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Stalinizing American Education
by Lawrence Baines — September 16, 2011
The similarities between contemporary American educational reform and Soviet educational reform of the 1930s are as striking as they are discomfiting.
Of the following three statements, which refer to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and which refer to America today?
1.
“Teachers are asked to achieve significant academic growth for all
students at the same time that they instruct students with ever-more
diverse needs….The stakes are huge—and the time to cling to the status
quo has passed.”
2. “We had to have a campaign for 100 percent successful teaching…all students must learn.”
3.
“Poor work by the school and poor achievement by the entire class and
by individual pupils are the direct result of poor work by the teacher.”
Although
all three of the above sentiments could be attributable to current
officeholders in Washington, D.C., only the first is American—from
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (Duncan 2010, January). The second
and third are policy statements which emanated from old Soviet policy
papers on educational reform (Ewing, 2001, p. 487).
In
the 1930s, the Soviet Union was mired in recession. Poverty and
unemployment, especially among the peasant class, were rampant. Although
the existing educational system was efficient and progressive,
especially considering schools’ negligible funding, most Soviet children
did not attend school. The Soviet government, led by Joseph Stalin,
instigated a series of educational reforms designed to obliterate the
established educational system and to create a new centralized structure
that would increase literacy, create “good citizens,” and transform the
Soviet Union into a global power, particularly in the areas of science,
mathematics, and technology. The similarities of Soviet educational
initiatives in the 1930s to American educational reform today are as
discomfiting as they are striking.
Trend 1: The move to a nationalized curriculum
The
adoption of a new, national curriculum in the United States has
proceeded rapidly with little fanfare. Despite the small difficulty that
no one is exactly sure what the final standards will look like, 48
states have already accepted the new, improved standards de facto as a national curriculum.
Although
the federal government in the United States pays a proportionally small
percentage of costs for public K-12 education (as low as 4% of costs
for New Jersey schools, for example), states and local school districts
are increasingly ceding power to the central government. In the recent
past, federal policymakers have mandated the following:
•
Students must take standardized tests at frequent intervals,
•
Schools must provide “least restrictive environments” for all children (including instruction in the student’s home language)
•
Schools must incur all costs associated with providing the “least restrictive environment,”
•
Schools must track the achievement levels of all students by ethnicity (and soon, by teacher and teacher preparation program).
Despite
such demands, the federal government contributes little towards the
costs of implementing these policies. With Race to the Top, federal
intervention in public schooling has been taken to new heights. Now to
qualify for federal funds, a state must agree to undermine its own
system of public schools by guaranteeing the proliferation of charter
schools (possibly run by corporations); must promote alternative
pathways to certification by bypassing state universities (for-profit
institutions); must guarantee that organizations formed to protect
teachers, such as collaboratives or unions, be rendered powerless.
At
a recent speech to the national Parent Teachers Organization, Secretary
of Education Duncan said, “For years, we have actually been lying to
children and lying to ourselves by pretending that 50 different
standards, in 50 different states, will make America competitive and
help our children succeed in life. We have to stop pretending. We have
to tell the truth. And we have to raise the bar for all children”
(Duncan, 2010b). Obviously, the goal of the current administration is to
establish national standards and national testing so that states,
regions, schools, teachers, and students can be compared and ranked.
Before
Stalin’s educational reforms in the Soviet Union, teaching was
characterized by local control. Educational policies were significantly
influenced by what were known at the time as “pedologists,” scholars who
considered learning the result of a conglomeration of genetic,
cultural, environmental, and instructional factors. Soviet pedologists
were early believers in using research to inform practice and were
blatantly oriented towards a “child-centered” education.
Educational
theorist Lev Vygotsky, a revered figure among many American academics,
was writing some of his seminal works, such as Adolescent Pedagogy (1931) and Language and Thought (1934)
during this time (Vygotsky died in 1934). Despite some promising
practices, the communist party rejected the child-centered, scholarly
approach of the pedologists and replaced it with a standardized
curriculum that featured frequent examinations, competitive grading, and
an emphasis on mathematics, science, and technology (Ewing, 2002;
Holmes, 1999; Petrone, 2000). Sound famliar?
