Rep. Miller to grads: Be ‘disrupter’
'Dynamic' environment is hope for reform
In his nearly 40 years representing Northern Californians from the East Bay, Congressman George Miller had turned down all invitations to speak at commencements – until Sunday, when Miller, the ranking Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, came down from The Hill to offer a deal to graduates of Stanford University’s School of Education. He’ll work hard to “create public policy that will empower and enable you to make the sustainable reforms necessary for our children and our schools to succeed,” he told the graduates. They, in turn, must agree to become “a disrurpter” – someone who will challenge the status quo and “won’t wait for change to come. You will embrace it and you will fight for your students.” (Go here for a transcript of the commencement address.)
U.S. Rep. Miller at Stanford commencement.
What prompted Miller to accept Stanford’s invitation, he said, was his optimism that the “dynamic” education environment that graduates are entering “holds the most promise of sustained, meaningful reform that I have experienced since becoming a member of Congress.” He cited as evidence “conversations” in 17 states on revising teacher evaluations (no mention of new state laws forcing non-negotiated evaluation systems on teachers); the adoption by nearly all states of the Common Core standards and efforts to write better assessments; reforms pushed by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top, and the Parent Trigger law, the parent-empowerment law first adopted by California and now being considered in a dozen states.
“As a result, the table is being set for real, systemic change recognizing the urgency of the needs of our children, our communities, and our nation,” he said.
Don’t sell yourself short; demand a good school
The job market for the new teachers and policy experts with master’s degrees and doctorates from Stanford is tough, he acknowledged, but “it is also a very different job market than previous graduates have encountered,” with a growing demand for new schools, a growing demand for smart, effective teachers, and a growing demand for enlightened administrators.”
So don’t sell yourself “cheap, or accept conditions that burden your talent and value. Schools that can’t or won’t keep up with the future will continue to lose market share,” Miller said, with new schools within districts or charter schools challenging “traditional schools.”
For his part, Miller vowed to help fix the No Child Left Behind Law that he helped craft a decade ago but which he acknowledged is “in need of substantial reform.” But what a reauthorized NCLB won’t do, he said in a conversation afterward, is go “soft” on accountability, because “accountability is the linchpin.”
“For all its flaws,” he said in his speech, “No Child Left Behind blew the doors off the notion that we could allow our schools to continue in an environment without real information about how each and every student fared in school. Schools were required, for the first time, to take some responsibility for student outcomes.”
A reauthorized NCLB, formally known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, will continue to hold schools accountable for the results of subgroups of children, but by multiple measures, including graduation rates, and not just one-time high-stakes standardized tests, Miller told me. And schools will have more flexibility to determine the ways to achieve improved results and to spend federal aid without dictates from Washington. He expressed confidence that the new federally funded assessments aligned with Common Core that two groups of states are creating will be “richer” and vastly better than the “mishmash” of cheap tests that individual states designed. (He didn’t promise that the feds would pay the states for the higher costs of better tests, but indicated that those in Congress working on the new law understand this is an issue.)
Congress, he said, has the obligation to create a “modern workplace” for teachers where they can work collaboratively, have access to real-time data on their students, and be effectively evaluated. They must be “at the center of any conversation about improving student achievement.”
The elements of an effective ESEA would include, he indicated:
- Accountability “through a richer index of measures that includes growth, graduation rates, and a high quality, modern assessment system;
- Flexibility for districts and students to improve schools, “whether it be extending the school day or providing wraparound services or developing a new curriculum.”
- Data-based decisions that communities and parents can understand;
- Flexibility at the local level to choose how funds will be spent;
- A professional environment for teachers and school leaders that gives them the information and the resources to succeed.
Miller said that he believes two-thirds of members of both political parties could agree on the basic elements of reauthorizing ESEA, and expressed optimism that the law could be reauthorized this year – a view not shared by many observers in Washington. His counterpart, John Kline, a Minnesota Republican who chairs the Education and Workforce Committee, has dismissed the possibility that a bill would be introduced by the end of summer.
