Post-Standardization: Schools for a Free and Democratic Society

Speaker 1 Hello. Before we get started, I want to let you know that this podcast is brought to you by Human Restoration Project's fantastic patrons. All of our work, which includes free resources, materials, and this podcast, are available for free due to our Patreon supporters, three of whom are Burton Hable, Connie Fletcher, and Matt Walker. Thank you for your ongoing support. You can learn more about the Human Restoration Project on our website, humanrestorationproject.org, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Hello, and welcome to season three episode 29 of Things Fall Apart, our podcast of human restoration project. My name is Chris McNutt, and I'm a high school digital media instructor from Ohio. Today, I am joined by doctor William Ayers, a retired education professor at the University of Chicago whose work is rooted in progressive ideology. Ayers was heavily involved in the free school movement in the nineteen sixties, and his work reflects a focus on democratic schooling and building a more free society. Ayers is a prolific author, including writing On the Side of the Child, Summerhill Revisited, Teaching Toward Freedom, Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom, The Teach, The Journey of a Teacher, and the recently released, you can't fire the bad ones and 18 other myths about teachers, teachers' unions, and public education. In this podcast, Ayers and I talk about the opportunity that COVID nineteen provides teachers to throw out standardized testing and build a better system.

Speaker 2 One of the kind of pillars that if we could attack that pillar of corporate school reform, we would actually make giant progress in terms of curriculum, in terms of other ways of assessing, in terms of pedagogy. I mean, I think that the testing empire has actually distorted education so profoundly. There's a lot of angles we could come at this. First of all, I think it's exciting that here we are in the midst of a crisis, and the the big the big theme song of the establishment is we have to get back to normal. And I think people like you, I assume, are saying, I don't wanna go back to normal. I wanna go forward to something much, much different, and I wanna look use this moment to analyze what normal looks like, and why normal is actually an emergency for poor kids, for kids of color, for marginalized kids, and really for all kids. If if education for free people is our goal, the testing empire has undermined that profoundly. So, you know, tests are with us, they've always been with us. And so people say, well, it's just it's just the way things always are, but that's not true. The whole kind of the whole kind of push in education to see education as a product rather than a human right really got steam starting in 1980. And and the last four decades, that steam has rolled this project forward. And I think of it as I call it sometimes corporate school reform or neoliberal reform, but it really stands on three legs. One leg is the reduction of an education to a simple score on a standardized high stakes test. That means and and that's a very important pillar of corporate school reform. A second is to abolish any collective voice of teachers, and a third is to privatize the public space. So those three pillars are hugely important, and what you're identifying, I think, is one of three, and therefore it's something we should really really spend some time, especially in this crisis, thinking about. Here's one of the amazing things, and this always happens in crises, but we were told that the world would fall apart, that that the that the heavens would crash on us if we ever did away with the SAT. And guess what? The SAT is gone. The the advanced placement tests are suspended or are at home, I guess. I guess they're done at home. Ed Ed, you know, the the certification of teachers, edTPA, which is this absolute stunning rip off of of people who are becoming teachers, that's been suspended. Colleges are saying, we don't need the SATs this year, we don't need the ACTs this year. And places like New York are saying, let's not have failing grades, let's have in progress. And I'm thinking, wow, that's a wonderful step forward. Let's not get rid of that instead of you flunked, you're in progress, you're working on it. And that is such a more sensible way to talk to kids about their academic progress, about their social progress, or anything. And Illinois has advised all school districts to do away with letter grades. What what in the world happened? You know, I thought that those were were absolutely radical crazy ideas. We couldn't live without these things. Turns out we not only can live with them, we can live better without those those impositions of the high stakes standardized testing. So I think it's time for us to say, to push hard, all of us, collectively to push hard and say, we've suspended grades or testing in Illinois, say, or in New York, or in Baltimore. We suspended it. Let's suspend it for three more years, and let's use that time to have teachers and community folks and students get together and talk about sensible ways of assessing students' work and students' education. Let's spend three years with the smartest people who are frontline people in terms of public schooling education. Let's all of us talk together about better ways to assess. And I can tell you, it wouldn't be long before we'd come up with a robust, vital, exciting way to look at student learning that had nothing to do with standardized tests. Let me,

Speaker 1 clarify a point that you were just making because I I I really like this idea of collective pushback and teachers organizing and being treated professionals. However, I think the argument would be that the College Board is literally a billion dollar organization, and they essentially have become, in many ways, almost like a national curriculum.