Trend 2: An emphasis on the teaching of science, math, and technology
Sporadic
promotion of the study of mathematics, science, and technology has been
a hallmark of American initiatives in education for more than a
century. Legislation such as The Morrill Act of 1862, the National
Defense Act of 1958, and Goals 2000 generously funded universities and
school districts that agreed to encourage study in STEM (Science,
Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). While there is little debate
about the importance of STEM to future developments in medicine,
engineering, robotics, and computer science, the emphasis on the
sciences has resulted in a corresponding national evisceration of the
arts, humanities, and physical education.
The
elementary school in my neighborhood, like the elementary schools in
many American neighborhoods today, no longer employs an art teacher. The
physical education teacher is shared by two schools. The school nurse
is shared by six schools. If a student in an American public school
becomes ill while at school, he or she had better do it on the one day
per week that the nurse is scheduled to be in the building or the
student will be out of luck.
A
vestige of the punitive policies of No Child Left Behind, elementary
schools in many states that fail to meet adequate yearly progress
standards are reprimanded by removing all electives, such as art and
physical education, from the curriculum. As a result, students who have
the misfortune of attending a low-performing elementary school may never
have the chance to draw, paint, run, or play during school hours.
Instead of art or physical education, they receive a relentless diet of
“the basics” until scores improve.
In
a speech in November, 2009, President Obama (2009b) lamented the waning
of American leadership in the sciences, but pledged “that’s what we’re
going to be about again.” Similarly, Stalin saw education in STEM as key
to a flourishing economy. “We frankly and deliberately consented to
incur what in this case would be inevitable charges and
over-expenditures owing to the inadequate number of technically trained
people” (Stalin, 1954, p. 45). In September 1931, the Soviet government
officially decreed that the “abstract sciences” should dominate the
curriculum. With billions of federal dollars earmarked to support STEM
in K-12 and post-secondary schools, the United States has decreed the
dominance of the “abstract sciences” as well.
How
close is current American rhetoric on the importance of STEM to the old
propaganda of the Soviet Union during the 1930s? Try to identify who
said what below—Comrade Stalin or President Obama.
1.
“There is no doubt that our educational institutions will soon be
turning out thousands of new technicians and engineers, new leaders for
our industries.”
2.
“Improving education in math and science is about producing engineers
and researchers and scientists and innovators who are going to help
transform our economy and our lives for the better.”
3. “Galileo changed the world when he pointed his telescope to the sky and now it’s your turn.”
4.
“In the course of its development science has known not a few
courageous men who were able to break down the old and create the new,
despite all obstacles, despite everything. Such scientists as
Galileo…are widely known.”
Key:
Joseph Stalin said the first (Stalin, 1954/c1934). President Obama said
the second (Obama, 2009, November 23) and the third (2009, October 8),
and Stalin said the fourth (Stalin, 1978/c1940, pp. 329-330).
Trend 3: Focus on predetermined outcomes
Soviet
teachers in the 1930s had little leeway to veer from the newly revised
Soviet curriculum, despite the composition of the children who might be
sitting in their classrooms. Similarly, in most states in America today,
the same curriculum must be delivered to all students-whether they
happen to be poor immigrants from Somalia sitting in an urban classroom
in Minneapolis or a group of profoundly gifted savants sitting in a
classroom in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta.
Perhaps
one of the most debilitating new policies is the federal mandate to use
test scores to assess the quality of learning. When the test becomes a
template for the curriculum, any diversion from the sanctioned
curriculum becomes suspect. For example, for all intents and purposes, a
teacher of social studies in most states cannot teach anything about
the Iraq War, though the conflict is ongoing, one of the most expensive
confrontations of all time, and the lengthiest war in American history.
The Iraq War is neglected as a topic of study not because it is
inconsequential, but because it rarely shows up on standardized exams.
