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Obama also said Chicago's dropout rate "has gone downevery year he's been in charge." Though that's technically true, the committee says it's still unacceptably high: About half of Chicago students drop out of the city's non-selective-enrollment high schools. And more than 70% of 11th-graders fail to meet state standards, a trend that "has remained essentially flat" over the past several years.

Even among those who graduate, it says, skills are poor: An analysis of students entering the Chicago City Colleges in fall 2006 showed that 69% were not prepared for college-level reading, 79% were not prepared for writing, and 95% were not prepared for math.

"Performance is very bad, very weak," says Civic Committee president Eden Martin.

Obama also said Chicago students' ACT test score gains "have been twice as big as those for students in the rest of the state." Again, technically true — ACT data show that Chicago students' composite score rose 0.9 points from 2002 to 2006, while Illinois' score rose 0.4 points. But Chicago students' composite score of 17.4 was lower than the statewide average of 20.5.

Timothy Knowles, who directs the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, says the report highlights "a highly irresponsible state reaction" to the federal No Child Left Behind law.

"In essence," he says, "many states have lowered (passing) scores on standardized tests to create the public appearance they are meeting federal standards. This practice sells children short — and the states that engage in it are, ironically, leaving themselves behind."

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you have, for instance, chains that are developing—

DEBORAH MEIER: That’s what I mean.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —like the KIPP Academy and some of these others. But one of the things I’ve been noticing in my investigations is that a lot of these charter schools, especially the chain types, pay enormous salaries. I reported on one here in Harlem, Eva Moskowitz. She was making, for just running a school of 300 kids, making $370,000 a year. And the New York Post, last week, reported that a charter school in Brooklyn, the director, was making $700,000 a year. This is a non-profit.

DEBORAH MEIER: And I was making seventy. So, it is an idea cooked up. It was an idea that may have had marvelous origins. I’m really not sure how it started. We have something in Boston called pilot schools, that were an internal attempt to capture the best qualities of charters but to remain within the system and was supported and initiated by the union.

You know, it’s not only that we shouldn’t be driven by data, but informed by data, which would require a much different kind of press coverage of education than we get, so that—we imagine that you can run schools on the basis of a distant—a lever from some distant place that looks at data and manipulates the system from that place. And there’s no data that works. There’s no suggestion—there’s not even, on their own terms, data that works.

AMY GOODMAN: Deborah Meier, this past week is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate the schools of this country. Where are we today with this?

DEBORAH MEIER: We’re not [inaudible]—not anywhere. I mean, when I came to New York City in the mid-’60s and taught in Central Harlem—actually, by the way, it’s closer to five decades that I’ve been working in the public schools. But when I came to New York City and worked in Central Harlem in kindergarten and was telling the kids about desegregation, it was hard to convince them, because they looked around the room, and what did I—when I said, “It’s only in the South that we have segregation.”

So, segregation has been with us a very long time, but it hasn’t changed. And you can send your kid, if you’re an upper-middle-class New Yorker, you can send your kids, for example, to schools in New York City from kindergarten through twelfth grade that have fewer black and Latino kids in it than most private schools. I know this personally.

And we have not—we’re so interested in the best and the brightest, by our very narrow definition of what we’re looking for in this country, what we mean by merit and what we mean by leadership. So I’m also just stunned by the Department of Education that includes virtually no educators, whose definition of being well-educated is that you graduated from Harvard.

There’s something basically missing about what we want from our schools. And if we don’t get that right, and even discuss it, so that the only meaning of achievement now is improving test scores.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, and when you mentioned the people who are running the system that aren’t even educators, increasingly now, especially with this charter school movement, even the principals have no experience as teachers.

DEBORAH MEIER: There is no respect for—now, it’s not the only place we do this. I‘m a little stunned that you send in people on the basis of some general brightness category to fix automobile industries, who know nothing about manufacturing and industry. We’ve gotten—you know, this decade of interest in finance has made us think that only people who know how to manipulate money know how to change the world for the better.

And I think that’s unfortunately the lesson we’re teaching in schools, by the way we view the schools and by the way we want teachers to view their students. We want them to look at their students as products, and that the way they can tell whether their product is good is whether its scores are higher, and then they’ll get paid more money.

And that whole bonus assumption corrupts the work itself. You know, there’s a principle, Campbell’s Principle, I think it’s called, that the more you focus on a particular indicator, the more corrupt that indicator becomes itself. And I think we have under—a corrupt educational system, not in the sense, really, that so many people are making money off it—too many are—but mostly in the sense that we’ve corrupted the purposes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, in New York City, they took it one step further, starting to offer children money for getting higher test scores, right? The mayor wants—has a plan to cash bonuses for students who get higher test scores.

DEBORAH MEIER: Yeah, it’s a fundamental corruption of the definition that I have of being well-educated. And the purpose of small schools and the purpose of a strong and powerful faculty was because you can’t pass on to kids what it means to be part of a powerful community if you’re not part of a powerful community. And teachers whom we don’t respect enough to make judgments of importance can’t teach the fundamental underlying principle of democracy, which is the exercise of judgment.

At Cody High, an aging school in a neighborhood of tiny brick bungalows, Duncan sat for 45 minutes Wednesday with teenagers in a library where shelves are lined with outdated encyclopedias.

The students he met -- poised to graduate in a class of about 250 and brimming with plans to be nurses or teachers or enter the military -- are success stories in a school with too few. About 97 percent of juniors failed state math tests last year, and about 80 percent failed in English.

Unfortunately, events are not breaking in the direction we both prefer. The stimulus bill includes millions so that every state can create a data system. This system will track the test scores of every student, from pre-K to college, and attribute their test score gains (or lack thereof) to their teachers. When the information is available, it will be used and misused. Every teacher (at least those who teach the tested subjects) will have a public record detailing whether his or her students made gains or not. This information will be used to establish calibrated merit pay schemes, so that each teacher will get more or fewer dollars depending on the scores of the year. Is this piecework?

The federal government seems ready to impose a Dr. Strangelove approach on our schools to turn them into "data-driven systems." Not, as you suggest, "data-informed" systems, but data-driven systems. Teachers will certainly teach to the tests, since nothing else matters. The only missing ingredient from this grand data-driven scheme will be education.

We agree with Dr. Mathis and will forward his recommendations on to Obama and Duncan:




• stop expanding the number of charter schools and relying on
  takeovers, privatization and other restructuring efforts for school
  improvement, and
  
• focus on making sure that all schools have adequate
  resources and support so that they can improve, and support such proven
  strategies such as early education, smaller class size, small school
  communities, intense personal intervention, and strong counseling and
  social support systems.