Re: Monty's Ed Week Letter and "professional development" panacea

[Peter Campbell <campbellp@mail.montclair.edu>]

Hi, George. I agree with most of what you wrote. I'd like to throw in a couple caveats:

1)  I just finished Part 1 of Young, Gifted, and Black, Theresa Perry's extraordinary essay on what she calls the African-American theory of knowledge and philosophy of education, "the philosophy of freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom." One of my favorite parts:

"Even if education leads to a good job, even if African-American parents communicate clearly to their children that education pays off, these experiences can be neutralized if children experience school and the larger society as unfair and discriminatory. In other words, a child's belief in the power and importance of schooling and intellectual work can be interrupted by teachers and others who explicitly or subtly convey a disbelief in the child's ability for high academic achievement, and the child having a rightful place in the larger society -- unless a counternarrative about the child's identity as an intellectual being is intentionally passed on to him or her." (p. 79)

She argues that schools need to create a culture of achievement in order to combat the most pernicious aspects of racism. She writes, "African-American students will achieve in school environments that have a leveling culture, a culture of achievement that extends to all of its members and a strong sense of group membership, where the expectation that everyone achieve is explicit and is regularly communicated in public and group settings. African-American students will achieve in these environments, irrespective of class background, the cultural responsiveness of the setting, or prior level of participation." (p. 107)

She continues, "Thus we can understand why it is that African-American students achieve in Department of Defense schools, in Catholic schools, in Black colleges, in independent schools, and in the Prescott Elementary School in Oakland. In addition to having the aforementioned characteristics, institutions that are culturally responsive and that systematically affirm, draw on, and use cultural formations of African Americans will produce exceptional academic results from African-American students. Usually in these school communities, there are academic support services available to ensure that al students are able to achieve , as well as a determination to socialize students to the behaviors and values that support achievement." (p. 107; original emphasis)

I was really surprised to see her come to a conclusion that so radically discounted the effects of class and the socioeconomic disparities that shape the reality of poor blacks (as well as poor whites and poor Hispanics). I was also surprised to see her argument become so overly-determined and so causally linked to a single phenomenon when she had spent so much of the original part of the essay teasing out so many strands and themes out of the fabric of the academic achievement gap. While I certainly respect her argument and find it compelling, I'm not at all convinced that closing the educational achievement gap is as simple as she makes it out to be. I agree that it's vital to create cultures of achievement and to create counter-hegemonic narratives that empower children that have been historically disempowered. But I think it's not only misleading but potentially very harmful to reduce the issue to this alone. I think her argument can be misinterpreted as saying, "All you need to do is try harder and believe in yourselves." As Richard Rothstein and David Berliner and many other educational researchers have pointed out, closing the educational achievement gap will involve more than shifting attitudes and creating cultures of achievement.

And yet, it seems to me that both Rothstein and Berliner underestimate the role that race and racism play in the achievement gap. Teachers that communicate doubt in minority children and/or do not combat the internal messages that minority children have about their ability make even 1:1 teacher to student ratios meaningless for student achievement.

2) As for professional development, I have seen my fair share of hucksters and snake-oil salesmen. But I have also encountered some pretty fabulous folks. Rick Stiggins and Judy Arter at The Assessment Training Institute (http://www.assessmentinst.com/) and Grant Wiggins (http://www.grantwiggins.org/) come to mind.

Peter Campbell

On Mar 5, 2006, at 7:16 AM, Gnschmidt@aol.com wrote:

> 3/5/06
>
> Colleagues and friends:
>
> Recently, I went over Monty's letter to Fair Test, with an eye towards asking 
> that it be expanded for publication in the April Substance, where we have 
> more space to cover the broader issues. Three things I would suggested expanding 
> are:
>
> 1. It needs to be noted that the three tests (MCAS, TAKS, and NY Regents) 
> that Monty examined and found lacking were just about the only ones that are 
> available because in most states, including Illinois, secrecy prevents the public 
> from ever reviewing the actual tests. Any letter or critique of high stakes 
> testing that leaves out the fact that more than 40 states (I'll leave it to 
> someone who catalogues such things to give the exact number at this point in 
> history) are using secret high-stakes tests which even parents are forbidden to 
> review in total. The only first step towards a critique of high-stakes tests 
> themselves is the complete disclosure of every question and every "correct" answer 
> once the testing cycle is completed and the children's scores have been 
> released. The reason Monty was able to review TAKS, MCAS, and the Regents is that 
> they are from the small minority of states that release the tests and scoring 
> rubrics (as opposed to "sample items" which prove worse than useless because 
> they are used to mislead people via the media). 
>
> I would have hope that Fair Test would have made a plug for full disclosure 
> of tests and am disappointed this hasn't been done here.
>
> 2. The stratification of scores on standardized tests -- whether normed 
> referenced tests like the Iowa or supposedly tests based on course content like 
> most of the state tests -- according to economic status is not based on something 
> that teachers and principals are failing to do inside public schools, as 
> Achieve and Ed Trust prattle when they go on about "achievement gaps". It is based 
> on the "savage inequalities" (Kozol) and the terrible impacts (plural) of 
> poverty on children (see David Berliner's "Our impoverished view of education 
> reform" for the most recent exposition of this fact.) To discuss these issues 
> without reiterating that point over and over is to allow the teaching bashing 
> that forms the basis of the testing industry at this point -- "We have to test 
> them because we can't trust the teacher in a 'government school'".
>
> 3. Which brings us to the last and equally important problem, the promotion 
> of "professional development" as the solution to the "problems" of low 
> achieving schools. 
>
> Just as No Child Left Behind and the high-stakes state and local programs 
> based on standardized testing became first a full-employment program for 
> psychometricians (and, in many cases, pseudo-psychometricians), so the "professional 
> development" panacea then falls right into place and becomes a full employment 
> program for "external partners", professors of education, and a growing cadre 
> of for-profit in-service providers whose only real skill is marketing 
> themselves and their latest Power Point CD based wastes of teacher time. The 
> presecription for external and centrally mandated "professional development" (which is 
> what Monty is doing at the end of his letter) is a form of teacher bashing 
> based on the notion that teachers just need some professor and fast talking 
> contractor to tell them how to do it right. This is promoted even if all the kids 
> are poor, with bad teeth in a community where the wealthiest person is the 
> local drug gang leader, as we face in Chicago and as Berliner and others have 
> noted.
>
> In Chicago, this has translated into white "experts" with no inner city 
> teaching experience replacing and lording over the mostly black teaching and 
> administrative staff of our most hard core schools. Now that we have had four years 
> of school closings (for "poor performance") under "Renaissance 2010" here, 
> that racial divide is very clear, and hundreds of black parents, teachers, and 
> community leaders have been meeting across the city here to organize around the 
> growing realization that the formulas of "school reform" that have been put 
> upon us the past decade are, at their core, aimed at the people of the inner 
> city.
>
> I don't think it does the movement for justice any good to have a public 
> statement like Monty's letter pull punches on such important questions as test 
> "security" and the underlying white supremacy of the "professional development" 
> panacea. 
>
> That's all I have time to cover this morning. As the character says in "Moby 
> Dick" -- good luck to ye, maties.
>
> George N. Schmidt
> Editor, Substance
> www.substancenews.com  
>
>
>
>
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