On the other hand, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which occurred over 150
years ago, is a staple on standardized examinations so it is furiously
“covered” in American schools from coast-to-coast.
The
students of a teacher who launches into an intensive study of the Iraq
War, then, will likely score lower on a standardized exam than students
of a teacher who has chosen to focus attention on the intricacies of the
American Civil War. In this way, learning for the real world has become
supplanted by the directive to memorize facts and events that someone
else has deemed important. The distance between inert and useful
knowledge is not just a feature of the social studies. Contemporary
breakthroughs in science, mathematics, and technology, while profuse in
real life, are conspicuously absent in K-12 schools because the
discoveries are too new to have been formally vetted by the bureaucracy
that controls the sanctioned curriculum.
Proponents
of standardized testing claim that making tests better will, perforce,
make the curriculum better (Hirsch, 2009). However, the development of a
sanctioned curriculum takes collaboration, negotiation, and incredible
expenditures of time, energy, and money. In the current era of rapid,
radical change, by the time a curriculum gets codified and approved, it
may well be obsolete.
Finally,
the very notion of establishing predetermined outcomes for American
children seems antithetical to democratic ideals. Establishing precisely
what a child should know and be able to do sounds more like an
antediluvian communist fantasy of yesteryear than an American policy for
the twenty-first century. In fact, it is.
About
the Soviet curriculum of the 1930s, Zajda (1980) comments, ”Uniformity
in the curricula, teaching methods, and textbooks was also followed by a
blue-print like uniformity of the entire educational system in the
USSR” (p. 25). One might have thought that the American way would be to
offer rich opportunities and varied experiences, then allow students to
decide for themselves what they mean. A prefabricated curriculum takes
the adventure out of learning; it dictates both what is important and
why.
For
most children, especially American children, prescribing final outcomes
seems absurd. Most parents would find laughable the notion of forcing
all their offspring to think, act, and speak in identical ways, yet the
expectation for American teachers today is to get all students to think,
act, and speak in the ways that the sanctioned curriculum specifies.
Despite its flagrantly anti-democratic, anti-individualistic
underpinnings, outcomes-based education has become pandemic, providing
the very foundation for American educational reform for more than forty
years. Ubiquitous in American schools, outcomes-based education seems
more suited to the goals of communism than the ideals of democracy. “The
activity of the [Stalinist] system of education was not oriented toward
encouraging creativity, and the development of the personality but
rather toward universal leveling, averaging, and the fulfillment of the
social mandate” (Borisenkov, 2007, p. 7).
Trend 4: Stronger teacher accountability, less teacher autonomy
Both
Secretary of Education Duncan and President Obama praised the recent
firing of the entire teaching staff at Central Falls High School in
Rhode Island. True, test scores at the school were far from stellar, but
absenteeism and misbehavior were down and graduation rates were up, no
small feat for a school located in one of the poorest areas of the
state. Below is a table that compares the achievement of students at
Central Falls High School, again, located in one of the poorest parts of
Rhode Island, with that of Barrington High School, a school located in
one of the richest areas of Rhode Island, over the past two years.
School
|
Change in mean reading score, 2008-2009
|
Change in mean mathematics score, 2008-2009
|
Change in mean writing score, 2008-2009
|
Barrington (rich students)
|
-1
|
No change
|
-.3 (-5%)
|
Central Falls (poor students)
|
+3
|
+2
|
+.5 (+10%)
|
The teachers from which school were fired?
Perhaps
inspired by the plaudits from the White House for firing teachers,
Teach for America alumna and ex-superintendent of Washington, D.C.
schools Michelle Rhee fired 6% of her district’s teachers for not
sufficiently raising student achievement. Perhaps the fired teachers in
D.C. also happened to work with the most disadvantaged children in the
poorest neighborhoods.
Increasingly,
teachers in urban schools are alternatively certified brand new
graduates from “somewhere else,” who were trained in quick-and-easy,
non-university programs. With the enthusiastic support of Secretary of
Education Duncan, alternative certification continues to gain momentum
across the country.
