The Echo

The grassroots organization, Teachers' Letters to Obama, held a teach-in Tuesday night featuring educator turned Congresswoman Judy Chu and conservative education scholar turned critic, Diane Ravitch. (You can hear the recording here.) Once you load Elluminatelive, give it a few minutes for the for the dialogue to begin.

The following excerpt is from Living in Dialogue Blog by Anthony Cody.

The Education Reformers: Willfully Blind

By Anthony Cody on July 15, 2010 8:19 PM

...There is an oil and water phenomenon at work here. Our perception of the reality in our schools is so drastically different from that of the administration that the two cannot seem to coexist in the same space and time.
To be fair the paradigm of school reform we are facing did not begin with this administration. They have merely adopted it for whatever reasons. But let's be clear about what we are up against. We can offer positive solutions all day long, but until we share a common awareness of reality, we will not be heard. So what is at the heart of this disconnect?

The central claim of the "education reformers" in and out of the administration is that our schools, and in particular, teachers who hold low expectations, are the reason for the differences we see in performance between different socioeconomic groups. To bolster this, they cite research that shows that some teachers are better able to lift student performance than others. So, if we had nothing but great teachers like these, our problems would be solved. But while many of us have invested heavily in our own efforts to become more effective, and in processes such as National Board certification that offer ways to demonstrate and elevate our practice, these processes alone are not going to eradicate the inequities faced by our students.

Ironically, the administration co-opts the language of the Civil Rights Movement to proclaim education as "the civil rights issue of our generation." The leaders of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s were deeply concerned about education, but they understood very well that fighting poverty was fundamental to the health of their communities. So-called reformers have turned civil rights on its head, and no longer worry about the resegregation of schools, or the vast inequities in funding between wealthy and impoverished schools, or the widespread poverty and violence in these communities. Now these are dismissed as excuses offered by the real culprits, those teachers who set low standards and allow their students to fail, and the unions that protect them...