Patrick Annabel
Stephanie Hansen
Herb Horn
Jeremy Johnson
Mike Roberts
December 5, 1996
Education Reform
In order to understand education reform, we will start with the history of education in the US, and discuss the aims competing groups have for education. We will outline the goals of modern education reform in the US, and will describe a case study in the state of Oregon, one of the first states to institute such a program.
One component of reform is assessment testing. We will outline some of the assumptions centered around testing, and point out how testing has historically contributed to the stratification of students into classes based on socioeconomic standing. We will examine how the structure of education can reinforce divisions between social classes.
Alternative schools, such as charter schools, are another attempt at reform. We'll question whether they can be considered as a real substantive part of education reform, or merely a device that is used to undermine equality of education through public institutions.
We will look at education reform in the state of Washington. We will examine the principles of reform, and how private schools are addressed in the recently enacted law.
In part two, we will cover the current discourse and analyze how some of the historical questions are being dealt with today. In part three we will describe the status of current education reforms.
History
Throughout the history of the United States, education has had varying goals. During colonial times, education was seen as a means of preparing children to obey the authority of the government...1 Educations aim was the indoctrination of religious beliefs and faithfulness, and obeyance of the king. However, during the intellectual revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries school was seen as a place where the free exchange of ideas emerged. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, education in the US was recognized as an important tool for improving the economy and workforce. Of aims in education John Dewey wrote:
...It is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims. Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract idea like education. And consequently their purposes are indefinitely varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. Even the most valid aims which can be put in words will, as words, do more harm than good unless one recognizes that they are not aims, but rather suggestions to educators as to how to observe, how to look ahead, and how to choose in liberating and directing energies of the concrete situations in which they find themselves...2
Due to this lack of common vision, calls for reform have been continual. Historically, calls for educational reform in the US arise when turbulent social conditions occur due to economic instability. During the 1980s a proliferation of government issued reports pointed out the need for nationwide education reform. It was then that the groundwork for a cohesive national strategy on public education in the US first emerged.
-------------------------------------
1Joel Spring, The American School 1642-1993 third ed. (New York: McGraw Hill.) 5.
2John Dewey, Democracy And Education (New York: The Free Press.) 107.
One of the most notable reports on education at the time was produced by the National Commission on Excellence in Education. It was titled, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, and was issued in the Spring of 1983. The Commission concluded that:
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre education performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
With these words, the nation gathered strength to reform its education systems. The reports two imperatives were that 1) fallen standards had to be restored, and 2) those accountable for teaching students had "to be made to toe the line and shape up."3
In the early 1990s, the national Goals 2000 Plan was developed from these two imperatives. Afterwards, the national Goals 2000: Educate America Act was passed, and Washington and Oregon adopted the competency criteria from the Act as a basis for each of the States' student learning goals.
The Goals 2000: Educate America Act requires that by the year 2000:
------------------------------------
3Ray Marshall and March Tucker, Thinking for A Living (New York: Basic Books) 76.
Oregon followed Californias lead in the bid to reform education based on the national model. In the early 1990s Oregon governor Barbara Roberts signed and approved CIM/CAM, Certificate of Initial Mastery/ Certificate of Advanced Mastery program, part of the America 2000 Act, as recommended by the National Center on Education and the Economy. Instead of having a comprehensive high school for all students, the students progress with the same curriculum until they receive the Certificate of Initial Mastery, which is similar to a G.E.D. At this point the students must choose whether or not to enter vocational training or college prep training, which offer very different course studies until graduation. It is considered to be a difficult task to transfer from one course of study to the other. The college prep course is called Content-related, while the vocational course is called Career-related. Those engaged in the Content course must be able to exhibit skills in the areas of english, mathematics, science, history, civics, geography, economics, foreign language, and the arts. Those engaged in the Career course must be able to exhibit skills in the areas of personal management, problem solving, teamwork, communication, workplace organization, career development, and employment foundations. While those involved in the Content course must also exhibit Career related learning experiences, those involved in the Career course are not required to exhibit anything in the content skills beyond the tenth grade (Slimak,1).
This program may have many positive effects, for example, an increase in student interest in learning, improved attendance rate, and greater job/college viability. However, it is important to question a scholastic system in which students are divided into separate groups, and given separate educations, especially when the requirements of the two educations are different, and possibly unequal, and non-inclusive of important curriculum elements. If knowledge of a subject is important to one student, how can it have no place in the education of another?
