John Goodlad has written an essay — “Judging the Bush Years: Well-Educated or Much-Schooled?” — that analyzes and criticizes the No Child Left Behind campaign of the Bush administration.
Goodlad says that although NCLB is obcessed with testing, it fails to measure and therefore fails to encourage key human attributes such as perseverance, honesty, good problem-solving behavior, ability to work alone and with others, compassion, dependability, creativity or any of the other traits we associate with a democratic people.
Goodlad says we will not have the schools we need, “until community leaders, educators and policymakers agree on the democratic purpose of public schooling and work together toward its advancement.”
Excerpts from the article:
- There is plenty of blame for the past eight years to spread around. George W. Bush just happened to be our leader in chief at a time when, to borrow from communications scholar Neil Postman’s book, “The End of Education,” the god of economic utility was at the top of his game in guiding the purpose and conduct of our schools.
- A clash of major proportions occurred in the mid-1950s when so-called progressive education was attacked severely by prominent critics as threatening solid learning in the traditional school subjects. Their speaking and writing reached a wide audience. Publications such as Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” brought debate to the public.
- Suddenly, in 1957, two small satellites, Sputnik I and II, circled the globe and ushered in a new top priority for schools — ensuring the nation’s global supremacy in science and technology. Schooling quickly appeared on the agenda of policymakers in Washington, D.C. Although the influential book, “The American High School Today,” by the much-respected James Conant supported the concept of a comprehensive secondary school available to all students, Conant recommended a much heavier curriculum in mathematics and science for the academically able. The hard and tough was moving toward ascendency in the curriculum for advancing the nation’s agenda of leading in the global economy.
- In 1965, Congress passed an Elementary and Secondary Education Act quite different from that of 2001, providing the largest budget ever for research and development pertaining to schools to support President Lyndon Johnson’s vision of the Great Society.
- Sociologist James Coleman was commissioned to lead a research team that would bring out within a year a report on the critical factors in classroom learning and guide funding priorities. The most significant and controversial finding stunned the president and Congress: The primary factors are not teachers and curricula but the social and particularly the educational capital students bring from home and communities and encounter in their fellow students.
- Unfortunately, we have never made clear to policymakers, teacher educators, school board members and school personnel what that game should be. Had we done so even a quarter-century ago, we might now be a long way along the road to the renewing system of schooling our democracy must have.
- Several educational leaders saw instead the need for comprehensive renewal and discovered a readiness for it among school principals and teachers nationwide. A fascinating flurry of innovation, funded by philanthropic foundations, arose late in the 1980s and continued into the late 1990s. Then it largely perished, like plants without water, during Bush’s first term.
- Where do we go from here? That is another story in the making, not of further tinkering I hope. Two major lessons emerge out of the past half-century of misguided school reform eras. First, we will never have the schools our democracy requires until primary responsibility for them returns to their community contexts. Second, we will never have them until community leaders, educators and policymakers agree on the democratic purpose of public schooling and work together toward its advancement.
Mike,
It would be most helpful if you sorted out:
1. David Mathews
2. Marc Dann, “Friend of Education”
3. Bill Ayers
4. John Goodlad
…
n. Multitudes of friends of Bill & John
…
Of the above, David Mathews got it right and should be taken seriously. The others don’t even make the “nice” list–For example, it would be “nice” if oath-sworn expert testimony matches political advice, particularly if youi are a friend of Bill and John as well as a member of President-elect Obama’s transition team.
Failing to distinguish among those who want to help schools complicates progress. A look at Necessary Lessons: Decline and Renewal in American Schools by Gilbert T. Sewall may provide some insight.
Goodlad writes:
“three major ongoing inquiries into contemporary schooling … were ignored … ideology triumphed over hard-nosed inquiry.”
Homework: Find the titles of the three reports. Find their entries at eric.ed.gov. What makes those reports more commendable than Kettering Foundation pubs?
Eric, John Goodlad is known for his school research — particularly his book, “A Place Called School,” written over 20 years ago. It’s worth a reread and I think I will try to find a copy. Goodlad has made significant contributions to education (he is now 87 years old, and still writing!) so I don’t understand your comment that he doesn’t make the “nice” list. I have no idea what Goodlad was referring to in his mention of “three ongoing inquiries,” and a quick look at eric.ed.gov wasn’t helpful. It would be great if you could help dig out appropriate links to these reports.
I did review David Matthews book. But, I’m wondering, when you say that Mathews “got it right,” exactly what you are referring to?
