National Review Attacks Michael Winerip

[Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>]

Predictably, the National Review, long a knee-jerk, right-wing house 
organ, is hosting an attack on New York Times columnist Michael Winerip. 
The line of argument here is particularly hypocritical since the 
co-author, Jay Greene, has been widely criticized for playing fast and 
loose with "facts."


HIGH-STAKES EDITORIALIZING
Times Education Columnist Tugs the Heart,
Clouds the Mind
National Review On-Line

by Jay P. Greene & Marcus A. Winters

The New York Times' weekly education column is perhaps the most widely 
read and influential newspaper space for education policy. The column, 
which for the last year has been under the pen of Michael Winerip, could 
be used for a rational discussion of the facts about education. 
Unfortunately, Winerip uses his weekly space in the Grey Lady to muddy 
our thinking with tear-jerking anecdotes. The column is perhaps the most 
dangerous newspaper space in the nation for those interested in 
education reform.

Hard evidence has no home in Winerip's column. Each week Winerip, a 
former education reporter for the Times, deploys human-interest stories 
meant to reduce even the most hardened education reformer to weeping; 
then, having blinded the reader with tears, he leaps to his favored 
conclusion  especially when it comes to his pet subject, high-stakes 
testing.

Take Winerip's recent column about a kindergarten teacher in Orlando, 
Florida. The first half of the story is a heartwarming description of 
this gentle teacher nurturing her students. "Precious darlings, we have 
a day that's bigger than big," she tells them. "You are the b-e-s-t  
kiss your brains for being so smart." Watching a video of her students, 
she cries "pink tears"  that is, the happy kind. She's irresistible.

Then, halfway through the article, Winerip lowers the boom. The teacher 
is quitting because she doesn't approve of Florida's new high-stakes 
test and thinks it will force her to change her teaching style. Since 
Winerip devotes virtually the whole article to describing how sad it is 
that this teacher is leaving, he doesn't provide any real discussion of 
the merits of her complaint against high-stakes testing. But he does 
provide a painstaking description of the teacher's last day at school, 
when she sheds "blue" (sad) tears.

Maybe it's a tragedy that an experienced and dedicated educator is 
leaving the profession because she doesn't like standardized testing. 
But to let that be our sole guide for policymaking would ignore the 
simple truth that teachers of such exceptional quality are a minority in 
the public school system. We know that schools are failing to adequately 
teach basic skills like reading and math, and the evidence indicates 
that high-stakes testing improves education. Winerip simply ignores such 
research. To him, none of that matters if this one teacher is shedding 
blue tears.

Winerip returns to this subject in another column, this one about 
respected educator Debra Meier. Meier is the founder of several schools 
that utilize individual instruction and progressive teaching methods. 
These schools have been an unbridled success, so much so that praising 
Debra Meier has become more or less a mandatory practice for education 
policy writers, like politicians extolling motherhood and apple pie. 
Meier believes, and Winerip certainly agrees, that high stakes testing 
is "pushing public education toward mediocrity." She worries that such 
tests may require teachers to abandon methods designed to teach a child 
broader skills, not simply how to read or do math.

Of course, "pushing public education toward mediocrity" may actually 
imply improvement rather than decline. Be that as it may, the larger 
point is that Winerip is distracting us from the facts. Debra Meier's 
educational successes deserve our highest praise. If we could put Debra 
Meier into every public-school classroom, public education would 
certainly improve dramatically and standardized testing would be 
unnecessary. (Having praised her, we can now keep our 
education-researcher membership cards.) But a public school system 
requires hundreds of thousands of teachers and we simply don't have 
hundreds of thousands of Debra Meiers.

For the last several decades, our policy has been to treat all 
public-school teachers as if their performance were as reliable as Debra 
Meier's, regardless of whether they have earned such treatment. As a 
result, many children  particularly the most disadvantaged and 
vulnerable among them  are sentenced never to acquire the basic skills 
they need. Standardized testing does not provide these children with an 
ideal, Debra-Meier-quality education, but at least it guarantees that 
they do not graduate without being able to read and do basic math, as so 
many hundreds of thousands have done for so long.

In another one of his columns bemoaning high-stakes testing, Winerip 
describes seriously disabled students who are given a mockery of a 
standardized test because the state requires that they be tested. We 
visit a school for students with mental retardation severe enough that 
they cannot hold a pencil, let alone knowledgably answer questions on a 
standardized test. Why should we test these poor students, Winerip wants 
to know, when we already have a process for evaluating the performance 
of special education students in the form of Individualized Education 
Plans (IEP)? Winerip implies that it is unnecessary to test any student 
who has an IEP.

The problem is not that testing severely handicapped children isn't a 
farce; it is. But such students are only a small fraction of all 
students with IEPs, though you'd never know it from reading Winerip's 
column. A full majority of students with IEPs have diagnoses that fall 
into the category commonly known as "learning disability," and many 
others have other relatively mild disabilities such as speech 
impairments. There is legitimate disagreement about whether students 
with these comparatively mild disabilities should be required to pass 
standardized tests, but it's just plain dishonest to make the case 
against such testing by holding up severely disabled, wheelchair-bound kids.

While high-stakes testing is by far Winerip's topic of choice, he 
routinely defends many of the other priorities of the teacher unions and 
their fellow travelers. He often does this not by singling out 
particular education reforms but by conveying a sense that whatever is 
wrong with education has nothing to do with schools.

The most striking example of his blaming society for education's 
problems is that in his tenure as Times education columnist Winerip has 
managed to write a column about orphans. The column doesn't address any 
educational issue; it simply points out that life is difficult for 
orphans. But this Winerip article and others like it implicitly support 
the teacher-union political agenda by conveying a sense that the 
inadequate results of many public schools are entirely the product of 
poverty and other social problems. Can we really expect schools to teach 
orphans how to read, with all the disadvantages they face? Is it really 
fair to expect them to pass a standardized test before they graduate?

Michael Winerip's education column employs the most powerful weapon in 
the teacher union's arsenal: the sad stories of a few teachers and 
students. But the evidence shows that for each child Winerip portrays 
crying about standardized tests, there are thousands who would not learn 
basic skills without those tests. And for every naturally motivated 
Debra Meier, there are hundreds of teachers in inner-city schools who 
serve their students better because they are held accountable. Yet 
Winerip's defenses of the status quo are placed prominently on the pages 
of the New York Times every week. It's enough to make you cry "blue" tears.

 Jay P. Greene is a senior fellow and Marcus A. Winters is a research 
associate at the Manhattan Institute's Education Research Office 
<http://www.miedresearchoffice.org/>. )

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/greene_winters200402230902.asp