Experts React to NBC's "Education Nation"

Come back throughout the week for the thoughts and reactions of professors Kenneth Howe, Sherman Dorn and A. G. Rud to NBC's week-long "Education Nation" broadcasts.

I live far from New York City, and though I can view the Education Nation broadcasts this week, I cannot witness the transformation of Rockefeller Plaza into a "Learning Plaza." It will be "an interactive experience that will explore some of the most innovative aspects of American education." From the pictures on the site the plaza does indeed look impressive, with curved posters and video monitors. The designers want visitors to be engaged in the information, and though I laud this effort, I wait cautiously to see if such does indeed happen. I am more intrigued by the "Teaching Garden" in the plaza, which will "explore the critical link between nutrition and learning." This topic is pertinent to everyone, and the bodily aspects of learning are being explored increasingly in depth and interconnection in the neurosciences and in health and nutrition fields. Nutrition and learning can also be a way of engaging participants in conversations about the social and cultural contexts of education. Poor nutrition and underperformance in school is also, obviously, linked to poverty. Let's hope the visitors to the technically advanced displays in Rockefeller Plaza this week make that connection, as well as other links to the social contexts of learning in our schools.

There were no surprises in the first day of NBC's Education Nation conversation.  It was kicked off on Meet the Press, with David Gregory engaging three of the usual suspects: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Chancellor of Washington D.C. schools Michelle Rhee, and President of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten. These three were joined by lesser known, Robert Bobb, Emergency Financial Manager of Detroit Public Schools.

Arne Duncan was given the floor first and laid down two premises that have become commonplace in U.S. educational policy: (1) education’s aim is to foster economic competitiveness (“education is an economic strategy”) and (2) the locus of reform should be schools, particularly choice and accountability. These premises were never challenged, including by Weingarten.  She merely cautioned that teacher accountability should be augmented with professional development because that is what “countries do that out-compete us.”

In the received view of educational reform Duncan represents, there are reformers and defenders of the status quo—and nothing in between. So, those who are critical of choice and punitive accountability regimens must be in favor of the status quo. And where increased funding is supplied, they must be in favor of throwing “good money after bad.”

What rendered this discussion completely uninformative for viewers who may have been seeking a deeper understanding of the issues is that opponents of the received view of educational reform rarely (if ever) deny that the U.S. public education is seriously flawed and that it does, indeed, need reform. The disagreement is not about the general diagnosis but about its source and what kinds of reforms promise to lead to real improvements. Regarding the latter, the evidence on choice and accountability is mixed. Positive results in achievement in certain places are counter-balanced by negative results in others. And there are no counter-balances to the overall negative results of accountability and choice, which, respectively, narrow the curriculum to what is tested and exacerbate racial segregation.

At a more fundamental level, opponents of the received view locate a major source of the failures of public education in the social-economic structures in which the system is embedded and contend that addressing these structures is the only truly effective way to reform public education. This is not to say that it is pointless to reform public education in the meantime, but it does counsel against overpromising what isolated school reform can deliver and, what goes hand-in-hand with this, unfairly holding teachers accountable for goals that are beyond their power to achieve.

Meet the Press was followed by the “Teachers Town Hall,” which aired only on MSNBC, not the major network. Brian Williams hosted and posed a series of questions to on-stage panels and an audience of educators. His first question sparked a particularly animated exchange when he asked the question of whether teachers are under attack. Almost all who spoke had this perception. One teacher’s remarks were particularly noteworthy for being the only challenge of the day to Arne Duncan’s way of framing the issues. She characterized teachers as “scapegoats” for society’s wider social ills. Teachers are attacked both from the political right—for example, their greedy pension schemes—as well as from the self-identified political left—for example, by the splash documentary Waiting for Superman.

The subsequent issues taken up in the town hall meeting—tenure, accountability, STEM education, and unionization—prompted less agreement among the teacher participants than the general issue of teachers being under attack. A significant number of teachers, often young and working in charter schools, were relatively more likely to endorse the shape accountability has taken and to be critical of tenure and unions as functioning to protect ineffective teachers.

The town hall meeting was mostly just an opportunity for teachers to vent their concerns. Still, it was considerably more useful than the Meet the Press segment. The conversation was much less constrained, and it captured the points of view of teachers that, unfortunately, typically go unheard at the level of educational policy. In this vein, one award-winning teacher answered Williams’ question about what the solution to education reform might be with the suggestion to bring teachers to the educational policy table.  Were this advice followed, it would enable teachers to do more than vent and actually meaningfully contribute to the formulation of policy.

The low point of the day was the panel on Davis Guggenheim’s movie Waiting for Superman, moderated by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Panel members consisted of Geoffrey Canada and (again) Michelle Rhee and Randi Weingarten, who were later joined by singer-song writer John Legend. Orchestrated by Scarborough and Brzezinski, the group participated in a one-hour infomercial for this “incredible movie,” as Brzezinski called it, as well as self-aggrandizement for themselves. The exception was Randi Weingarten, who, also as orchestrated by Scarborough and Brzezinski, was flogged throughout for allegedly being motivated by little else than protecting ineffective teachers. It would have been quite interesting to have included in this discussion the teacher in the town hall meeting who had a quite different view of Waiting for Superman, likening Guggenheim to Leni Riefenstahl.