Speaker 2 They are. A de facto national That's exactly right. So

Speaker 1 how do teachers who are typically not treated like professionals or as experts collectively organize in a way that

Speaker 2 could basically get around that huge financial barrier that the College Board presents? Well, I I think the crisis actually is presenting the answers to your question. In other words, in health care, we've had a predatory capitalist health care system for a long, long time, and it's a ragged it's not even a system. It's a raggedy, jerry rigged kind of thing. If you're wealthy, you get the best health care in the world. If you're employed in a in a union job, you get pretty good health care. If you're poor, the the message is take care of yourself. I mean, you know, it's it's it's an atrocity. That contradiction has pushed itself forward. Everyone can now see it. And what was considered radical when Bernie Sanders raised it during the Clinton campaign and he said, health care is a human right, you know, health care for all. Everybody said, wait, that's some kind of socialist communist nightmare. What's he talking about? There's not a single Democratic Party candidate who doesn't endorse the idea that health care is a human right. The same is true in education. But it's up to smart folks like you and like your organization to say, here's the new deal for education coming out of this nightmare. And one of the new deals for education is to push the the college board aside. Let's just take a look at the SAT. The SAT is driving curriculum. It's driving teachers. It's driving kids crazy. I'd say two quick stories about the SAT. One kind of tickles me because in my in my faculty, when I was a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and I was I was the only distinguished professor of education in the at the university. And we were having a meeting about whether we should have PhDs and EDDs. PhD degree and also an EDD degree. And the argument was, oh, man, the EDD is a lesser degree. It has no prestige. I finally raised my hand and I said two things. One is I said, I have an EDD. That's all they gave at teachers college when I went there. So I don't have a PhD. I'm still but somehow, I've been able to function with a, you know, a lesser degree. Secondly, said, everybody makes a big stink about, you know, testing and so on. We let graduate students in how they did on their graduate record exam. I I don't I don't think anybody has ever asked one person in this room what score you got in your SAT. And one of my colleagues from psychology raised his hand and said, you know, I've been pissed off about that ever since because I got an 800, nobody's ever asked me. Exactly. Nobody cares. It's a gate you go through. Nobody cares. And it means very little except how you do on the SAT. I find it interesting that the SAT was once called the the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and then they realized that didn't quite say it, so they changed the name to the Scholastic Achievement Test. That was wrong also because it has nothing to do with achievement. So now it's simply called the SAT, which in a perverse way is perfect. All it is is it the test which tests what the SAT tests. So it's a and everyone knows another thing. Everyone knows that we can rip the the cover off this as well, is how you will do on any high stakes standardized test that you take will depend on how you did on the first one you took. And the main correlation with how you did on the first one you took is income and academic level of your parents. So why don't we just get rid of the whole costly thing and line people up and say, how much money do your folks make? Okay. You go over here. Or something equally cynically stupid because the SAT is cynical. It's covered with all this academic research and all this idea that it means something, and then you see educational researchers, scholars who, you know, I lived with for the last thirty years, as a professor, and they always when they do their research studies in schools, they always say, well, I'm using the the standardized test scores as my baseline even though it's irrelevant, but it's the only thing we've got. Let's get something else. Let's get teachers in control. Wanna also just quibble with one thing. You said teachers are not treated as professionals. I understand that the the desire for teachers to be professionals, and they are professionals. But