Keisha,
a recent graduate of a research university in the southwest who went
through five years of intensive study that included field experiences in
four different schools before a full semester of work as a student
teacher, returned to her old high school, an underperforming high school
in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to accept a job as teacher. Despite her ties to the
neighborhood and a superlative first year as teacher, Keisha was laid
off by Tulsa Public Schools and replaced by a fresh recruit from Teach
for America’s New York office, an individual with no classroom
experience, zero courses in education, who has never set foot in
Oklahoma.
The
recent firings of teachers across the country represent a new wave of
vituperative accountability for teachers. Historically, the lure for
American teachers has been job satisfaction and job stability. The
unwritten rule was that teachers would exhibit dedication, indefatigable
enthusiasm, a modicum of intelligence, and an unshakable belief in the
potential of children in exchange for low pay and job security. No more.
A teacher who finds herself in a school of at-risk children and does
not produce tangible jumps in test scores in the first year is in danger
of losing her job.
While
a teacher is an important influence in a child’s life, the social and
cultural contexts of learning are also cogent. To illustrate, of the
2,000 high schools that produce half of the nation’s dropouts (Duncan,
2010c), none are located in middle class or wealthy neighborhoods. In
the United States, the percentage of schools where 75 percent or more
students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals rose to 17 percent
in 2008. Almost half of all students attending urban elementary schools
live in poverty (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Data
substantiating the link between poverty and academic performance is well
established (Baines, 2007; Bracey, 2009; Darling-Hammond, 2010;
Khadaroo, 2010), though largely ignored in recent American educational
policy decisions.
As
with current American educational reformers, Soviet leaders of the
1930s “rejected any suggestion that heredity or environment presented
limits that could not be overcome with the proper combination of
enthusiasm and dedication” (Ewing, 2001, p. 481). As in American schools
today, Soviet teachers in the 1930s were expected to conform to
governmental demands or they would lose their jobs; exile and
imprisonment for uncooperative Soviet teachers were possible
consequences, too. In the Soviet Union, increased pressure on teachers
resulted in enormous rates of turnover, quick attrition, and
unsurprisingly—teacher shortages.
Consider
the experience of Nikolai Nennik, a Soviet teacher during the 1930s who
received scant training before being sent to a rural school as
full-time instructor (Ewing, 2002). Mr. Nennik’s first year of teaching
was considered “practice teaching,” though it was full-time and involved
real children: “more than fifty pupils…around only ten desks” (p. 178).
To Soviet leadership, the composition of students in Mr. Nennik’s
classroom, his (negligible) training and experience, and the deplorable
conditions under which he was expected to teach were superfluous. He
would produce significant achievement gains or he would lose his job--or
worse.
While
the Soviet government expounded upon the vital role of the teacher,
genuine professional development was virtually nonexistent. If training
was given at all, it was brief and sporadic; most teachers learned “on
the job” as do teachers from alternative certification programs in the
U.S. today. Teachers who would “keep their heads down” and “do what they
are told” were preferred.
Teachers
in the Soviet Union during the 1930s often operated out of fear—fear of
failure to control a classroom, fear of not knowing how to teach
effectively, fear of “stepping out of line,” fear of repercussions for
not performing the job of teacher as the government requires. Yet, fear
is not a particularly desirable trait for an individual whose job it is
to stimulate interest and build intellectual curiosity among the young.
Fear inhibits learning, increases stress, limits possibilities, and
shuts down creativity.
A Militaristic Turn
In
many ways, Stalin’s Five Year Plan amounted to a military takeover of
Soviet schools, replete with the surrender of the pedologists, the
conversion of teachers to the Communist party line, and the whole-scale
politicization of schooling. The Five Year Plan forced Soviet schools to
change from loosely-organized, largely locally-controlled,
child-centered schools to tightly-governed, centrally-controlled,
outcomes-focused schools.
Of
course, one of the problems with a militaristic orientation is that it
often clashes with the delicate, immeasurable, exhausting work that goes
along with helping a child develop into a fully realized adult.
