🧵A brief history of education reform in the 21st century US:
◾ GW Bush dismantles the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, creating the Institute of Educational Sciences with the call to create a "science of education," with the "Gold Standard" of RCTs
◾ GW Bush introduces most far-reaching federal education legislation in US history, No Child Left Behind, based on the so-called "Texas Miracle" where test-based accountability "improved outcomes" in student learning [1]
◾Test-based accountability now required for schools that want federal funds
◾ Because tests are expensive and had primarily been developed in mathematics and literacy, schools that "underperform" on those measures are subject to sanctions are reconstitution
◾ The most widely available and least expensive tests are norm-based tests (as opposed to standards based tests)...
◾ ... and the "norming group" is typically white, middle class, English speaking students.
◾ As a result of this instrumentation, schools with high numbers of students outside of those norms "underperform," while schools whose students fall within those demographics "succeed"
◾ Obama appoints Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, a person whose primary expertise was basketball before he oopsed his way into the Chicago Public Schools with no prior educational experience
◾ When the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is renewed (where NCLB was spawned), Duncan injects steroids into the accountability mechanisms through Race to the Top, requiring states to link ALL TEACHERS' RATINGS to these inadequate accountability tools.
(This is where PE teachers did math lessons because they were worried that the low math scores of their students will affect their ratings.)
◾ Meanwhile, the wide-availability of test scores and crap sites like "good schools" spread narratives about schools as "good" and "bad" based on limited data
◾ Enter a moral panic about bad schools and bad teachers, strengthening school choice advocates and charterization movements. (See also: WAITING FOR SUPERMAN, the Michelle Rhee TIME cover, and WON'T BACK DOWN for the pop culture detritus of this moment.)
◾ The attraction of teaching as a profession has diminished, because of all of these pressures, particularly the extra burden of external standardized assessments and the decreased autonomy.
◾ Teacher demographer Richard Ingersoll notes the "greening of the teaching profession," where the average years' experience of US teachers starts skewing to fewer and fewer years.
◾ As a result, we have more inexperienced teachers dealing with ever more challenging teaching situations.
◾ This again strengthens the case for public school defunding advocates (which is essentially what charterization and school-choice advocates are). They can find teachers making rookie errors, amplify them, and then clutch their pearls.
◾ So, the efforts toward education reform in this century have decreased resources in our schools that need them most, have pushed experienced teachers out of the classroom, and have led to US schools being more segregated than they were at any time since Brown.
Given what I have explained, nobody should be surprised.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The "Texas Miracle" was not at all a Miracle. It was another instance of creating pseudoscientific "data" to advocate for a desired conclusion
journals.sagepub.com/share/862KSS...
I don't have it in me to keep going with DeVos, Science of Reading, and Moms for Liberty. But since this is all more recent, hopefully you can see how the seeds for all of these were planted in earlier administrations.
#EduSky
I'd really love to see someone on #EduSky dive into Science of Reading, as I was taken in for a while by the very one-sided Sold a Story podcast. Thank you for this thread!