Although the Goals 2000 Act is rather vague in its wording, assessment testing, a tool used since the beginning of the twentieth century, will continue to be used to measure student and teacher competency. The aim of assessment testing is to track competency, and establish accountability to taxpayers. However, assessment testing may be of limited use to the student. Dewey wrote that;
It is as absurd for the latter (teacher) to set up his 'own' aims as the proper objects of the growth of the children as it would be for the farmer to set up an ideal of farming irrespective of conditions. Aims mean acceptance of responsibility for the observations, anticipation's, and arrangements required in carrying on a function -- whether farming or educating. Any aim is of value so far as it assists observation, choice, and planning in carrying on activity from moment to moment and hour to hour; if it gets in the way of the individual's own common sense (as it will surely do if imposed from without or accepted on authority) it does harm...4
------------------------------------------------
4Dewey 107.
Dewey tells us that assessment in education is okay if it helps to tailor the curriculum to the day to day needs of the student. However, when students realize that assessment is being forced on them, it can do more harm than good, particularly if the testing isn't relevant to the student's life experiences.
Testing has also been used as a means to separate working class children from the elite political and business class children. Popular assumptions from the early twentieth century still exist today concerning intelligence and socioeconomic standing..
Linking class status with intelligence sets up certain expectations of the promises that society holds for various groups of people. It also dampens the expectations of the prospects that individuals from lower socioeconomic groups hold for themselves. F. Allan Hanson comments in Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life about these assumptions;
The Conventional concept of intelligence and its measurement by intelligence tests are deeply implicated in this unfortunate situation. The notion that intelligence is inherited bolsters the idea that different classes, as largely in-marrying groups, may have different average levels of intelligence. Testing supports this point of view because, as we have seen already, intelligence test scores are highly correlated with socioeconomic status. Therefore, to use such tests as qualifiers for higher-level jobs will assure that those positions, with their higher levels of compensation, continue to be reserved for the higher classes (272-73).
Looking at the history of vocational education can show us how the structure of schooling can serve to reinforce the distinctions between social classes. The development of human capital as a means of solving problems in the labor market became a major educational goal of the twentieth century. It resulted in the acceptance of vocational education as a legitimate part of the educational system (Spring, 188). In the early 1900s schools became preparation centers for the workplace. The number of schools in industrial areas swelled as the economy improved. Then a problem was raised. There were now too many well prepared individuals available for each job that was available.
It is a surprising fact that,
the original purpose of the junior high school was to differentiate students into separate courses of study according to abilities and vocational goals. It was hoped that with the proper guidance the student would choose a vocation in the junior high and then follow an educational program through the high school directly to the occupation. There was something of an engineers social organization about the idea of education functioning as a feeder system to the industrial complex (Spring, 91).
One fear at this time was that corporations were trying to hold power within the public school system in order to meet their own needs. Vocational guidance was used "to reduce the inefficiency of the distribution of human resources" (Spring, 92). Information was accrued as related to manpower shortages and surpluses and "this information was used to encourage and discourage training in particular occupations depending upon the needs of the labor market (Spring, 92). It was at this point that the division in programs of study began. For those with vocational aspirations that required a college diploma, high schools began to provide a specifically college preparatory curriculum. For those who wanted a high school education for employment immediately after graduation, a more general curriculum was offered (Spring, 213). As a result of this reform, the gap between socioeconomic classes was deepened and widened.
Scholars and social analysts began to recognize that;
Schools tend to reinforce and strengthen existing social structures and social stratification. The rhetoric of schooling has always suggested that schools break down social class lines. By the 1940s sociologists began to argue that rather than breaking down social class lines schools actually were strengthening them by schooling people into their social positions (Spring,151).
Spring, in The American School 1642-1993, reports the results of a study done in Indiana in the 1940s of high school courses called the Elmstown Youth. This community was divided into five social classes.
The first was those with established wealth. The second class was businessmen and professional. These social class divisions were reflected in the differentiated courses of studies offered in the high school. The students from the upper two classes went to college preparatory courses while the majority of the other students went into commercial work courses (Spring,151).
While there have been reforms of the educational system since the 1940s, the general course layouts and division between college prep and work courses has not changed sufficiently, although it was generally agreed that every student should have the same courses available to them.
Some believe the best chance for education reform is to leave the public school system entirely. Throughout this nation's history some have insisted that the government pay for establishing alternative schooling for their children. In 1776, Adam Smith wrote a book entitled Wealth of Nations, proposing the idea that government give money to parents so that they could choose their childs education. Shortly thereafter, Thomas Paine brought Adam Smiths idea of consumer sovereignty to the United States. Consumers, rich and poor alike, would be able to choose in their children's education.