Openness, benevolence, spontaneity, tolerance, and intellectual
skepticism might be attractive traits for a teacher, but they could cost
a soldier his or her life. The American military today is strong,
agile, and effective, but a militaristic orientation may not be optimal
for educating young children.
If
pay-for-performance becomes a reality for teachers in America, as it
looks like it will, the transformation from teachers as
caretaker-nurturer to teacher as technician-soldier will be complete.
Thus, the qualities of what constitutes a “good teacher” will be
transformed utterly—from child-centered to curriculum-centered.
Which comments are about American schools today and which comments are about Soviet schools of the 1930s?
1. “You can’t compare teachers if they’re not pursuing a common standard.”
2.
“No provision was made…for critical thought in cultural and other
matters or for creative growth in a non-collectivist direction.”
3. “To a great extent, teachers’ relations with state power were shaped by a constant sense of vulnerability to repression.”
Key:
Bill Gates said the first about American teachers in a speech in 2008.
Mathews (1982, p. 3) wrote the second and Ewing (2002, p. 258) wrote the
third about Soviet educational reforms of the 1930s.
Conclusion
Why
is current American educational policy so focused on punishing teachers
rather than helping students? In examining the credentials of the
individuals in the Secretary of Education’s cabinet, those who are
guiding the educational reforms that will inexorably alter the character
of American public education for the foreseeable future, one
characteristic becomes apparent—none of the members of the cabinet
listed below has ever worked as a teacher in a public school.
Decision-makers in the United States Department of Education
Name
|
Title
|
Number of years as teacher
|
Other experience
|
Arne Duncan
|
Secretary of Education
|
0
|
Chief Executive Officer, Chicago Public Schools (appointed)
|
Gabriella Gomez
|
Assistant Secretary for Legislation and Congressional Affairs
|
0
|
Assistant Director of the Department of Federal Legislation
|
Anthony Miller
|
Deputy Secretary
|
0
|
Operating partner of private investment firm
|
Peter Cunningham
|
Assistant Secretary for Communications and Outreach
|
0
|
President of a communications company in Chicago
|
Peter Groff
|
Director of the Center for Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships
|
0
|
Executive Director of the Center for African American Policy in Denver
|
Jacqueline Jones
|
Senior advisor to the secretary for early learning
|
0
|
Educational Testing Systems administrator
|
Carmel Martin
|
Assistant Secretary of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development
|
0
|
Formerly, a general counsel (lawyer) and advisor to Senator Edward Kennedy
|
James Shelton
|
Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement
|
0
|
Program director for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, business consultant.
|
In
an interview with H. G. Wells in 1934, Stalin said, “Education is a
weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by
who is to be struck down.”
The
Stalinization of Soviet schools during the 1930s had a pervasive,
enduring impact on Soviet life. Scholars (Rust & Dneprov, 1992;
Brodinsky, 1992) reckon that Soviet schools remained largely unchanged
for more than fifty years, well beyond Stalin’s demise.
Perhaps
surprisingly, Stalin was somewhat envious of the unbridled vigor of the
American student of the 1930s, whom he considered to be wholly free
from the artifices of regimentation. He stated: ‘In America two types of
creativeness are recognized—one is the creativeness of the study and
the other is broad, life-inspired creativeness, manifestations of the
creative spirit in life” (1954/c1934, pp. 269-270).
Educational
reforms currently underway in America promise to trade the uncertainty
of the “creativeness of the study” for measurable, prescribed outcomes.
As proven by the Soviet educational reforms of the 1930s, the goals of a
nationalized curriculum, a focus on STEM, measurable outcomes, stronger
accountability for teachers, and increasingly militarized schools are,
indeed, attainable. But, these goals are gained at enormous costs—to
schools, to children, and to democratic ideals. Once “the creativity of
the study” goes, the “the creative spirit in life” cannot be far behind.
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http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 16545, Date Accessed: 11/13/2011 8:01:37 PM
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