Our Narrative
November 21, 2011
Thomas Friedman – author of The World is Flat, From Beruit to Jerusalem and Hot, Flat and Crowded, among other major works – has a gift for converting complicated topics into moving narratives. So I took note, during President Obama’s second year in office when, in a New York Times column, Mr. Friedman took the President to task for a communication gap.
Friedman wrote that the President doesn’t have a communications problem per se (in fact, he’s been one of our nation’s more articulate chief executives), and he has a good grasp of facts on many subjects.
What he has, according to Friedman, is a narrative problem. “He has not tied all his programs into a single narrative that shows the links between his health care, banking, economic, energy, education and foreign policies.” Without this, wrote Friedman, people do not see these are all “building blocks of a great national project.”
Regardless of one’s opinion of Mr. Obama as President and Mr. Friedman as pundit, those responsible for school sports should pause over this observation or opinion; should stop to consider how all the projects and programs we contemplate either do or do not help us tell the story of educational athletics in Michigan.
The narrative for school sports can be compelling. When and where programs maximize participation and promote high standards of eligibility, conduct and care; when and where programs demonstrate quality coaching and officiating; and when and where it can be demonstrated that the programs are not merely compatible with the educational mission of the school but actually improve attendance, raise GPAs and increase graduation rates; then and there we have a coordinated and convincing narrative.
Projects and programs that produce and promote these results will be the kind of building blocks that tell our story and should generate popular support for many more years to come.
Scandalous Schools
April 19, 2013
One of the bad features of the school reform movement that was cited in our posting of March 29 (“Hit Again”) is the obsession over standardized testing and the linkage between children’s scores and adults’ salaries. The length to which some so-called educators have gone reached new highs (or perhaps lows) in Atlanta recently; but that’s far from the only school testing travesty we’ve seen, as Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post Writers Group reported on LSJ.com on April 4, 2013:
“It is time to acknowledge that the fashionable theory of school reform – requiring that pay and job security for teachers, principals and administrators depend on their students’ standardized test scores – is at best a well-intentioned mistake, and at worst nothing but a racket.
“I mean that literally. Beverly Hall, the former superintendent of the Atlanta Public Schools, was indicted on racketeering charges Friday for an alleged cheating scheme that won her more than $500,000 in performance bonuses. Hall, who retired two years ago, has denied any wrongdoing.
“Also facing criminal charges are 34 teachers and principals who allegedly participated in the cheating, which involved simply erasing students’ wrong answers on test papers and filling in the correct answers.
“In 2009, the American Association of School Administrators named Hall ‘National Superintendent of the Year’ for improvement in student achievement. For educators who worked for Hall, bonuses and promotions were based on test scores. After a day of testing, teachers would allegedly be told to gather the students’ test sheets and change the answers. Suddenly a failing school would become a model of education reform. The principal and teachers would get bonuses. Hall would get a much bigger bonus.
“State education officials became suspicious. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote probing stories. There seemed to be no way to legitimately explain the dramatic improvement in such a short time, or the statistically improbable number of erasures on answer sheets.
“Sonny Perdue was governor at the time, and in August 2010 he ordered a blue-ribbon investigation. Hall resigned shortly before the release of the investigators’ report, which alleged that 178 teachers and principals cheated over nearly a decade. Those findings laid the foundation for Friday’s Grand Jury indictment.
“My Washington Post colleague Valerie Strauss, a veteran education reporter and columnist, wrote Friday that there have been ‘dozens’ of alleged cheating episodes around the country, but only Atlanta’s has been aggressively and thoroughly investigated.
“Standardized achievement tests are a vital tool, but treating test scores the way a corporation might treat sales targets is wrong. Students are not widgets. Even absent cheating, the blind obsession with test scores implies that teachers are interchangeable implements of information transfer, rather than caring professionals who know their students as individuals.
“School reform has to be something that is done with a community of teachers, students and parents – with honesty and, yes, a bit of old fashioned humility.”