Local media also ignore critique of Chicago miracle ‘hype’...

National critique of ‘No Child Left Behind’ and high-stakes testing

News Analysis

If there were any further need for proof that most education reporting in Chicago is (and has been) simply corporate propaganda, the final proof came at two vastly different meetings held in Chicago during the third week of April 2003.

Between April 21 and April 25, many of the foremost education scholars, teachers, and writers in America assembled in Chicago at the annual convention of the AERA — American Educational Research Association.

At the same time, a handful of others met at the far end of the Loop in the murky “W” hotel.

AERA was attended by more than 11,000 people, ranging from internationally famous professors to graduate students and classroom teachers. It spread across the Regency Hyatt, Sheraton Chicago, and Swissotel hotels straddling the Chicago River east of Michigan Ave. None of the thousands of meetings, presentations, and exhibits at AERA was more than two blocks from the Chicago Tribune, three blocks from the Sun-Times, or a half mile from the city’s major electronic media.

Professors Eric (‘Rico’) Gutstein (University of Illinois, Chicago) and Pauline Lipman (DePaul University) were joined by researcher Dionne Danns (University of Illinois, Chicago) and Professor William H. Watkins (University of Illinois, Chicago) presenting at the AERA session “Race, Class, Equity, and Chicago School Policy: Don’t Believe the Hype.” The session was held on April 23, 2003, in the Gold Level ballroom of the Regency Hyatt Chicago. This one session was keynoted by Dr. Lipman’s presentation of her research on Chicago (published in last month’s Substance). It was attended by more people than attended the “Education Writers Association” at the other end of Chicago’s Loop the same week. Yet the research presented by Danns, Gutstein, and Lipman elucidating the critique of Chicago’s corporate version of “school reform” was ignored by the city’s mass media — which chose instead to report the federal government’s “No Child Left Behind” version of events from the point of view of the corporate, government and not-for-profit sponsors of the Education Writers Association.

The AERA researchers offered more than a hundred trenchant critiques of both the so-called Chicago “education miracle” (long touted by corporate money here) and the federal “No Child Left Behind” law (touted by the Bush administration in Washington and its corporate sponsors).

Although there were still some pockets at AERA that praised what most now view as the Chicago hoax, the tone of the meeting was in sharp contrast to two years ago, when AERA met in Seattle. At that time, during the final months of the Vallas administration, more than a dozen AERA presenters (including Northwestern University’s Fred Hess, several people from the University of Chicago’s Consortium, and Chicago public schools testing director Carole Perlman) presented favorable “research” on Chicago’s school programs.

One month after the April 2001 Seattle AERA meeting, the Vallas administration came crashing to an end. A Chicago Teachers Union election on May 18, 2001 eliminated Vallas’s main prop in the labor movement, CTU president Tom Reece and his “United Progressive Caucus.”. Public clashes with Mayor Richard Daley (and Vallas’s increasingly snide criticisms of the mayor’s abilities) made Vallas’s continuation as CEO untenable. The Duncan administration was hastily ushered in in July 2001, while Vallas orchestrated a shrill but unsuccessful attempt to ride his media wave into the Illinois governor’s mansion.

In 2003, the version of Chicago being reviewed by the nation’s most important researchers was completely different from 2001. Yet, the scholars, researchers, and critics at AERA were ignored or berated by the men and women from the media who write about schools here and across the nation. Even the facts that Chicago Teachers Union officials (who two years ago were classroom teachers) were involved in many facets of the research critique of Chicago was ignored by the pundits who helped create the Vallas version of history in the first place.

While more than 11,000 people met east of the Magnificent Mile along the Chicago River, where were the nation’s “education reporters”?

They were on the other side of Chicago’s Loop — in a quirky meeting of a few hundred people at the odd “W” hotel on Adams St. The EWA (Education Writers’ Association) was meeting two blocks from the headquarters of the Chicago Board of Education during some of the same days the nation’s education researchers had been meeting a mile away. The two groups (and what they had to say about Chicago) might have been meeting on opposite sides of the continent.

At the W Hotel, Chicago’s newspaper education reporters (along with many others from across the USA) imbibed the “standards and accountability” propaganda of a few dozen corporate, not-for-profit, journalistic and federal government testing bureaucrats.

There was an enormous contrast between the critiques of Chicago and federal education programs and claims that permeated AERA and the monolithic one-sidedness of the official version of “educating reporting” taking place less than two miles away. That contrast could have been the subject of much reporting, analysis, — and even, perhaps, some questions about “journalistic ethics” in the town that fired Bob Green and sports the nation’s longest newspaper code of ethics (the version currently used at the Chicago Tribune).

Yet there was none. AERA — along with the vast complexity of public schools in the USA — was ignored by the “public” in Chicago because the media ignored it.

And the future of education reporting in Chicago and elsewhere had its agenda set by the Bush administration, the corporations who sponsor high-stakes testing, and their hirelings in the not-for-profit sectors (and their publications) funded by the same corporate dollars.

To those who listened carefully, the final verdict on the high-stakes testing debacle of the late 1990s was finally being rendered as a result of careful research at AERA. The critique of high-stakes testing had begun at the grassroots in Chicago, Texas, and other places bedeviled by the programs as early as a decade ago. The data were in (and published in a few places, including this newspaper) by the late 1990s. By April 2003, the data were now so overwhelming that even many of the former scholarly apologists for the simplistic “bottom line” versions of education reality had been forced to acknowledge the facts (and even publicly recant previous claims).

Yet the nation’s corporate propagandists worked under the aegis of a group called the “Education Writers Association” (EWA) and did ignore the facts.