I worry that when we say professional, we're thinking of ourselves as how could we be more like lawyers? And I think we should reject the idea of professionals in that regard in terms of teachers and think of ourselves as professionals of a new type. What marks us as professionals, what marks lawyers as professionals, is they have control over the content and the conduct of their work. It's not a question of wearing a suit and having conferences at the Hilton. It's a matter of having control over the content and conduct of your work. That's what I think teachers should have, and I think the whole, you know, corporate school reform push has been to deprofessionalize and d and take away power from teachers and and say the collective voice of teachers is irrelevant. We go to two more quick points and then and then relook at this, but two more quick points. One is that kids are privileged, and and I think that one of the things we can do when we talk about real reform is we have to ask ourselves what do the most privileged people have for their children? And we should ask ourselves in a democracy why that's not true for all kids. So Arnie Duncan, who was in charge of Chicago schools for four years and the nation's schools for eight years, so it's twelve years he's a school leader. He comes back to Chicago, he can't find a single public school to send his kids to, even though he's been telling us for twelve years how we ought to do these things. He comes back, he sends his kids to a private school. I don't blame him. I'm I I get it. I'm for it. It's for him. What I'm against is him advocating that the rest of us deserve something else. He sends his kids to a school with a class size capped at 15, with a full arts program, including music and drama, with standardized tests are taken, but they're taken a third of the time that Chicago Public Schools kids a third of the amount of test testing that Chicago Public School kids take. So how does he do that? And I went over I mean, I one of my standard tropes is whenever the Chicago Public Schools do something that I object to, I go over to the school where Ernie Duncan sends his kids and ask them how they do it. And one example is that a few years ago, the Chicago Public Schools banned the book Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, the great story of coming of age in during the Iranian revolution, the Islamic revolution in Iran. Brilliant, brilliant graphic novel. And they banned it in Chicago, and the reason they banned it is because on one page, a kid is peeing in the street. It's a 150 page book, and you can see his penis, and nobody would want that, so it's banned. So I go to lab I go over to Arnie Duncan School and I say, oh, do you guys have Persepolis in your library? Oh, yeah. We have 12 copies including two in the original French. I say to the kids, read it? Oh, yes. They're required to read it before seventh grade. Oh, my gosh. So the kids of privilege get real art and real literature and the Chicago Public School kids get another hour of drill and kill. So similarly, when the Chicago Public Schools required to to assess their teachers, 30% of the assessment of their teacher was based on kids' test score. So immediately, I went over to this privileged private school and I met with the principal and the head of the union, and I asked them how by the way, it's unionized. And I said, how do you all assess teachers? And they gave me a two hour talk, which I won't repeat for you. But in essence, it involved a period of induction into the profession and it it involved mentorship. It involved a constant conversation throughout the school community about what makes good teaching. And then it involved kind of peer coaching and and peer observations, and and it was quite elaborate. At the end of it, I said to them, well, how much in your evaluation of teachers, how much does standardized test scores count in evaluating teachers? And they looked at me and they said, well, what does that have to do with good teaching? Thank you very much, people of the privileged. But people of the not privileged get something quite different. So I think we should say what the privilege get for their kids, we have a right for all of our kids, number one. Number two, we should note that standardized, high stakes standardized testing distorts everything, and we should fight it tooth and nail. This is the perfect time to come up with alternatives.

