from the long history of business’s attempts to influence educational policy or from the endless critiques of education and educators that have appeared over the years. How different is this transformation from, for example, the one in the first quarter of the twentieth century that Raymond Callahan described in Education and the Cult of Efficiency? There he detailed “the power of the business-industrial groups” to shape education policy and “the extent and degree of capitulation by administrators, to whatever demands were made upon them” by “their critics” (1962, i–ii). Or how different is it, one might wonder, from the massive infusion of federal and private monies into science and mathematics education in the 1960s and the consequent turn to science as the panacea for education’s troubles?

It is important to understand that the transformation I explore in this book is not simply a new version of the “cult of efficiency” or corporate intrusion into the classroom or education’s faith in science. What we are witnessing today is something new, and something much more dangerous than a worship of science or the “cult of efficiency.” Its uniqueness lies in its pervasiveness, its threat to the very foundations of public education, its wide embrace by the educational establishment, its direct assault on the intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical life of teachers, and its radical misunderstanding of teaching.

The transformation this book maps has over the last decade, profoundly affected all aspects of teaching, schooling, and teacher education in the United States. Although it is clearly not confined to the United States—its origins can be found in Margaret Thatcher’s England, and it now affects all developed countries and many developing ones—I focus in this book on the transformation in the U.S.

It is a transformation that in the name of educational reform may well render public education obsolete. It is certainly impoverishing the intellectual lives of teachers and students and having baleful consequences on teacher education. As Diane Ravitch, perhaps the most well known historian of education in the U.S., a former Assistant Secretary of Education, and paradoxically one of the key architects of the transformation, warned in her February 2007 keynote address to the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, AACTE:

I think we really do face a situation that can justly be called a crisis. Never have I felt more certain that public education itself hangs in the balance . . . I don’t think the American public has any idea about the seriousness of the efforts to dismantle public education, piece by piece.

At the most recognizable level, the transformation has progressed through a series of educational reforms implemented by federal, state, and local governing bodies, regulatory agencies, professional organizations, and educational institutions. These reforms consist of policy statements about and regulations governing curricula, teaching practices, teacher preparation, school administration, educational auditing, licensing and accreditation practices, the progress and geographical movement of students, the distribution of material resources, and the operation of for-profit educational enterprises. The reforms have most dramatically affected public schools and teacher education programs, but they are increasingly aimed at all institutions of learning, including colleges and universities. Their most palpable aspect consists of the high stakes tests, with which we are so familiar, but about which we are less knowledgeable.

At another, less obvious level, the transformation has progressed through the widespread adoption of particular terms, concepts, and practices that emanate from within conservative social agendas, neoliberal economic policies, and the learning sciences.

These terms and concepts, such as, for example, “performance outcomes,” “ best practices,” “data driven,” “metacognitive strategies,” “learning environments,” and “evidence based research,” mobilize, anchor, and normalize particular discourses on teaching and education. Those discourses shape national, state, and local mandates governing schools, teacher education, and pedagogy and curriculum. Practices once confined to the corporate world, in particular auditing and accounting practices that reduce complicated phenomena and experiences to quantifiable and thus commensurable data, now structure how we think about what happens and what should happen in classrooms. Increasingly practices that rely on mathematical calculations and the impersonality of numbers have replaced individual teachers’ often unique and context specific approaches to teaching.

Because these terms, concepts and practices circulate within the world of business and the learning sciences, they tie the educational reforms to these two fields—science and business. This association bestows a particular legitimacy on the reforms at a moment when science and business enjoy prestige in the media, among politicians and in the public imagination. Furthermore the apparent objectivity of quantification lends an aura of fairness and disinterestedness to an endeavor—teaching—that critics perennially accuse of being haphazard, rife with prejudice and subjectivity, and lacking authority. As the sociologist Nikolas Rose (2003) writes, “[W]here mistrust of authority flourishes, where experts are the target of suspicion and their claims are greeted with skepticism by politicians [and] distrusted by public opinion . . . [n]umbers are resorted to in order to settle or diminish conflicts in a contested space of weak authority” (208). It is hard to dispute that the work of teachers, teacher educators, and educators in general is often greeted with skepticism, suspicion and disdain. The bottom line, the authority of science, and the exactitude of numbers seem to offer critics and criticized alike a solution to such problems. We are quite literally teaching by numbers.

Chapter 2
The Current State of
Affairs

“Kafka, of course,” he says, showing me that smile again. “Yes, this is true; many of us survive almost solely on Kafka. Including people in the street who have never read a word of his. They look at one another when something happens, and they say, ‘It’s Kafka.’ Meaning, ‘That’s the way it goes here now.’ Meaning ‘What else did you expect?’”

—Phillip Roth (1977, 115)

At some point in the spring of 2003, the semester before I became an assistant dean in the School of Education at Brooklyn College, I realized something had radically changed in how my colleagues were talking about teaching, education, and their life in schools. Having been subjected the previous two years to New York State’s new regulations governing teacher certification, having spent hours in meetings frantically plotting how to meet these mandates, and now having to face the daunting task of preparing for a visit in 2005 from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), professors increasingly filled their conversations with talk of outcomes, performance data, alignment of standards, rubrics, grids, and how to “tweak” or “jury-rig” or simply fabricate course syllabi or bulletin descriptions to meet some new standard. Program and general faculty meetings consisted more and more of discussions about how to comply with directives from the state or outside agencies and associations. In hallway corners and behind closed doors, faculty whispered threats of leaving and despairing words about the surveillance to which they were being subjected. Less and less audible were conversations about race—after five years the Committee on Race, Ethnicity, and Equity had fallen by the wayside—or about aesthetic education—collaborative efforts with Lincoln Center Institute had declined—or about faculty research interests—monthly discussion groups at which colleagues presented their scholarly work had faded away. Replacing these were discus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The Current State of Affairs
• Chapter 3: Tests
• Chapter 4: The Language of Educational Policy
• Chapter 5: Audit Culture Standards and the Practices of Accountability
• Chapter 6: The Seduction of a Profession
• Chapter 7: Intellectual Capital How the Learning Sciences Led Education Astray
• Conclusion
• Bibliography