I paid attention to two events on the second day of NBC’s Education Nation summit: the President’s interview with Matt Lauer at the beginning of the day and the NBC Nightly News at its end.  Things started better than they finished.

The President articulated a reasonable and relatively nuanced view of educational reform.  He did not join in on the teacher union bashing recently egged-on by Waiting for Superman.  He showed an appreciation for and endorsed the unions’ role in protecting its members from being arbitrarily fired, and showed knowledge of the particular role played by teachers unions in furthering the cause of working women.  On the other hand, he also observed, rightly in my view, that teachers unions have exhibited resistance to reform.  

When asked by Lauer whether mediocre and poor teachers should be fired, he responded that the education profession should be lifted up and honored. Under those conditions, yes, teachers who had been given a fair chance to succeed but remained “sub par” should be fired.  He avoided demonizing a general group of lousy teachers and was silent on firing “mediocre” (equals average?) teachers, thus avoiding the requirement to produce a Lake Wobegon teaching core.

Regarding charter schools, the President denied they are a panacea.  He sees them as having shown themselves as capable of being effective with students who have historically fared very poorly in traditional public schools.  Charter schools should function like laboratories whose successes can be disseminated to other schools, including traditional ones.

Though one can only welcome the thoughtful and respectful tone of the President’s remarks, that tone did not prevent him from advancing a number of dubious claims.  For example, the President claimed that teachers unions have not simply resisted reform, but resisted reforms that are known to be effective: charter schools, standards and accountability, and pay for performance.   The problem is that none of these are known to be effective, particularly when effective includes fair, and unions have resisted on those grounds. Charter schools, in particular, have not shown themselves to be generally more effective with low performing students than traditional public schools and they have shown little penchant to cooperate rather than compete with traditional public schools.  In the end, the President’s views on educational reform rest more on what is trendy than on what the available evidence supports. 

The Nightly News, unfortunately, exhibited not a whiff of the President’s measured approach.  (I guess that’s not at all surprising given increasing signs that broadcast journalism is looking to Fox News as the model.)       

Lester Holt did a segment featuring Mark Zuckerman’s 100 million dollar donation to Newark Public Schools, which Newark’s mayor hopes to match, followed by Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement that IBM will be funding a six-year high school that will guarantee graduates a job at IBM.   The obvious questions of what the entanglement of private interests in education means and what happens if and when the private money goes away were never broached.

Holt subsequently touted Washington DC Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee for “trying to purge her schools or failing schools and principals.”   In the previous day Rhee “sparred with” Randi Weingarten, the “teacher’s union boss” (emphasis added) over resistance to differentiating among teachers, which is required to purge the bad one.  Though Weingarten does not disagree with Rhee on the general idea of differentiation, but on the details, the tape was edited in way that suggested she does.  In this simplistic morality tale, Rhee came off as the hero and the “union boss” came off as the villain.

Subsequently came the segment, dramatically introduced by Brian Williams before going to a commercial break, about a “young women who rolled a verbal hand grenade into a large gathering of teachers.”  The story was put together by NBC’s education correspondent Rehema Ellis.  The young women in question had risen and remarked in the previous day’s teachers town hall meeting that she saw no need for tenure, thinks union contracts just get in the way of good teaching, and believes charter schools are better able to meet students’ individual needs.  Ellis approvingly characterized her as exemplifying the new generation of teachers that is saying  “get out of my way [unions], let me do my job.” Ellis then went on to again glorify Michelle Rhee. 

That this young woman represents the views of the new generation of teachers is mere—wild—speculation on Ellis’ part.  Moreover, the views she expressed were in a distinct minority of the views expressed by the teachers who spoke on the issue at the town hall meeting.  But, then, why complicate things this way?  Right NBC?

When I worked at The North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (www.nccat.org) years ago, I led a week long seminar on film making and film criticism. One of the presenters helped me, and the teacher participants, move away from focusing on just the film’s acting and toward a more nuanced and contextual way of seeing a film. Many of us found this jarring; surely it was a great actor alone, a Pacino or a Streep, who made a film great, we thought. We came to realize there was much more to a moving and memorable film, and we explored theme, dialogue, direction, and many other facets of this art beyond just the acting that week.

I remembered that lesson learned in the mountains of North Carolina as I watched the segment on how Bill Gates is funding research and inquiry into what makes a great teacher. The Measures of Effective Teaching project is ambitious, and hits many of the right notes. There are elements of good teaching that can be measured. We can “deconstruct” good practice by watching video of master teachers. We can laud ancient means of engaging young minds such as Socratic questioning and inquiry based learning, and encourage teachers to use these, and other means, to ignite learning in young minds.

But if we are talking about what makes a great education for our students, it is not simply a great teacher, just as a great film is simply not one with a great acting performance. There are numerous contextual factors in education and in society that mitigate or support the efforts of valiant, persistent, and skilled, teachers. Such factors can be as unassailable as a safe home and neighborhood, free from want and the darkness of family and social dysfunction. A teacher can hardly be effective no matter the skill or experience level if the social context outside the classroom is toxic. So while I applaud the work of Gates and other enlightened benefactors, I want us all to see more widely what enables a young mind to be educated, and what is both inside the walls of our classrooms, and outside those walls, that help us achieve that end.