As this book was going to press, Betsy DeVos had begun her tenure as Secretary of Education. Prior to that, she headed the All Children Matter Political Action Committee. Her agenda was not to improve public schools, but to shrink public services, protect students from exposure to liberal ideologies, and monetize education. It is easy to foresee the future if this trend goes unchecked: The affluent will be able to purchase access to the best schools and tutelage available, while schools for the middle class will be further diminished and the poor will continue to receive subpar educations with equally poor life choices for all but a token few. Dismantling public schools and making the populace less aware of the entire scheme of things and their place in it, but with sufficient skills to meet corporate needs, is the barely concealed ultimate goal.
These are contentious times in Education and the continuing press of neo-liberal reforms has evoked disparate responses. One is to cede superior wisdom to those who wield extensive test data, funding, and momentum. A second is to accommodate all practice to the standar ds of accountab ility and instruction currently in place not because of belief in the approach, but because it is mandated. This is especially rampant among new teachers, and probably the best way to ensure continued employment. A third position is vehemently denying all legitimacy to testing and resisting it in every way possible (e.g., refusing to teach to the test and parents opting out of tests), but this stance is only pursued by activist parents and teachers secure in their positions. These responses tend to omit careful consideration of what should be happening in classrooms. Moving the educational dialo gue forward in a progressive direction requires an account of how we got where we are, both in terms of policy and the deeply ingrained folk knowledge underlying common educational practice.
This chapter will examine the educational reforms of recent years to set a cont ext for juxtaposing theories of learning and development with educational politics as they affect teacher educa tion and classroom practices. Because the reforms are tied directly to funding, certification of teachers, and accreditation of schools, their impact is immense. Although the fervor for testing has cooled to some degree in response to pressures from both teachers and parents, its determinant influence on schools persists.
Educational Reforms
A great deal of scrutiny of education goes under the banner of “stand ards,” exerting pressure upon teachers and students to produce tangible results. The current spate of mandates for accou ntability began with No Child Left Be hind (NC LB; U.S. Department of Education, 2002), which promised that within 12 years all students nationwide would achieve “proficiency” or above on a number of indicators, as measured by test scores. Now, over 12 years later, no one would concede that this goal has been met.
One of the most beautiful—and cynical—statements about education reform was coined when N CLB was introduced, demanding high standar ds that mitigate “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (U.S. Department of Education, 2003). But such solutions, if we take them at face value, seem to assume this can be achieved in the same way that manufacturing practices are designed to achieve acceptable quality in goods.
Although the metaphor used to frame the problem with education was inaccurate, the “low expectations” statement introduced at least a shadow of a doubt that someone else knew more. This has been a successful tactic. Most educators, unable to adequately deflect the sly attacks on their integrity, knowledge, judgment, and orientation to current realities, have acquiesced to whatever comes down from the City, State, or Federal government agencies.
The Race to the T op (U.S. Department of Education, 2009) extended the N CLB initiative, linking compliance with prescribed practices to federal funding. It continued widespread reliance on high-stakes standardized tes ting, setting outcome goals with insufficient attention to how children think, individual differen ces, and the con text of any particular classroom. Patterns of mind are not shaped in nine-month, academic year, increments. Neither intellectual curiosity nor the development of sustained interest are short-term goals. Reports of progress or problems along the way should inform ongoing instructional interventions, rather than being considered attainments, credits, or debits in a ledger. The press of immediate measurable results is analogous to an emphasis on quarterly earnings rather than long-term investment in infrastructure. Yet education is not simply a commodity or service to be delivered as efficiently as possible. It is a sacred pact between a society and its children.
A perceived problem with NC LB was the state-by-state variability in the knowledge students were expected to acquire. In order to assure a greater number of students are able to demonstrate content mastery learning in Mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA), and that their performance is measurable and comparable to those of students across the country, curriculum stand ards and tests aligned to them appeared on the scene. The Common Core State Standards are not officially mandated by the federal government; they originated with two organizations: the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. The curriculum guidelines claim to be a response to the disparate educational preparation of children, seeking equity by promising to offer the same curriculum to all students at a particular grade level, ignoring differe nces and hoping they will disappear. But real equality of opportunity means circumventing barriers that accompany growing up within an impoverished family in a marginalized com munity.
Instead, coverage of topics in ELA and Mathematics for students in grades K–12 was delineated. Common Core has been implemented by 42 states and the District of Columbia. Larry Cuban, a noted Stanford University School of Education Professor Emeritus and blogger, wryly asserts that it will be declared a success regardless of student outcomes, simply because it has been so widely adopted (Cuban, 2013).
