As the NFL season came to a close this past Sunday, the annual armchair analysis of SuperBowl ads has begun. As an avid NFL fan, I like to salute those ad campaigns that have stood the test of time for the whole season. My top honors for advertising campaigns goes to Budweiser beer. (Disclosure: I am only a fan of their advertising. I am not a fan of their beer.) Through a variety of hilarious commercials Budweiser salutes all of the superstitious things that fans do to help their teams win. My favorite spot features “Ramsay.” The narrator begins the commercial by describing Ramsay as the most obnoxious person you would hate to watch a game with. He yells at the TV, throws food in the air after a bad play, and does goofy touchdown dances after good plays. Yet the narrator says that every time Ramsay comes over, their team wins. “I love you Ramsay,” concludes the narrator.
I have also been reminded of this ad campaign throughout this school year every time I hear the next cockamamy plan for improving our schools. In case you have not been paying attention for the last 13 years, 2014 is the year in which 100% of the students in America will meet basic standards in reading, math, and science so that there is No Child Left Behind. Recognizing that we were not going to meet that goal, the Obama administration has been handing out No Child Left Behind waivers like cotton candy. The brilliance of the Bush administration was to set the timeline for the ridiculous goal for after he is long out of office. The Clinton administration was a little short-sighted in their benchmarking. They had the audacity to think that they could move the United States from the middle of the pack on international assessments in 1994 to be the top scoring country by the end of his presidency in the year 2000. (On the 2000 PISA, we were still average in 14th place in science and 19th place in math.) The Reagan administration did not set benchmarks per se, but he did set off the hailstorm of standards-based education by declaring that our education system was so mediocre that we would declare it an act of war if another country had imposed the system on us. (By the way, the products of that mediocre system fueled the largest economic expansion in U.S. history.) In every discussion of raising standards, I am always reminded of a quote from Gerald Bracey saying that just because you make someone’s shirt sleeves longer, doesn’t mean their arms will grow longer.
Although the Obama administration is pragmatic enough not to set specific benchmarks for judging his education policies, they still rest their hopes on a bedrock of educational competition. Those teachers, principals, and schools that are above average will be rewarded and those teachers, principals, and schools that are below average will be punished. Obama has introduced what many have hailed as a “new” approach to school reform, piloted tested by Arne Duncan in Chicago, called school turnaround, in which all of the staff at a failing school are let go and a whole new staff is hired. What modern, ahistorical policy makers do not realize is that this same approach was called “reconstitution” in the 1990s, with little success. In fact, “turnaround” has a long history in business, with a very small success rate.
Just as the narrator in the Budweiser commercial tells Ramsay that the players can’t hear him when he is yelling at the TV, we need strong voices to tell policy makers that the essence of lunacy is superstitiously doing the same things over and over again and hoping to get different results the next time. Since none of these ideas are working at scale, it’s just weird how we keep trying them over and over again.
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