UPDATE: Education Secretary Arne Duncan told reporters he would consider suspending parts of NCLB, including the requirement that all students be proficient by 2014, if Congress doesn’t reauthorize ESEA this year. On Tuesday, from 6 to 7:30 am Pacific time, Miller and Duncan will speak in a discussion on ESEA reauthorization at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. (Further update: Miller said at the discussion he is skeptical of he use of waivers and hopes states don’t see that as a path around accountability.)
Thank you John. This was a most encouraging message. I hope Congressman Miller will continue to challenge both his constituents and his colleagues!
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I second Craig Armstrong’s remarks.
As for your parenthetical remark of non-negotiated evaluations systems being forced on teachers by legislation, it is indeed regrettable. But, I think to some extent the union leaders brought it on by opposing without any hint of compromise, evaluation system, charter schools, NCLB, and testing. By generally supporting the status quo as the best of all possible worlds and casting the blame on everyone but the current system, the unions have lost a lot of support. The anti-union forces have been around a long, long time but they didn’t get broad support until the public unions started looking like just another power group, along with Wall St. and Big Oil.
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The “status quo” is 10 years of high stakes accountability and consequences via NCLB and 20 years of charter schools.
That’s the “disruption” we’re all experiencing.
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I stand corrected . I should have said “status quo ante as the best of all possible worlds”.
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Representative Miller’s comments are undoubtedly well intended and well taken. But disrupters need real support from our political leadership, when the forces for retrenchment are so powerful. And the same support is needed for former disrupters trying to fit into new environments. In reality, I think that for reforms to be truly lasting, substantial mind change will be needed, since today’s reforms passed in a partisan environment are subject to being rather easily overturned tomorrow. Diane Ravitch’s “Left Back” very memorably summarizes a century of well intended educational reforms which flourished and withered with cyclical regularity. To avoid being the passing fancies of fashion, we need to seek out those who disagree with us, find out what we can learn from them or at least understand their points of view, and work as hard as we can to come to agreement wherever possible, agreeing to disagree only where we must. While we indulge in mere partisan rancor, our children are being left behind in the employment competition by those graduating in more unified jurisdictions.
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Bruce (who by the way often has very wise observations on these issues) in this comment is modeling the newest fad-within-a-fad, which is to claim that the reason corporate education reform triggers so much outrage in the real world of schools is simply a failure of PR, of inadequate messaging.
Yet the fact is that corporate reform is designed and inflicted primarily by those who know the least about schools and have the least day-to-day contact with real live children, especially at-risk low-income children. And the resistance comes largely from those who do work in schools and teach children every day. (How ironic is it that self-described education reformers celebrate and exalt ignorance and lack of expertise?)
No, it’s not the PR. What’s igniting resistance is the wrongheadedness, magical thinking, often malice and destructiveness, and frequently opportunism behind the current fads. The fact that the fads are successful only in cases where they can be propped up by vast amounts of extra money and/or high selectivity and attrition also has something to do with the resistance.
So yes, George Miller, we DO need to disrupt — not our schools, where high-need kids with unstable lives do not need further disruption, but the damaging and mistaken policies inflicted upon them by No Child Left Behind, which are now the status quo.
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Caroline, I’m not conscious of modelling a fad in this attitude. In case you are curious of the source of the approach I am advocating, let me tell you that in my first year of teaching English, I wasn’t very good, but I was able to identify what I needed to learn in order to be a better teacher. One such topic was listening, so I read a variety of books on the subject, including Gandhi’s “Listening With the Heart”. That is the point: listening as closely and intently as possible, trying to gather what the feelings are behind the others’ words, what their points of view may be, trying to consciously divine how (if at all) they may actually be right, or at least why they believe themselves to be. This I continue to try to practice. I am critical of insincere PR and “messaging”; I’ve seen too much of it.
Many of your criticisms of what you call “corporate” reform I agree with; we have been experimenting on children, and primarily on the children of the poor, on the basis of analogies from the business world, and I long ago learned that arguments by analogy are, logically speaking, automatically invalid. You will recall that NCLB was the program of a man who proclaimed himself our first “president as CEO”. I don’t want to see a second.
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