Common Core curriculum guidelines include reference to making connections between prior experiences and new ones, a shift from passive to ac tive learning, a push toward deeper understa nding, and efforts to encourage analytical and cri tical thinking (e.g., engage NY, n.d.). Yet in practice, it often functions as a deficit mod el of fixing those who don’t immediately get it right and teaching to the test. Curriculum guidelines prescribe how mathematics problems should be set up, the questions that should be asked, and how problems should be solved; it is claimed this will ensure conceptual understa nding. There is no recognition or support for students who devise their own understa nding, even if they consistently arrive at correct solutions. From a constructivist point-of-view, rigidly prescribing steps for problem solution is antithetical to exploration of the material, working out relations and distinctions, weighing alternate interpretations, and considering possibilities. In English classes, there is less emphasis on fiction and more on nonfiction. Acquiring factual evidence from text is granted more attention than the reader’s response or interpretation. Individual and cult ural differen ces are ignored.
Common Core’s assumptions, goals, and methods markedly contrast with the progr essive education tradition of Dew ey, Pia get, Vyg otsky, Frei re, and numerous others. Mandates only pay lip service to these principles while undermining the value of both students and teachers actively creating underst andings. And the gap between avowed values and the emphasis on test data is a great frustration to many educators.
Learning Theory and “Objective” Research
There are divergent conceptions of what thinking and learning are, and these necessarily color all other ideas about what schools should be doing. Even at the height of its popularity, constructivism was overshadowed by an old and entrenched tradition of school practices; direct instruction, memorization of “the basics” (e.g., multiplication tables, verb conjugations, rules, and formulas), repetitive practice, and mode ling (i.e., in the simplistic sense of expecting students to copy a demonstration) remain popular. This influence may be traced to theories of learning by association (Hume, 1777/1975; Locke, 1690/1975; Pavlov, 1927/1960), rewards, and punishments (e.g., Skinner, 1951/2014; Watson, 1925/1970). Another type of learning theory that has a prominent place in classrooms focuses on the replication and retention of input from observed behavior (e.g., Bandura, 1962). A long experimental tradition focused on verbal learning of paired associates—often random words or nonsense syllables placed in spatial or temporal contiguity (Anderson & Bower, 1979, Chap. 14; Ebbinghaus, 1885/1962; Kling & Riggs, 1971, Chap. 19)—has been especially influential in schools. Rote learning was prescribed as useful in forming connections that were assumed to become consolidated and more complex with repeated use.
Through the years, learning theory has been updated and refined, but retains an emphasis on the external environment and observable behavior, both relatively easy to measure. At heart, there is an assumption that a mechanistic relation between stimuli and responses, physical or temporal contiguity, will yield meaningful (or functional, to be more precise) relations. Analyses began by breaking behavior into atomistic bits that could be measured and counted; this was viewed as more scientific because it has been “purified” of all its messy humanness.
The quest for certainty suggests the need for rigorous methods. The sort of “objective” research accepted as justification biases the questions that are asked and the types of solution that will be entertained. During the George W. Bush administration, the government’s Educational Research Information Center (www.ERIC.gov) was reorganized into the Institute of Education Sciences (IES, n.d.) to highlight quantitative research using large sample sizes and stan dardized testing instruments. Studies utilizing methodologies such as qualitative case study were excluded; the rationale was an emphasis on higher quality “real” data (Kolata, 2013). The embrace of science was used to exclude consideration of education in a wider societal cont ext. Viewing the enterprise in a positivistic scientific manner meant that only data about student and teacher performance, curriculum, textbooks, and use of specific technology would inform national policy.
Research formulated in accordance with specific assumptions about schooling, especially narrow concern with the performance of students and teachers, deflects attention from issues of div ersity and achieving soc ial justice in schools. Failures in education are defined as deficiencies in individuals; critiques of structural causes (e.g., Aronowitz, 2008; Varenne & McDermott, 1998) are dismissed as ideological, lacking an objective basis.
Test scores are designated as “student performance,” a reductive measurement that has gained acceptance as the sufficient index of thinking and learning, and as a valid and reliable predictor of future success (itself a loaded term). A further proposal based on outsized faith in test scores was their use to assess teachers, despite insufficient support for extending the use of results in this way (Darling-Hammond, Amrein-Beardsley, Haertel, & Rothstein, 2011; Kupermintz, 2003). A...