The idea of school choice has been around for 200 years, yet it remains a threat to many. One example why was found in an article entitled, "The Pitfalls and Triumphs of Launching A Charter School," found in Educational Leadership, October 1996. Parents in Colorado Springs Colorado feel that they are out of the decision making process when it comes to school curriculum. Linda Page and Mark Levine report that at the Cheyenne Mountain Charter Academy School:
Several parents and some of the teachers told me they had volunteered repeatedly to help review curriculum materials, but the board rejected their
offers...
Even though,
The founding board intended that the "parent-run school" they had established would be something quite different from what they had communicated to the parent body. (28)
Some have turned to charter schools as an alternative to public education. A charter school is a public educational entity operating under a charter, or contract, that has been negotiated between the organizers who design and run the schools (e.g. teachers, parents, or others from the public or private sector), and a sponsor who oversees the provisions of the charter (e.g. local school board, state board of education) (Bierlein, 13). The first charter school was opened in Minnesota in 1991. By 1994 eleven states had charter school laws. We were able to find very little research on the success or failure of those schools.
In response to the growing demand for public education reform nationwide,
Washington State has embarked on a quest for education reform with the goal of improving student achievement. To do this, in 1993 the state enacted an omnibus bill called the Education Reform Act of Washington (ESHB 1209). The essential components include:
According to Part XI , Section 1101 of the ESHB1209, under the heading, "Private School And Home School Student Exemptions," the Act states;" The state board shall not require private school students to meet the student learning goals, obtain a certificate of mastery to graduate from high school, to master the essential academic learning requirements, or to be assessed pursuant to RCW 28A.630.885. However, private schools may choose, on a voluntary basis, to have their students master these essential academic learning requirements, take these assessments, and obtain certificates of mastery " This aspect of the law was intended to make it easier for private institutions such as charter schools to be established without bureaucratic red tape and unnecessary regulation. There are guidelines that these institutions must follow under this section, however there doesn't seem to be an enforcement mechanism in place.
Current discourse
While the main intent of ESHB 1209 is to address academic preparedness and workforce training in the context of a global and competitive economy, there are still questions about how large a part politics and big business are playing in the development of Washington's performance-based education system.
There are some questions about whether the ESHB 1209 is too ambiguous with regard to the role that parents are supposed to play in their children's education. This portion of the law states:
"Parents to be primary partners in the education of their children, and to play a significantly greater role in local school decision making." 5
We are curious about what exactly this means, how it will be implemented; whether or not it will be enforced, and if this portion of the law is just an update of the old truancy law. This may be one of a few implementation challenges and barriers to ESHB1209 along with lack of public awareness.
"Political support ultimately comes from the general public, which must approve and pay taxes to support the system, and which elects key officials, who then appoint other key policy makers and implementors."6
Surveys conducted by Moore Information, Inc. in 1994 for the Partnership for Learning show that while voters believe that better schools are essential and that they strongly support the major components and features of the Education Reform act, two-thirds were not familiar with the Act. By 1995, the numbers remained largely unchanged.7
This may be an area where the state's education reform causal model fails, a systemic strategy to address the electorate seems decidedly absent.
----------------------------------------------
5State of Washington. ESHB 1209. Education Reform-Improvement of Student Achievement. (Chapter 336, Sec.1 State of Washington printing office, 1993.
6Richard N. Brandon, "Sustaining Political Support for Systemic Education Reform," A Human Services Policy Center working paper prepared for the Pew Forum on Education Reform. January, 1993, p.9.
7Washington State School Reform Survey Summary Findings, Moore Information, Inc., for the Partnership for Learning, July 1994, 1995.
Meanwhile in Oregon, Critics argue that the Oregon plan will create an elitist school system with children from lower-income families being channeled into the vocational programs (Spring, 416). This view is shared by students and teachers alike. Many families may see the Career studies as more practical, especially those who could use an extra income. It appears that this reform may deepen the rift that was described in Indiana in the Elmstown Youth study.