Speaker 1 I I think the inverse of that would be what you describe. You coauthored You Can't Fire the Bad Ones. And in that book, you talk about I think it's called Urban Prep or or something like that. It's a That's the name of it. Yeah. There's that the school basically is entirely focused around standardized prep and high disciplinary measures which tend to focus on students of color primarily with white teachers. It's a model that you find in pretty much every major city across The United States. What ramifications do you then see when these schools who were relying on standardized testing, I mean, that's like their whole trope, how do they go about operating or do they cease to operate in lieu of the public schools when we see test optional?

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I think they will feel liberated. I think it may be it may be disorienting at first, but it will not be disruptive. I think teachers people don't go into teachers' symptoms. It's nobody no 10 year old looks at himself and says, you know, I think I wanna become a teacher and test and grade those little bastards and sort the winners from the losers. Nobody says that. That's not a a motive to go into it. I've taught teachers for thirty years, more than thirty years. And and I can tell you nobody goes into it thinking, wanna be a cop, I wanna be a sorter, I wanna be a judger. No. They go into it because there are two major motivations. One is they love something in the world, music, art, African American poetry, literature, that they wanna share with the world, and this is a place that they can do that. Two, they want to help children or they or they feel that they love children, or at least they love themselves when they're in a position of helping children. These are good motives. Nobody goes in and saying, I wanna be a I wanna be a sorter and a and a divider. So I don't think people are gonna be too upset. I think it'll be disruptive and it'll be disorienting, but in the end, this disruption will lead to something very positive. The thing you're saying about urban prep, that's in a section in that book where I talk about a a law of of economics, a Goodhart's law, and it's something I absolutely love. I stumbled upon it some years ago, and it's a it's a law that is taught in all economics courses, and it's named after a British economist named Charles Goodhart. Goodhart's law states that a performance metric only works as a performance metric if you don't use it as a performance metric. Sounds paradoxical. Right? And and so listen to that. A performance metric only works as a performance metric if you don't use it as a performance metric. That means if Presbyterian Hospital says, our metric for making good hospital is whether people live thirty days after major heart surgery. If we can meet that standard, then we're a good hospital. Well, guess what? You can keep somebody alive for thirty days after heart surgery easily. The problem is that when when they geared themselves to that metric, people were dying in day 31, 32, and 33. It it it meant nothing about a good hospital. It was simply a focus on one metric. This is what when PrEP did. What they did wasn't so much standardized testing. What they did is they said, we're a good high school. How do we know we're a good high school? We send a 100% of our graduates to college. 100% poor black kids, you know, they wear uniforms, very strict discipline, and a 100% go to college. Look a little deeper, kids are pushed out in their freshman and sophomore years dramatically. Second, anything comes as a college, Rose's Beauty School and this, you know, profit making other school, those are colleges. And finally, kids don't last four years if they go to Northern Illinois University or if they go to Chicago State. They can't make it for four years. So is it a high school? It's a terrible high school. Does it meet its metric? It does. And that's a classic of Goodhart's Law. They focused on getting kids to college. They missed the fact that that doesn't make a good high school. It's one metric, and it's a stupid metric if you stop and think about it, and if you focus all your energy there, curriculum falls apart. But yes, you met your standard, and now you can say I'm a good high school, but you're not. Right. Right. And when you were talking back about teachers

Speaker 1 not going into the profession to rank and file and bringing into that idea that we become so focused on standardized testing. And sometimes I I struggle to talk about this because I myself am a teacher, so it feels weird to criticize my peers. But at the same time, there are many teachers as technicians. There are people that have warped into this mode of thinking that this is the way that you're supposed to do education. If you meet that metric, therefore, you're a good teacher. How do you go about, like, almost deprogramming someone

Speaker 2 to go back to the way that they were probably when they first entered the profession? Right. Well, I wouldn't even be nostalgic for how they once were, but I would say teachers are not clerks, and we should not be reduced to being clerks. We're not simply passing the goods onto an empty head. We should spend more time peer to peer. We should spend more time in in faculty meetings talking about how learning happens, how it could be more robust, how it could be and we should take away the kind of whip that stands over teachers that says, you're gonna be judged by your test scores. One of the things that the high stakes testing standardized testing does that we haven't talked about is it creates competition in a field that is naturally cooperative. So if if I'm gonna be paid and judged based on my kids' standardized test scores, then it's my third grade against your third grade. It's my high school against your high school. It's my city against your city, my state against your state, and Arne Duncan was the architect a lot of this. Race to the top? Arne Duncan wasn't the secretary of education. He was like a low level program officer for the MacArthur Foundation. What do you mean? I have to compete with Rhode Island to get a grant in Illinois? Why? Aren't all kids deserving of a decent education? Shouldn't we pour masses of of resources into this? Here again, we see a contradiction exposed. Right? Because we were told again and again, there's no money for the arts in in Chicago. There's no money for a decent for small class sizes, which is also essential. There's no money for small schools. We can't do this. And and and and all of that, know, driven by privatizing the public space. Suddenly, there is money. There's trillions of dollars if you want it. It's a question of priorities. What do you wanna spend on? Who do you want to who who what do you think is important in our society? And even arch reactionaries want taxes, but they want taxes to go to military surveillance and prisons. I want taxes to go to health care, education, and guarantees of of a decent standard of living for everybody. That's just a different way of saying what we should spend on. But the fact is every government taxes and spends, and we spend largely on the wrong things. This crisis exposes that in a dramatic way. Some of the crazy things that have happened in this moment, you know, the Chicago Public Schools announced with great fanfare in February before they shut down that they were gonna put soap in the children's bathrooms. And you're like, wait a minute, there's no soap in the bathrooms? Detroit announces with great fanfare the stop shutting off water to poor families. Wait a minute, they were shutting off water? Oh, great, you know, great advance. So I think we should take every one of these contradictions, in your case, in my case, we should take every one of these and say, let's take this contradiction and use it as an opportunity to solve the underlying preexisting conditions of social, you know, despair.