At an EWA meeting co-sponsored by Catalyst, the Chicago Sun-Times, and many of the corporations touting “standards and accountability” at the other end of downtown Chicago, dozens of reporters managed to ignore AERA. They also ignored 25,000 Chicago teachers and union officials (except to hear teacher bashing propaganda during their sessions). They also ignored virtually all of the serious research of high-stakes testing. They focused instead on the teacher bashing stories they’ve specialized in since the current attack on democratic public schools began more than a dozen years ago. And their words — not the words of Chicago’s classroom teachers or the words of the researchers who are trying to sound a national warning about the dangers to children, public schools and democracy in “No Child Left Behind” will be the words that most Americans read, see and hear when they get their news about public schools during the past year.

“ Don’t believe the hype…”

One session at the AREA convention in Chicago that was attended by more people than attended the entire EWA convention was entitled “Don’t believe the hype” and focused on Chicago’s “school reform” claims.

On Wednesday, April 23, nearly 200 people gathered in a ballroom at the Regency Hyatt Ballroom A for a session entitled: “Race, Class, Equity and Chicago School Policy: Don’t Believe the Hype.”

The session featured three researchers from the University of Illinois (Eric Gutstein, Dionne Danns, and William Watkins) and DePaul University Professor Pauline Lipman. Lipman’s critical study of Chicago had been published a year earlier in the main AERA research journal (reprinted last month in its entirety in Substance) and formed the basis for the session.

Lipman’s analysis of Chicago’s political economy showed how the racial and class politics promoted by the city’s political and corporate leaders had led to vast stretches of inequality and had destroyed the educational hopes and dreams of the city’s most vulnerable children and families, most of them Black and Latino.

Eric Gutstein’s research focused more narrowly on the impact of Chicago’s high stakes testing and graduation gates on the lives of Latino students who had been interviewed by Gutstein. Reflecting the conclusions of decades of research (all of which were ignored during the hype years of Chicago’s corporate style school reform), Gutstein’s subjects once again demonstrated that grade retention policies harm students more than they help them.

The research reported by Dionne Danns of the University of Illinois showed how in the past when educational inequality became too great to endure, large movements were created out of the city’s poor and minority communities for true education democracy, equity and justice. Focusing on the movements of the 1960s and 1970s, Danns showed how Chicago’s poor communities were not always the victims of corporate and media manipulation and the white supremacist policies of City Hall.

Not all of the sessions at AERA were as critical of high-stakes testing and Chicago’s promotional policies as the “hype” session, but an undercurrent of criticism even flowed through the presentations by representatives of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, which had previously been viewed as one of the main apologists for the Chicago Board of Education. Especially under the Vallas administration, Consortium spokesmen and women, including Tony Bryk, Melissa Roderick, and John Easton, had downplayed research showing the negative effects of the Chicago retention policies, choosing instead to highlight those parts of studies which porported to show the successes of the Chicago program.

By AERA 2003, the line had changed. Despite the fact that Easton and Roderick had served as highly paid (in excess of $100,000 per year) employees of the Board of Education during the past two years, Consortium speakers at AERA were more balanced in their views on the claims of Chicago school administrators and politicians.

One of the most critical events of the week, however, came not as an official AERA functon, but on the evening of Thursday, April 24. On that evening, prominent national scholars joined test critics and Chicago Teachers Union officials on the stage of Jones High School, a Chicago public school, for a three-hour session outlining the problems with “No Child Left Behind.”

The speakers for the evening included Martin McGreal, who led the “Curie 12” in opposition to the CASE tests at Chicago’s Curie High School; Chicago Teachers Union Testing Committee chairperson Norine Guetkanst, who began organizing critical forums on high-stakes testing at Inter-American Magnet Elementary School (where she teaches full time); Jacqueline Price-Ward, recording secretary of the CTU; Susan Ohanian (Substance reporter and the author of more than a dozen books on education); Gerald Bracey (research columnist for the Phi Delta Kappan magazine); Angela Valenzuela, a University of Texas professor and long-time critic of high-stakes testing in her home state; Monty Neill of FairTest; Larry Ward (organizer of the Massachusetts Coalition for Authentic Assessment); Julie Woesteohoff (of Chicago’s PURE); and Pauline Lipman, who anchored the AERA session “Don’t believe the hype.”

The April 24 event held more than 75 people in the Jones auditorium until 9:30 that evening as presentations and discussions swirled through the room. All of the participants agreed to remain in contact and to encourage future research, organizing and communications about opposition to the pernicious effects of high-stakes testing and “No Child Left Behind.”

Nationally respected University of Texas professor Angela Valenzuela took part in several sessions at AERA critical of the Bush administration’s work both in her home state and through “No Child Left Behind.” On April 24, she participated in a forum critical of “No Child Left Behind” at Chicago’s Jones High School sponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union’s Testing Committee. Valenzuela’s research and its warnings about the impact of high-stakes testing on poor and minority children have been ignored by media promoting test-based “school reform” programs.

The following day, the CTU hosted a breakfast forum at Union headquarters for local and national people who had come to town for AERA or to discuss opposition to “No Child Left Behind.”

Those in attendance at the April 25 breakfast meeting included representatives of FairTest, PURE, the CTU, Massachuseets CARE; PARURSOL (a group long opposed to high stakes tests in Virginia, Milwaukee’s teachers’ union, the NEA in Iowa, and others from around Chicago.

Those who wish to continue the national discussion on high-stakes testing and the negative effects of “No Child Left Behind” can join the Assessment Reform Network ListServe (contacted through www.FairTest.org) or Substance (through Email to Csubstance@aol.com).

Those who attended the various events reported that the sessions and presentations enabled them to understand better the scope and meaning of their opposition.