Industry and the workplace also figure into the modern problem. Along side the CIM/CAM education reform of Oregon is a new plan for business/school relations. This called the School-to-Work Alliance, or SWA. SWA's goal is to provide a comprehensive system for helping youth make a smooth transition to the workplace and to meet the work force demands of the next century (Rantschler, 2). Again, it is feared that industry will have undue influence on the curriculum. Industry champions in the local community will be allowed to come directly into the schools and recruit students from the school, according to their assessment tests which they are allowed access to. Why take general knowledge courses when you can be injected directly into the work force? This system seems to show that, the social biases that pervade the educational system and the bureaucratic control structures that give force to those biases produce schools that reflect and confirm the social structure by processing children to fit into slots roughly congruent with the status of their parents (Katz, X).
Most recently Washington State voters voted down two initiatives which would have used public funds for private schooling, and could have drastically changed our public education system. So why do people have a problem with charter schools? People fear that these schools will ruin public education.
However, Page and Levine report in Educational Leadership, that advocates for charter schools claim:
Ideally, charter schools offer -
As we have seen in the previous section, this last point did not bear out for parents of the students at Cheyenne Mountain Charter Academy. There is no evidence to back up the remaining claims.
With regards to the assessment process in Washington State, it was determined by the Commission on Student Learning that portfolios will be used to track student progress throughout their school career. Lowell W. Biller8 wrote a magazine article in Bulletin looking at the strengths and weaknesses of portfolios. Following is a partial list of advantages and disadvantages as outlined by Biller:
-----------------------------------------
8Biller, Lowell W. "School Choice: An Educational Myth or a Panacea?" Bulletin May. 1995: 33-40.
Advantages of Portfolios
Disadvantages of Portfolios
It remains to be seen if the use of student assessment portfolios will be a useful tool which will be reflective of the students achievements, and responsive to what is in the best interests of the students. Portfolios are a record of development. Development includes failure, a truth that students, and perhaps prospective bosses, won't want to accept. Do we only put positive things into portfolios? If so, this certainly won't show development.
Regarding assessment testing in general, there seems to be some question about who really benefits from it. It doesn't appear that students do. Evidence suggests that creators of standardized testing are the ones that are profiting. The dynamics of the tests can't measure many of the things that students do learn in classrooms. Susan Tyler Eastman wrote an essay that looked at assessment testing in college mass media courses. In Assessment in Mass Communication she found that the tests that were given to the students couldn't measure very pertinent areas like; "cognitive skills, intellectual capacity, creative capacity, depth of appreciation, and understanding." She concluded that "assessment is only one view of what a student knows. ...tests fail to test anything worth measuring about their students" (Eastman,3-4).
To put the current debate on education reform into perspective, it may be helpful to consider the following letter written by Richard Rothstein, research associate of the Economic Policy Institute, and professor at Occidental College in California. The letter was written to NEA Today.
In every decade of this century serious critics have argued that schools aren't as good as they used to be. If each decade's critics were correct, we'd be forced to the absurd proposition that schools today are worse than those of the turn of the century, schools that few attended for more than a few grades. Of course, the fact that in most generations critics have been wrong doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong today, but it should give use pause before we too quickly embrace the "declining school quality" story. It is very difficult to get reliable evidence on education "then and now", because the curricular goals of schooling change, the types of students change, and there are few tests given to a representative group of students in the past that could be readministered to a similar group today. The most widely cited test series in recent years has been the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). And, both before and after adjusting for different types of pupils then and now, NAEP results show student achievement mostly stable over the last quarter century, with greater improvements in results for minority students. We would be better advised to develop realistic outcome goals for schools today than to chase a groundless vision of schools in a mythical golden past.9
----------------------------
9Richard Rothstein, letter, NEA Today Sept. 1996: 5
Current range of practice
In Washington State a multiphase implementation approach to education reform has been enacted. The following are the five critical phases for this implementation:
Under ESHB1209 the Commission on Student Learning, Center for the Improvement of Student Learning, Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, Joint Select Committee on Education Reform and the Legislature, have specific roles for implementation. While these groups are interrelated, how they are interrelated remains ambiguous. No one organizational entity is responsible for implementing and overseeing the state's education reform as a whole.
In Oregon, the CIM/CAM program has been approved and must be implemented by the year 2000. However it is currently under reform itself and has not been enacted. A similar system is currently being abandoned in the United Kingdom. The British system bestows a general certificate of education during the freshman year of education, after which point assessment testing separates students into college preparatory and vocationally oriented programs (Encyclopedia of Education, 311). This system has been blamed for deepening the division between the British classes. For Oregon, the final reforms have, hopefully, not been made.
Regarding charter schools, it may be too early to tell if these systems are working. School boards granting charters were unwilling or unable to adequately evaluate charter school outcomes or student success (Molner, 12). Charter schools are too new to adequately assess their overall performance (Texas, 9).