Speaker 1 And we don't have a ton of time left, and I realize this is a gigantic question. But now that we are shifting, I know your focus is especially on this open and fair democratic society, as I think all of us would want. What do you envision then that type of classroom looking like? So what does a classroom look like that no longer has these abhorrent

Speaker 2 testing measures? You know, I I I was gonna ask you that, so so let's talk about it. But but let me say one word about testing and then come back to the classroom. You know, the the alternatives to stand high stakes standardized testing are are things that people have done. People like you have done them, and and many, many good teachers do them in their normal functioning as teachers. We all wanna know where our kids are, what are they doing, what's their best work. We wanna understand them as learners. So one of the things I would think that we would come up with if we spent enough time on this, is we'd come up with the idea of portfolios. You know, my kids went to a school in New York City, where to graduate from the high school, you had to present a portfolio of 12 items. And on in those 12 items were were test scores and grades. I mean, that's the world they live in. But the other 10 were so exciting. Your best piece of art, the best essay that you wrote, three drafts of the best essay you wrote, a reading autobiography projected five years forward. What do you need to be a more educated person? What do you need to read to be a more educated person, a more participatory citizen? Things like that. Wow. A a critique of a public piece of art, a physical challenge that you made for yourself and met. Woah. Now that to me is great, great thinking because take the physical challenge. My kids were healthy and robust and strong and fourteen years old, but one of their classmates was in a wheelchair. They had different physical challenges. One of my kids wanted to say, I'll run a marathon. This kid in the wheelchair wanted to say he could make the special Olympics theme in basketball. Those are different physical challenges. But you see, that's what really that pushes us back into the classroom. We want a classroom that's embedded in a community that serves the interest of that community in a powerful way. We want connections between parents, community members, schools. We want the community to feel at home in the school, and the school to feel at home in the community. Not some gated place where we have kind of colonial education going on. That's where we begin. And then we note that the normal range of what it means to be a three year old or what it means to be a first grader is vast. Any attempt to to narrow that normal range is a mistake. So I know I I knew five year olds who could read, and I knew five year olds when I was a early childhood teacher who were peeing in their pants. I also knew five year olds who were peeing in their pants while reading. I mean, you know, the idea that somehow these are these separate elements are something we can so what I want is a classroom that invites in the wide range of kids into the classroom that has something familiar and something strange for each of them. Something to reach for, something to strive for, and something that they know and understand because it's part of their lives. I think that we can do this. I think it's hard work. I think it requires smaller schools and smaller classrooms. I think it requires nodding at teachers as the professionals they really are, the intellectual workers that they really are, and assuming that the work you do is intellectual and ethical work, and we ought to respect it on those grounds. And that's fantastic here on our part because we actually our our current grading system actually is portfolios. In in the portfolio I was describing, there was also a record of your community service, a record of your internship. I mean, in other words, you can expand this idea to go in all kinds of places. But the one the school that I'm referring to, in order to graduate, you had to defend your portfolio in front of a committee. I don't know if you guys do that, but it felt like going to Oxford University and getting a PhD. You had to sit there, you had 12 items in your portfolio, your portfolio is all developed over four years, and you're sitting in front of two peers, a parent or or caregiver, one of your parents or caregivers, community member, a teacher that you select, and your adviser. So six people are sitting there like a doctoral dissertation defense, and you're defending your portfolio to a group that's gonna ask you questions. What a brilliant way to go through education. What a brilliant way to think of yourself as a thoughtful, working, hardworking,

