Trust versus Manipulation

Abstract

WATCHING THE stores put away summer goods to make room for back-to-school items and seeing parents begin to scan the array of bookbags and notebooks reminds us all of this special time of the year. Education is truly blessed with this annual ritual of beginning. No other institutions in society and no other professions have a chance to start anew each year, to bring out a clean slate and write me across it. The children and parents entering the schools do so trusting that they will be treated fairly and that the learning they encounter will challenge them. The teachers trust that their students will want to learn and that their own pedagogical skills can help make it happen. Administrators, policy makers, researchers, and all others who depend on the cycle of teaching and learning to give meaning to their work trust that they will be successful or learn something new. We depend on these patterns, even though we also expect some erosion of the general optimism over the course of the school year. What is different about the issue of trust in the education system now, however, is the assault upon it, sometimes overt but most often subtle. There is a difference between strong criticism and willful manipulation. The nation's schools are responding to the former--perhaps too slowly for some--but the need to improve education has caught the attention of almost everyone. The manipulative tactics used in hardball politics--and education has become a national political issue--are more difficult to understand or even to recognize. It took a long time, for example, for the education sector to realize that the U.S. Department of Education's answer to the complexity of the new No Child Left Behind law was a public relations blitz. The department even bought the opinions of so-called journalists. With a political year looming on the horizon and much riding on the success of the President's education initiatives, this is a time to be even more vigilant about protecting the public's trust in education. Here is a primer on some ideas, language, and pitfalls to avoid. Beware of exaggeration. The Administration is going to look anxiously for any signs that NCLB is a success. It is beginning to mention improved test scores and state actions to do something about persistently failing schools. It may declare, by fiat, that every classroom has a qualified teacher, as NCLB demands for this year. But let's slow the rhetoric and lower its temperature a bit. Any claims for NCLB that are based on higher test scores are close to a sham. The U.S. Department of Education has changed the rules almost as often as states have adjusted their standards or cut scores, making declarations about improved student achievement almost impossible to judge. Scores for 9- and 13-year-olds are up on both the math and reading tests of the National Assessment of Educational Progress--but those tests were given before the law could have had an impact. Exaggeration also crops up when either side cites data about charter schools. As Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute pointed out at an Education Writers Association seminar on the law, both opponents and proponents of charter schools come to the same conclusions. Some charters are excellent, some are awful for kids, and the existence of charter schools has yet to improve regular public schools. Beware of the dogged denial. Another potential threat to trust in the education system is the dogged denial. When criticisms hurt, the defense strategy is often to deny the problem. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings once described the opposition to NCLB as just a handful of dissident states. Once it was pointed out that the rebellion existed in 47 of the 50 states, she began to issue regulatory changes that exhibited more flexibility. …