According to Page and Levine, there has been some success at the Cheyenne Mountain Charter School:
Even with the pitfalls, there were some enormous triumphs at Cheyenne Mountain Charter Academy. For example, one 5th grader who entered Cheyenne Mountain at the 1st grade reading level completed the year reading on grade level. A 2nd grader who entered scoring at the 4th percentile ended the year scoring at the 30th percentile. An 8th grader who could barely read and write when he entered the school could write acceptable compositions by the end of the year...(29).
However, this seems like hardly enough statistical data to base a well informed conclusion about the effectiveness of charter schools.
Looking next at portfolios, we find that they are currently in use in Vermont and Kentucky, and other states are experimenting with them. In Washington state, portfolios are to be used to contain the results of assessment tests for grades 4, 7, and 10. The assessment tests will cover reading, writing, communications, and math. By April 1996, more than 240 school districts and over 50,000 students agreed to participate in this pilot project. It remains to be seen how successful this will be as a tool for measuring students' progress.
Lastly on assessment testing, teachers are preparing students to achieve the Essential Learnings mandated by the state of Washington. They will give assessment tests to measure this progress, but it is too early to tell whether the assessment tests will show conclusively if education reform is working or not.
Where do we go from here?
Unfortunately two of our research members, Stephanie and Herb, will not be attending the 2nd quarter of the Public Education program. Assessments and Charter Schools will no longer be part of our research agenda. Jeremy, Mike, and Patrick will continue researching how successfully the various components of education reform in Oregon and Washington get enacted. Mike will research how ESHB 1209 will be enacted in the Tumwater district. He will uncover the barriers and obstacles to full compliance there, and get some perspectives from teachers, students and administrators there. Jeremy will continue to monitor the CIM/CAM reforms. He will continue to look at how the reforms in Deschutes county contribute to social stratification. Patrick will research how the ESHB 1209 will continue to be introduced to the general public, and the effectiveness of the public "buy-in" programs to involve parents throughout Washington state.
While this is only a rough sketch of our intentions, our research goals will become more clear to us when we sit down and discuss the next phase of our collaborative effort.
Works Cited
Bierlein, Louann A. "Charter Schools: A New Approach to Public Education." Bulletin
Sept. 1995: 12-20.
Biller, Lowell W. "School Choice: An Educational Myth or a Panacea?" Bulletin
May.1995: 33-40.
Brandon, Richard N. "Sustaining Political Support for Systemic Education Reform," A
Human Services Policy Center Working Paper prepared for the Pew Forum on
Education Reform. January, 1993: 9.
Eastman, Susan Tyler. "Assessment in Mass Communication." Paper Presented at the
Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association 43rd, Washington,
DC, (1993): 3-4. ERIC ED 361 774.
"Examinations." THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EDUCCATION: Crowell-Grolier. 1971.
Hanson, F. Allan. Testing Testing: The Social Consequences of the Examined Life.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993
Katz, David. CLASS, BUREAUCRACY, AND SCHOOLS: THE ILLUSION
OF CHANGE IN AMERICA. New York: Prarger, 1971.
Marshall, Ray and March Tucker, Thinking for a Living. New York: Basic Books,
1992.
Molner, Alex. "Charter Schools-The Smiling Face of Disinvestment." Educational
Leadership. Oct. 1996: 9-15.
Moore Information, Inc. "Exit polls survey on public awareness of ESHB 1209," 1995-
`96. Coordinated by the Washington Roundtable.
Page, Linda and Mark Levine. "The Pitfalls and Triumphs of Launching a Charter
School." Educational Leadership Oct. 1996: 26-29.
Rantschler, Nancy. SCHOOL TO WORK ALLIANCE, INC. Deschutes School
District, Wall Street: Oregon, 1996.
Rothstein, Richard. Letter. NEA Today Sept 1996: 5.
Slimak, Barbara. THE CERTIFICATE OVERVIEW. Deschutes School District, 1996.
Spring, Joel. EDUCATION AND THE RISE OF THE CORPORATE STATE. New
York: Beacon Press Books, 1972.
Spring, Joel . THE AMERICAN SCHOOL 1642-1993. 3rd. ed. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1994.
State of Washington. ESHB 1209. Education Reform-Improvement of Student
Achievement. (Chapter 336, Sec.1.) State of Washington printing office, 1993.
Texas. Department of Education. Charter Schools: Experiments in Reform. Austin:
June, 1994.