Speaker 1 energetic young person launching into the adult world. I love that. Yeah. I I really like that idea as well. It's similar to what we have that we're building it into. Right now, we have a we have a senior capstone, which is like an internship slash community service thing that's half of the day that you just choose what you wanna do, And then that's defended to community members, parent members, teacher, etcetera. I don't know if you've heard of the mastery transcript, but that's something that we are building our portfolio system into. The mastery transcript is based out of area near Cleveland. And what they're working to do is it's like a portfolio that's standardized enough that a college admissions counselor could read and understand and throw out the traditional high school transcript. So there's no grades. It's literally just a collection of your work. Kind of what you're describing, basically,

Speaker 2 organization would be able to go to different colleges and train people. Here's what it is, and here's how you read it. But, of course, you know, the the that's a good that to me is a good idea. We have to always remember that college is not the next step for many, many people. So whatever the next step is, we wanna we wanna, in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, understand that education's goal is not to make a man a carpenter, it's to make a carpenter a man. We have to focus on the humanizing aspects of education, and that means that this portfolio is good whether you're going to junior college or community school or whether you're going into the military, this is a good thing. You are an intellectual. You are an energetic person. You have goals. You have thoughts. You're reading books. You're part of the culture. This every kid needs that and every kid deserves it, whether they're college bound or not. You're spurring on a discussion, which I think is really interesting surrounding

Speaker 1 what's possible in a virtual learning environment that was not necessarily possible in the classroom. And just real quick, there's a a really fascinating thing I see happening right now with our virtual classrooms where students can actually be more purposeful with their actions. As in, I can only supply so much to 25 to 30 students in a small classroom day to day in terms of co creating the curriculum and personalized learning and all these things that I think are vastly important. And something that we've been dabbling in is, like, three days plus of purpose finding. You

Speaker 2 know, I mean, I think I think, again, what's interesting is that this crisis is forcing us to expand our thinking about what's possible. I don't I I get nervous when people like Arne Duncan get rhapsodic about distant learning as a way of the future. I don't buy that. But the way you're talking about it makes a whole lot of sense to me. That is purpose finding. I mean, a great kind of way of thinking about it. There's a there's a school in, Rhode Island where every kid has an adviser, comes in as a freshman and has an adviser, and the key work goes on in the advisory. And among the things the kids do is they spend a lot of time figuring out what they wanna do over the next four years. They spend a lot of time early on with an advisor in a small peer group, and one kid wants to be a chef, thinks he wants to work in a restaurant. They find ways for that kid to be an apprentice in a restaurant. They find that kid that kid becomes a sous chef in another restaurant. That kid studies the business of restauranting and so on. Another kid wants to be a rap star, and that kid spends time in a recording studio working on the technical aspects of it, then taking some classes from a junior college in math and so on. But what a great thing, at the end of four years, you know, if it had been my kid, one of my kids, the only reason my son Malik, who's now been a a science math teacher in Oakland for fifteen years, but when he was a kid, he wouldn't have gone to school, I mean, if it weren't for baseball. And he wouldn't have learned how to read if it weren't for the sports section. And he wouldn't have learned how to do math except for the statistics of baseball. The kid became very, very smart, but his focus was baseball. So what? Why is that a problem for anybody? Why shouldn't we allow that to be the the motivator for this particular kid finding his purpose. I love that that searching for purpose element of what you're doing. I think it's really smart.

Speaker 1 Thank you again for listening to Things Fall Apart from the Human restoration project. I hope this conversation leaves you inspired and ready to push the progressive envelope of education. You can learn more about progressive education, support our cause, and stay tuned to this podcast and other updates on our website at humanrestorationproject.org.