Remember when Betsy DeVos seemed like the worst problem public education advocates had to contend with? DeVos, of course, is the billionaire education reform advocate who served as Secretary of Education for the Trump Administration and excelled at supporting controversial policies that made her infamous.
With new strains of COVID-19 emerging, who can say exactly when it will be safe for all students and teachers to return to school? Pinning a neat end date on this simply won’t work.
Now that she is gone, however, it is clear that public education in the United States is still very much under attack, and not just from free-market devotees like DeVos.
Many people have high hopes for the Biden Administration in general, but especially public education supporters. Still, the wounds here are deep, after years of bipartisan federal and state support for the kind of policies DeVos championed, from the spread of charter schools and other school choice schemes, to a seemingly complete disregard for the concept of public education as a public good.
Others have noted that lurking beneath this widespread support for education reform is an old American myth about rugged individualism and the belief (or is it mostly fantasy?) that anyone, at any time, can rise above the inequality into which they were born.
It looks like those in favor of a more progressive and less competitive and choice-driven approach to public education are going to have to wait a while longer.
On February 22, the Biden Administration announced that all public schools will be expected to meet annual standardized testing directives, despite the ongoing disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This is actually a departure from Secretary DeVos, who, for all her much-discussed faults, agreed last spring to waive testing requirements for every state as the coronavirus took hold. It would be simply too much to ask of students and teachers, DeVos conceded.
By last September, she had changed her tune, warning state education officials that testing would resume this school year because not doing so would amount to “abandoning the important, bipartisan reforms of the past two decades at a critical moment,” as noted in a Politico article.
Biden Administration officials appear to agree with this sentiment.
The letter sent to state education leaders on February 22 was signed by Ian Rosenblum, a Biden-Harris appointee currently serving as the acting Assistant Secretary in the Department of Education.
Rosenblum’s letter assures state education officials that they can seek a waiver from the accountability requirements spelled out under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, including the mandate that 95 percent of all students participate in yearly standardized reading and math assessments.
That high level of participation may be impossible this spring, as school districts across the country—especially large ones, in urban and suburban settings—continue to grapple with how, exactly, to get kids back in school at all, let alone for a round of multiple choice testing.
Shouldn’t getting kids back in school really be job one, anyway?
Instead, the Biden Administration has backed itself into an uncomfortable corner on the subject of reopening K-12 schools. In January, Biden was still proclaiming his ambitious goal of getting most schools to open for in-person learning within his first hundred days in office.
Through February, that goal has become more of a moving target. Rather than indicate a lack of commitment from Biden, I think the administration’s shifting messaging on this topic (does one day per week of in-person school actually count?) indicates the risk that comes with making promises during a pandemic.
With new strains of COVID-19 emerging, who can say exactly when it will be safe for all students and teachers to return to school? Pinning a neat end date on this simply won’t work.
Neither will using standardized testing as a key measure of how kids are doing these days. Nevertheless, Rosenblum’s letter makes at least two bold statements. First, he insists that “It remains vitally important that parents, educators, and the public have access to data on student learning and success.”
Later, Rosenblum argues that “It is urgent to understand the impact of COVID-19 on learning,” and, therefore, the testing must go on.
Is it really, as Rosenblum states, “vitally important” that kids—many of whom have not seen the inside of a classroom since March 2020—take standardized tests (typically run by for-profit corporations such as Pearson) in math and reading in order for us to understand the impact of the pandemic “on learning”?
In trying to answer this question, I can’t help but consider Rosenblum’s pre-Biden Administration career.
Most recently, he served as the executive director of the Education Trust, a “data-centric” nonprofit funded by incredibly wealthy philanthropic entities, such as the Chan Zuckerberg, Gates, and Walton family foundations.
This is the wellspring from which standardized test-centric, not necessarily data-centric, policies come from. Data can be gleaned from all kinds of sources as a means to indicate the health of our children, after all. How about the embarrassingly high child poverty rate in the United States, for example?
“Children remain the poorest age group in America,” noted the Children’s Defense Fund in a 2020 report dedicated to what the group called the “urgent and preventable crisis” of childhood poverty in this country.
Even more damning is the data showing that nearly three-quarters of all kids who live in poverty in this country are children of color.
We already know which students are likely to emerge from the pandemic with their academic lives intact: the very same ones who are not living in poverty nor facing endless disruptions due to COVID-19, including extended school closures, job losses, or even the death of a family member.
Why not give these kids and their communities an abundance of resources, including updated school facilities, robust health care options, and real support for their families? We could start with raising the minimum wage or, better yet, agreeing to send cash to families in need for an extended period of time.
The Biden Administration’s insistence on going ahead with testing this spring represents an ongoing capitulation to the elites who drive education policy in this country, no matter how bipartisan they claim to be.