Mike-
This site just swallowed my followup. I’m not recomposing it, including hyperlinks the site mistook for spam. Can the followup be recovered?
Eric — sorry, but I can’t find any record of your vanished followup. Sometimes the site puts potential spam comments in a limbo state, “waiting moderation,” but, nothing is there. Sorry. Maybe you can give a shortened version (?)
Mike, You state:
“Goodlad says that although NCLB is obsessed with testing, it fails to measure and therefore fails to encourage key human attributes such as perseverance, honesty, good problem-solving behavior, ability to work alone and with others, compassion, dependability, creativity or any of the other traits we associate with a democratic people.” I don’t want government schools go measure perseverance, compassion, creativity, honesty (except to punish cheating) because they are much too subjective and subject to abuse. (“I’m sorry, Mrs. Jones, but little Johnny flunked because his compassion score was too low. He doesn’t favor government solutions to poverty.) In higher education many abuses by liberal professors and under speech codes have been documented.
You state:
“A clash of major proportions occurred in the mid-1950s when so-called progressive education was attacked severely by prominent critics as threatening solid learning in the traditional school subjects. Their speaking and writing reached a wide audience. Publications such as Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” brought debate to the public.” Flesch got it right. People were not attacking “progressive” education, they were attacking methods of instruction that were demonstratively inferior.
Our country, our people are widely divided on the purposes of education. I am confident that you and I have deeply divided ideas about education. That is why I like vouchers and individual choice. I am against, with some minimal exceptions, forcing parents to turn their children over to a school that educates their child in a manner that they disagree with.
Rick, you write, “I am confident that you and I have deeply divided ideas about education.”
Maybe our views are not so different. I support the view that our educational system needs to be transformed to one emphasizing a free market, free enterprise structure. See here, here, here and here.
We have a coercive tax system that forces property owners to turn over significant money as a tax to finance public education. Taxation, in general, is justified to the degree that tax money is used to advance the public good, the general good. We each of us have a stake, for example, in maintaining adequate defense against fire and crime — so it makes sense to pay taxes to fund fire and police departments. We pay taxes to help finance a military. The idea is that maintaining an adequate military is a requirement to advance or secure the general good — the general good, in this case, defined as the general safety of the nation — and that taxes are therefore justified.
Often missing in discussions about public education is any consideration for how the general good of public education should be defined so that the coercive taxation needed to fund public education is logically justified. There must be a clear aim, a clear purpose, for public education that explains the goals of public education in terms of the public good. Goodlad says that this clear aim must center on generating a citizenry that will maintain and invigorate our democracy. This aim makes sense to me.
What I hear Goodlad say is that in a democracy, the key purpose for public education, that justifies its funding through coercive taxation, is the preparation of citizens to act as effective citizens. It is a crucial need, it is in the general good, that future generations have the capacity and dedication to maintain and invigorate the freedoms and opportunities and promises of our constitution, that our ancestors, in previous generations, worked hard to establish. Without the capacity and dedication within the citizenry to maintain our democracy, certainly our democracy at some point in the future will vanish.
The quality and capacity needed for citizens to maintain and advance the ideals of a democracy is quite different from the qualities needed for citizens to maintain and advance the ideals of a totalitarian state. A totalitarian state certainly would want its future generations to show competency in academic tests and would, no doubt, have a system of rewards and punishments for schools, teachers, and students based on success or failure with such tests. We need to ask ourselves how our goals and methodology for public education in our democracy differ from the goals and methodology for public education in a totalitarian state. The answer seems: Not much.
Goodlad says, “We will never have the schools our democracy requires until … community leaders, educators and policymakers agree on the democratic purpose of public schooling.” I think he is right.
A public education that seeks simply to give students academic skills — and this is how public education, via state tests and No Child Left Behind criteria, is now defined — to me, hardly seems sufficient, hardly seems sufficiently connected to the common good, to justify coercive taxation for its support.
Like I said, maybe our views are not so different.
Mike: Could you please send me a “clean” link on this article? Some stupid Goodle pop-up ad is obscuring the final paragraph of the text here & I don’t know how to click it away. Thx!—really appreciate it.
Rich Ham
seattle, WA
E-mail: richam@silverlink.net
Evidently the Forum for Education changed their web-site, because I couldn’t get that link to work either. Thanks for telling me that it wasn’t working, I’ve fixed it now.
Here is the link to the article at the forum: http://www.forumforeducation.org/node/371
And here is where the article is also published: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/389904_busheducation30.html
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