Margaret Spellings Still Doesn't Get It

Why would David Frum (or anyone else) bother to interview Margaret Spellings? But he did, and a friend told me to go look at the result (thanks a lot, Jennifer), and it's a celebration of many of the worst, most failed ideas of 21st century ed reform.

Who's that now?

You can skip this if you remember her, but for those who don't--

Spellings is a career politician, but her career has often intersected with education, and it has generally intersected with it in the same way that a passing motorist once intersected with my open car door, changing it for the worse. She was Bush's domestic policy advisor from 2001 to 2004, then most notably the Secretary of Education from 2005-2009, where she got to lead the charge on No Child Left Behind. She had been with George Bush since he deposed Ann Richards as governor of Texas, brought into the Bush fold by Karl Rove.

Spellings has worked in everything from lobbying to political consulting. Some of her opponents view her as a culture wars combatant; she infamously called PBS to demand that they yank a children's show episode that included a lesbian couple. (Also, fun fact: back in 2007 she went toe-to-toe with NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo over student loans).

While there are occasional attempts to portray her as some sort of complicated centrist, but mostly she has been a consistent source of nonsense about NCLB. She likes the narrative of test scores as part of national defense ("The success of every student in reading and doing math on grade level is vital to the future success of our nation") and she is another reformster to claim that, prior to NCLB's testing requirements, nobody knew if their schools were failing or not. Spellings has remained all in, loving not only national standards, but national standardized tests.

A decade ago she was in the Wall Street Journal, peering into the future, and what she sees is education as a consumer good:

Parents, for one, will have access to the flow of data, allowing them to help their children find the education that best fits them. Buyers, meaning the parents and students, will be in control of the education, selecting from an à la carte menu of options. Gone will be the fixed-price menu, where a student attends a school based upon geography and is offered few alternatives. Students and their parents can take their state and federal dollars and find an education that best suits them.

Like much of what Spellings has to say, this reveals a narrow and stunted view of education. In Spellings' world, education is not a public trust, helping to bind the communities that provide it and benefit from it. The social and civic growth of children, the learning about how to be their best selves and how to be in the world-- all of that will, I guess, happen somewhere else, because school is just about collecting the right modules of pre-employment training. Her dream of unleashing the foxes of market forces in the henhouse of education is not good news, and like many of Spellings' pet ideas encased in NCLB, long since proven to be bunk.

Spellings also has a checkered past with connections to predatory for-profit schools and the college loan collection industry. Or you can watch her do this little spot with the Boston Consulting Group (one of the four investment horsemen of reformsterism) arguing how more data and more information will help us "wring out efficiencies" so we can do "more with less." We've poured money into education and gotten no returns in "student achievement."

She landed a gig running the University of North Carolina a decade ago as part of a program to bring the university to heel, and she promptly threw LGBTQ students under the bus. She teamed up with fellow Very Wrong Former Secretary Arne Duncan for a Washington Post op-ed. And she was right there, post-pandemic to argue that the sacred Big Standardized Test must be brought back immediately. 

That Margaret Spellings.

The interview runs the greatest hits

After musing about MAGA sycophancy and the lack of self-respect, Frum, somehow connects that to his "dialogue" with Spellings, who he will introduce by harkening back to how her initials on White House speeches "struck awe in the hearts of all who saw them." Then "And she continues to strike awe..." in case the irony-o-meter hasn't yet registered for the problem of sycophancy.

Frum launches right into the old saw that at first, "steady consistent improvements in the performance" of students, by which they mean test scores went up, until they didn't. There are a variety of explanations for the 2010s test score stagnation; as someone who was in the classroom at the time, I would point directly to test prep having reached the point of diminishing returns. Those "gains" were about teaching students how to take the Big Standardized Test, and by the 2010s, we'd gotten as much return from that as we were ever going to.

But that's not the Spellings explanation. "We took our foot off the gas," by which she means we "allowed the states to really walk back on the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment, the transparency, and the consequence for failure." There's a lot of nothing in those terms, though she seems mostly to mean that more test and punish is what we need.

When NCLB and its unachievable goal of All Children Score Above Average By 2014 was finally rewritten in 2015, Spellings claims that states loosened things up too much. "Schools and states started manipulating their cut scores," she argues, failing to note that states had set cut scores every year since this dance started. The Spellings Theory of Action has always seemed to be that you set the cut scores real high, fail a lot of students, punish the schools for having those failing students and then... something that happens so that students don't fail in the following years. This is a lousy plan of action, and the failure of NCLB ought to be proof of its lousiness, but Spellings belongs to that family of single-minded reformsters whose argument is always, "If that idea failed, then we should get back in there and fail harder."

Covid, she argues, just made everything worse, combined with the fact "that we sort of didn't care as much in the accountability system," and Spellings again demonstrates the reformster unfailing belief that the "accountability system" aka The Big Standardized Test actually provides useful data. From the classroom perspective, test and punish was a lousy system that did not help with the work--especially since the test part was mediocre at best and toxic at worst. 

She will stop to genuflect at the altar of the Mississippi miracle (we're not going to get into the debunking of that here) and will quote Joel Klein, another classic reformstery neo-lib and the old "you can't say poverty affects education because education is supposed to cure poverty." Again, I don't want to go back down that rabbit hole other than to point out that Spellings is ignoring twenty years of nuanced and pointed criticism of these ideas.

