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by Susan Ohanian

Writing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Paul Krugman notes:



And in the wake of the crisis, the fault lines in the economics profession have yawned wider than ever. Lucas says the Obama administration’s stimulus plans are “schlock economics,” and his Chicago colleague John Cochrane says they’re based on discredited “fairy tales.” In response, Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, writes of the “intellectual collapse” of the Chicago School, and I myself have written that comments from Chicago economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.

What happened to the economics profession? And where does it go from here?

As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.




Now President Obama and his Secretary of Education Duncan hold up the Chicago Plan for Schools, touting the same vision of capitalism as held by the Chicago economists. Their school plan mistakes the beauty of unfettered data for truth.

Krugman says the the central cause of the economists' failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Arne Duncan uses the same carefully crafted soundbites every time he speaks in public--touting the same vision of a market-driven education policy--because he has no feet-on-the-pavement experience in schools. Wouldn't you love to hear his pitch on emerging from seven hours locked up in a room with 30 9th graders?

NCLB holds schools responsible only for math and reading numbers, with the result that the curriculum of children of poverty is largely test prep for math and reading tests. In a January 2009 Education Week article, Richard Rothstein pointed out that test makers used to be involved in figuring out how schools were teaching such things as civic responsibility. In their book
Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right, Rothstein, Jacobson, and Wilder note:




We've wound up, however,adopting accountability policies based almost exclusively on standardized test scores for reading and mathematics. This book demonstrates why such narrow test-based accountability plans cannot possibly accomplish their stated intent, which is to tell the states and nation whether schools and related public institutions are performing satisfactorily and to support interventions that ensure improvement. To hold schools and other institutions of youth development accountable, information from tests of basic skills must be combined with a wide array of information from other sources, including tests of reasoning and critical thinking and evaluations by experienced and qualified experts who observe schools, child care centers, health clinics, and after-school and summer programs, to determine if they are performing satisfactorily.




Elsewhere, Rothstein has called NCLB "incoherent, unworkable, and doomed." He called on the new president and Congress to restore local control of education. Instead, Presidedent Obama and his Chicago pal have brought us what Diane Ravitch terms "Bush's third term." The Chicago Plan is to intensify the worship of select data in an abomination titled Race to the Top. States won't get their share of the money pot if they don't tie student test score data to the evaluation or compensation of teachers. And the money is big--$4.3 billion, the largest pot of discretionary funds ever made available from the US Department of Education. It is the centerpiece of President Obama's education plan. Discretionary is the word here: Duncan gets to do what he wants. Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute writes on Gadfly that this "Race to the Top" program should be called "NCLB 2: The Carrot That Feels Like a Stick."

Of course this is small potatoes compared with $97.5 billion federal stimulus package for education, which Duncan also directs and skews into his Chicago Plan. When Duncan was in charge of the Chicago Public Schools, the district exeprienced relentless privatization, school closings, militarization, and union busting. And of course teachers were blamed for the problems facing urban schools. Here's a a great comment on the Chicago plan by Substance editor, George Schmidt.

Diane Ravitch asks the right question:



If Arne Duncan knows exactly how to reform American education, why didn't he reform Chicago's schools? A report from the Civic Committee of Chicago ("Still Left Behind") shows that Chicago's much-touted score gains in the past several years were phony, that they were generated after the state lowered the passing mark on the state tests, that the purported gains did not show up on the federal tests, and that Chicago's high schools are still failing. On the respected federal test (NAEP), Chicago continues to be one of the lowest performing cities in the nation.

I want to know why Washington is pushing "reform" ideas that have so little evidence behind them, ideas that might do serious damage to public education in America?




The rest of us should want to know the answer to this question, too. We should insist on it.




— Susan Ohanian

2009-09-20


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INDEX OF OUTRAGES

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