Why Education Reforms Aren’t Working

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/opinion/letters/education-reform.html

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To the Editor:

Re “School Reforms Fail to Lift U.S. on Global Test” (front page, Dec. 3):

I taught through various eras of so-called education reform. Very early in my career, as a beginning New York City teacher, I received an award to spend the summer studying special methods for teaching children of poverty at Princeton University. Children were bused in from Trenton.

Over the years, upstate New York schools where I taught received lots of special federal funds: We bought art to hang in our school, bought machines to give children extra phonics drills, bought tons of textbooks, sent teachers off to be drilled on intensive phonics, hired experts to fly in with their PowerPoints, and on and on.

How long will we continue to beat a dead horse? When will we help families directly, ensuring that all children live in families with adequate minimum income and adequate housing?

Education reform has enriched many people. It’s time to start reform where it’s needed, directing the riches to children.

I’d start education reform tomorrow by giving all children a voucher for 10 free books of their choice. And I’d work at making sure the children have homes where they can take those books.

Susan OhanianCharlotte, Vt.

To the Editor:

When billions of dollars are spent to overhaul education, it’s understandable why rankings on the Program for International Student Assessment are carefully scrutinized. But there is a distinct difference between an exam meritocracy, which is what PISA and other competitive tests measure, and a talent meritocracy.

Although our students have never shined on such rankings, they go on to do better in life and in the real world because some parts of the intellect, like creativity and curiosity, are hard to evaluate.

Raw testing skills don’t transfer well outside the classroom.

Walt GardnerLos AngelesThe writer blogs about education at theedhed.com.

To the Editor:

Your review of decades of failed attempts at public education reform highlighted a frustrating daily reality for many of us who teach in America’s public schools. Our high school English department grapples regularly with the challenge of encouraging students to read. We often joke that we’re more salespeople than teachers when it comes to convincing our students that reading is a valuable use of their time.

The stagnant reading test scores could be attributed to the larger societal challenge that fewer and fewer Americans read for pleasure regularly. Given that context, high-stakes testing, nationalized standards and curriculums, and random acts of English teaching often fall short. Distressing as it may be to those of us whose life’s work includes helping to nurture a literate population, it is wholly unsurprising that a society that places a low priority on reading in fact produces so few proficient readers.

Jon ParkerPittsburgh

To the Editor:

The stagnant results of the international PISA exam have spoken: An extensive overhaul in the American education system is desperately needed. Although myriad troubles plague American schools — from lack of support for immigrant students to inequalities between schools — part of the solution may lie in one of the countries that outperformed us on the PISA exam: Finland.

Our country has sought to boost test scores by introducing a multitude of standardized tests, essentially forcing teachers to center their class around preparing for these tests rather than teaching their students foundational skills. In Finnish schools, students are subject to almost no standardized tests, yet Finnish students surpassed American students in the PISA exam.

In our desperation to improve academic achievement, our country has fostered a culture obsessed with test results, yet, ironically, this fixation only serves as a detriment to America’s academic performance on the international stage.

Riya JonesFairfax, Va.

To the Editor:

The “education reform” movement of the past 20 years has not resulted in improved educational attainment because that was not its focus. All of its components — which include opening charter schools, merit pay for teachers, mayoral control in large cities, closing rather than helping struggling schools — focus on governance structures of public education, not on classroom instruction.

Indeed, the one initiative that would have yielded prompt improvement in achievement is the “Reading First” component of No Child Left Behind, which in turn built on the findings of The National Reading Panel Report to Congress of 2000. Instead, it was engulfed by vendor scandals early on, and disappeared. Twenty years later, struggling readers at every grade level still await the report’s full implementation. For that, we don’t need any more “reforms,” just action on what is well established about how to make sure every child is reading on grade level.

Susan CrawfordNew YorkThe writer is director of the Right to Read Project.

To the Editor:

Reading the article about the PISA results, I was disturbed but not surprised. You see, last year I was hired to administer this assessment, and what I experienced both discouraged and alarmed me.

First, students whose parents didn’t allow them to opt out were often upset and annoyed about taking another test, especially one that didn’t affect their grades. Second, some teachers had discouraged students from participating in PISA by telling them it would be their responsibility to make up what they missed in class. I believe that, because of these factors, many students did not put their full effort into the assessment, and therefore the results are not truly representative of our students’ ability.

Rick LeightonTucson, Ariz.

To the Editor:

It’s disheartening to see yet another article about the “failure” of K-12 education advancing the claim that efforts to “solve” the problem are bewildering in their lack of success. What all those efforts have in common is their disdain for people with the most useful knowledge about how to improve learning and teaching: teachers.

Yes, a handful of teachers were involved in writing Common Core standards, the guidelines for Race to the Top and the like. Writ large, however, the entire movement of which those efforts are part has operated on the assumption that teachers are too self-interested and poorly trained to know how to make education work better.

Maybe it would work better if people who want to improve education asked teachers what we and our students need instead of generating hugely grandiose plans that produce nothing but blame for teachers who had nothing to do with creating them.

Seth KahnWest Chester, Pa.The writer teaches English at West Chester University.

To the Editor:

Re “Perpetual Laggards Leap Ahead in Reading,” by Emily Hanford (Op-Ed, Dec. 6), about Mississippi students’ improved standardized test scores:

Apparently, educational theory has come full circle. When my wife and I were learning to read, we were taught to use phonics to decode unfamiliar written words. Later our mothers, who were public-school teachers, were required to teach reading by other newer methods. But they confessed to us that they never abandoned phonics entirely because the newfangled methods were less effective.

Now we are back where we started and should have never left. Could that be true for instruction in the other two “Rs” — writing and arithmetic — as well?

Paul R. HundtLarchmont, N.Y.

To the Editor:

Emily Hanford’s piece about improved test scores in reading in Mississippi since the state began funding in 2013 to train its teachers in a particular methodology certainly sounds optimistic. However, there’s another reason, a big one, for the improvement in fourth-grade reading scores, which Ms. Hanford didn’t mention.

In 2013, Mississippi passed a Literacy Based Promotion Act, which mandated that in most cases, a student scoring at the lowest achievement level on the state-mandated third-grade achievement test won’t be promoted to fourth grade. Voilà! The weakest readers in third grade don’t move up to fourth grade, and the fourth-grade reading scores go up.

Sandra WildeNew YorkThe writer is a retired education professor at Hunter College, CUNY.