Duncan’s record.
I never thought President Obama appointed Arne Duncan education secretary because he had done wonders in Chicago. Rather, he was a politically savvy choice whose approaches Obama approved of. Anyone who paid attention to Chicago media during Duncan’s tenure would have known that there was no consensus on the effectiveness of his reforms, except to say results were mixed. (Which seems to be the best you can say for any urban superintendent of the last decade, and anyway, who was the last education secretary who went into the job having had reformed a horrid system?)
So it surprised me to read in a Washington Post piece yesterday that the bubble was being burst, because I guess I had forgotten that there was a bubble. The news peg was Chicago’s mediocre math NAEP scores. Don’t get me wrong; Nick Anderson’s piece was good and important, and I especially loved the quote in which Duncan, who judges a hell of a lot on test scores in his new job, tries to explain these ones away by saying he was more focused on “outcomes.” I did think the headline was overly ominous. But the main thing is this: The only reason this was news to the Post was that journalists outside of Chicago hadn’t done a good job of evaluating his record around the time of his appointment as secretary.
This is a problem in journalism: It is too easy to produce quick, glowing stories about the past accomplishments of the new principal, the new superintendent, the new cabinet secretary, when the reality is far more complex. Of course Obama had talked up Duncan’s deeds in Chicago. But in this case, balancing information was not hard to come by, if you paid any attention to local media.
As Alexander Russo points out, the Post published a story exactly a year previous about Duncan’s potentially “model” reforms. It was not the only paper to leave out the more critical chunks. The 2009 NAEP scores should not have been the only reason readers outside Illinois eventually got a more balanced picture of the secretary.
So it surprised me to read in a Washington Post piece yesterday that the bubble was being burst, because I guess I had forgotten that there was a bubble. The news peg was Chicago’s mediocre math NAEP scores. Don’t get me wrong; Nick Anderson’s piece was good and important, and I especially loved the quote in which Duncan, who judges a hell of a lot on test scores in his new job, tries to explain these ones away by saying he was more focused on “outcomes.” I did think the headline was overly ominous. But the main thing is this: The only reason this was news to the Post was that journalists outside of Chicago hadn’t done a good job of evaluating his record around the time of his appointment as secretary.
This is a problem in journalism: It is too easy to produce quick, glowing stories about the past accomplishments of the new principal, the new superintendent, the new cabinet secretary, when the reality is far more complex. Of course Obama had talked up Duncan’s deeds in Chicago. But in this case, balancing information was not hard to come by, if you paid any attention to local media.
As Alexander Russo points out, the Post published a story exactly a year previous about Duncan’s potentially “model” reforms. It was not the only paper to leave out the more critical chunks. The 2009 NAEP scores should not have been the only reason readers outside Illinois eventually got a more balanced picture of the secretary.
posted by Linda Perlstein at
3:44 PM
3 Comments:
I agree with you and Alexander, and I disagree. Last year’s Post article did contain several caricature-like characteristics. It started with a success story - an elementary school of course. Then a breathless and vague sentence followed “Across the city, educators point to improvements” in a college prep charter school, of course. Next was a happy time story of a teacher who was mentored with the hopeful statement “Next year, the former theater major and other trainees will take on classes of their own ...” And worst of all, the story invested 8 paragraphs on a 5th grade teacher.
(In defense, though, back then the best data was previous NAEP scores where Chicago was ranked 2nd of 11 urban districts in 8th grade Reading. Plus, the reason why Chicago’s elementary scores increased so much more than older scores is ... nobody knows, just like nobody knows in other districts)
This year’s Post article was much better, but in fairness the recent disappointing NAEP scores followed the words “This month, the mathematics report card was delivered ...” Last year the Post could have also made the statement in this year’s article that “Yet questions have arisen this year about the magnitude of Duncan's accomplishments.” But you guys implicitly admit that the Post is now on much firmer ground when it correctly reports “his legacy is routinely overblown.”
As you and Alexander say, much was already known about Chicago’s record, and that record wasn’t the key reason for his appointment. Last year’s Post wasn’t inaccurate in writing”
“Washington area schools have launched experiments similar to Chicago's. Charter schools are multiplying in the District, and D.C. schools are trying cash incentives for students. A Fairfax County initiative bumps salaries for some teachers who work a longer year and take on extra tasks, such as coaching colleagues. Pay for performance is underway in Prince George's County, tying some teacher bonuses to test scores.” It didn’t say whether those policies produced results.
(to be continued)
continued)
I can understand why Duncan, or anyone else would try the first two turnaround efforts. When GM goes broke, innocent workers are hurt also. But my complaint is that reformers haven’t listened enough to experts like those at the Catalyst or the Chicago Consortium. For instance, every super and his dog get peddled the same reform “carefully chosen curricula designed to engage low-income students.”
But, as the Consortium later explained, aligned curricula will not turnaround discipline and attendance problems. The curricula will be outmatched unless you first address the “hundreds of students in the city’s worst high schools showed up weeks after the school year had begun. On average, students in these schools were absent 50 days or more. Teachers wound up spending weeks doing catch up and back tracking.” What are the chances that a big city super is both briefed on the logistics of curriculum alignment and its impossibility when teachers have no choice but to do “back tracking?”
But “the one tool schools need to combat it—truancy officers—are long gone.”
You guys should correct me if I’m wrong but its my understanding that Chicago was called the nation’s worst in 1987. The first generation of reforms, that used data to inform but that didn’t have sanctions, produced greater gains than subsequent more accountability-driven reforms. The Post wrote “Another hallmark of Duncan’s tenure is bringing business-oriented reformers into the fold, taking cues from Harvard University’s business and education schools. Their input has shaped a data-driven, performance-based culture that rewards well-run schools and their teachers and leaders, and penalizes schools that make no progress.” Has that approach ever yielded results in a system with as much violence in its students’ lives as Chicago?
Being a former super would be as good as any single qualification to run DOE. But I’m hoping that Duncan was chosen for his ability to listen as much as his ability to stay on the same sound bite message. If so, I expect next year’s article will be different still. Who knows, maybe they will be exaggerating his success on RttT as the reason why he’s supporting an NCLB II that’s fundamentally different than NCLB I, and Duncan will be using the same soundbites to support the opposite policies. Then Alexander will really have a cow.
Only a few days ago, in a comment on this blog, I described the whiplash-inducing coverage the New York Times gave to now-fizzled, once-hailed for-profit school manager Edison Schools back in '01-'02. One day reporter Ed Wyatt was parroting false claims by Edison CEO Chris Whittle, unquestioned and unchallenged; and another day not long afterward, reporter Jacques Steinberg was subjecting Edison's claims of test-score improvement in its schools to sharp analysis that showed them to be, well, false. But there was no mention in Steinberg's excellent coverage of the Times' previous trusting and unskeptical coverage.
I'm well aware of how stubbornly resistant the press is to running corrections of substantive errors (though if they get your middle initial wrong, you're guaranteed a nice prominent correction). I'm concerned that if there were a protocol calling for the press to acknowledge that they'd gotten it wrong in past coverage, the corrected story never would get written.
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