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education in a democratic society aspires to and the realities that so oſten get in the way. “Some of the folks who scream the loudest about


our lack of achievement don’t know the facts,” May- lone says. “Te sky is not falling. For all our problems here, our worst economic nightmares are Tird World countries’ fondest dreams. Te U.S. still has the only footprints on the moon and the only working robots on Mars—my point being that the public schools can- not have done all that poorly.”


T


he well-publicized crisis in SAT scores is another myth, he says. “You some- times hear commentators talk about how they’ve dropped pre-


cipitously, but it ain’t so,” Maylone points out. “SAT scores have essentially held steady for decades, and that’s been on the heels of a dramatic increase in the variety of kids taking the SATs since World War II. If you do a litle disaggregating, you find that white kids’ scores have dropped a bit and the scores of black and Hispan- ic and, to some extent, Native American students have steadily if not dramatically increased in the last 5-10 years. In other words, kids of color have been floating our scores, or we would have seen a drop. Tat’s actually cause for celebration, not despair, but people don’t care to do any careful analysis of the data.” It’s not as if there are no legitimate reasons for


concern, but what’s truly worrisome isn’t the stuff of headlines. William Price, professor of leadership and counseling, is particularly dismayed by what he calls the “disconnect” between policy and practitioners. “Te chief example is research showing that collegi-


ality among the staff is a major factor in achievement,” he says, “and how that’s undermined by awards to indi- viduals, making them competitive instead of coopera- tive. We pretend not to know what we know.” Price spent 30 of his 50 years in education as a pub-


lic school teacher, principal and superintendent. He’s personally acquainted with the effects of ill-considered policies where the rubber meets the road.


16 Eastern | WINTER 2011


One recent and conspicuous example was the legisla-


tive package required to support the State of Michigan’s ultimately futile bid for funding from the U.S. Depart- ment of Education’s Race to the Top challenge. “We just rammed through a huge number of re-


forms with very litle discussion and very litle public commentary in order to qualify for the ‘Race to the Trough,’ as I call it, and we didn’t get a penny,” says Price. “Now we’re saddled with these unfunded man- dates again. How do we do this when we’re cuting funding?” And how is it that so many bets come to be placed on standardized test scores, with all the atendant skewing of instructional and administrative practices? Maylone cites the McNamara Fallacy, the notion that because some elements of success can be measured quantitatively, all other variables can be disregarded, or even denied. “Everyone across the board has fallen for the fallacy because we have nothing else but standardized testing, which is limited in what it can tell us about true student achievement,” he says. “It is absolutely ubiquitous out there that if our students score high without cheat-


ing on tests, everything is considered to be hunky-dory. And that’s demonstrably


nonsense.” Of the Michigan Board of Education’s five goals for high school graduates—that they be literate, lifelong learners, productive workers, respon-


sible citizens, and healthy individuals—only the first is measured. “Why? Because it’s the only one we can measure,”


Maylone says. “How in the heck could you measure the other ones? But the system spits out numbers, they have this air of science about them, and hardly anyone questions them. You can show that it makes sense mathematically. What you can’t show is that it makes sense to be doing it.” But if you’re teaching at Eastern, you can show your


students how to do what policymakers deem valuable while staying focused on what it makes sense to do. “Tere is a huge press politically for transparency and


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