Oh, but then we get this:

Frum: Why do so many professional educators dislike testing so much?

Spellings: Well, because it leads to accountability for grown-ups, and none of us like that particularly, I guess; it’s just a reality of being an adult and being responsible.

I think I speak for many professional educators when I say that Spellings can go straight to hell. Also, if you want to bring up accountability for grownups, how about discussing the leaders of NCLB and their unwillingness to accept feedback from professional educators about the issues with the test (which were not about objecting to being held accountable), or maybe just accepting accountability for the many failures of the whole NCLB test and punish program. But no-- it's 2025 and folks like Spellings are still refusing to say, "Maybe we made some mistakes there" and still lean on "Well, those dopey teachers weren't doing it right." Honestly, just right straight to hell.

But no, this woman can't take responsibility for anything. She brings up the criticism that test and punish narrowed curriculum to block out subjects like science and social studies because they aren't on the test, which was absolutely a real thing. In my school, 7th and 8th graders who were at risk of low scores on the BS Test were denied science and history so they could be jammed into double reading and double math. But Spellings--

And my response to that is it’s hard to learn science or social studies or history or anything else if you can’t read.

Frum decides that what the interview really needs is some racism, so he asks if maybe the rise of "a new kind of illegal immigration after 2014" that includes more families-- maybe that was dragging scores down? Spellings doesn't offer an appropriate response like, "David, what the hell" but she does dance around to avoid agreeing with him, eventually circling back to expectations. Then there's this--

No Child Left Behind—those words say it simply—was essentially an expectation that virtually every kid ought to have an expectation that they can get what they need in our public schools. And I’m not sure that people believe that anymore. And then our strategy now is: Get a voucher. Get the hell out. See about yourself. And this idea that it’s in our national interest for an institution called American public education to attempt to do something no other country does is important.

No. NCLB was the idea that if the feds squeezed teachers and schools hard enough, they would magically fix achievement issues and the federal and state governments would be off the hook for providing any kind of assistance or support. But for people whose idea was always to get to issuing vouchers, NCLB was a godsend because, by creating a task that schools could not possibly accomplish, it helped erode trust in public education. 

Spellings makes a good point about accountability for tax dollars being spent on vouchers and charters, but it's clear that she hasn't really paid attention to how that's going these days. 

Frum points out that lots of BS Tests are out of favor these days and Spellings thinks that's a shame. She likes the idea that Trump's extortion attempt "compact" includes a standardized test requirement. Frum acknowledges that there's a racial element to testing, but he and Spellings agree that the only alternative to a BS Test is word of mouth, and you know how racist that is. Mind boggling that these are the only two ways they can think of to evaluate students.

About the unions

Frum wonders if the punishments and rewards under NCLB should have applied to the unions somehow, since they opposed testing. Because, you know, that was just because the union's main thing is to protect their worst members. Not, mind you, because using test scores was like rolling dice with a teacher's career, or because all the teachers who didn't teach reading and math ended up on the short end of twisty evaluations shticks. And I don't entirely follow her response, but I think she's saying the people who oppose testing are semi-responsible for the elimination of the federal department because they wanted no accountability. Because in Spellings' mind, the BS Test only and always provides accountability, because it is magical and perfect.

Frum mentions that a major anti-test group offers the argument that testing makes teaching less fun. Spellings replies with another false dichotomy:

That might be true, and here’s why: There is a way—the word regiment comes to mind—but direct instruction prescribed in a sequential, serious way, where there’s fidelity of implementation and hewing to the research, is the path to success. Now, we have gotten into this idea that every teacher should go into their own classroom and create and invent and student-led and all of this kind of stuff, and it sounds like a blast, but does it work? And the answer has largely been no. So it’s just like, we wouldn’t want your physician making up the protocols for cancer treatment; neither should our teachers make up stuff and hope that it works, just the spray-and-pray method of teaching. And so, yeah, might that be less fun? Yeah, maybe. And I think one of the things I’m encouraged about is: What can technology do and media do and tools that are available through technology to make teaching more fun, to better engage students? But to get results, sometimes you gotta eat your broccoli.

Are there other options besides "serious" sequences aimed at getting results or "spray and pray"? Of course there are, and there need to be, because school is where students live most of their lives, and where they learn about how the world works, so maybe "the world is a dull dreary place where your focus stays on the dull business of producing results for someone else" isn't great. Neither is the anarchy of teachers pulling things out of their butts. I'll bet smart people can think of other options. Also, I note that Spellings is my age, and "technology will make school more fun" is exactly the kind of thing that makes us look like fossilized boomers.

Also, she agrees with cell phone bans. We're loaded with irony today.

There's a nice side trip in which Frum notes that Silicon Valley types are demonstrating a willingness or even zeal to write off vast stretches of the American population and say "Who needs them," which is a valid observation about that crowd. But he also asks why schools don't teach foreign languages and I'm wondering what the heck schools he is talking about. 

We end with some "what can parents do," to which Spellings observes that "we still have pretty significantly rich data about the quality of your schools," and no, no we do not. Test scores are strikingly meager and narrow, but no, she thinks that tiny slice of data is a big deal. It's that unexamined view and her resistance to any contradiction of it, that remains at the heart of all her bad ideas about education, and yet somehow, here she is, still one of the leading unexpert experts in the education policy world. These days she's CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which has no policy tab for K-12 education, so maybe we can hope her attention will be focused elsewhere. Please.