Philosophical Differences

Why do so many students dislike school?

Many people have ideas about this. Some are noted experts who write books on the subject. It isn’t often that I read two books within just a few weeks of each other, whose authors are so far apart from each other in opinions and approaches. But recently I did.

The books are Why Don’t Students Like School? By Daniel T. Willlingham, and Unschooling Rules, by Clark Aldrich.  

Viewpoint #1: Willingham
Mastering subject matter is hard, and it
takes a long time.

Daniel Willingham is a noted researcher in cognitive science, and a professor of psychology at the University of Virgina. 

His underlying conclusion seems to be, essentially, that students don’t like school because mastery of subject matter is hard, and it takes a long time. The idea here is that if it isn't fairly quick and easy, they prefer not to stick to the effort.

He strongly argues that learning facts—presumably via the traditional, you-will-be-tested-on-these-facts approach—is essential to mastery, and that mastery of a discipline is the whole point of education. 

He is not greatly enchanted with the school of thought that talks about teaching “thinking skills,” because as he points out, you cannot develop such skills without first learning facts.

Viewpoint #2: Aldrich
Kids are pre-programmed to learn. 
Schools don't nurture that innate curiosity too well.

Clark Aldrich is a noted education-reform expert, described in his author biography as a “global education thought leader.” He is a respected speaker, facilitator, and writer who works with business groups, government agencies, and academic organizations. 

His underlying conclusion seems to be, essentially, that students come hard-wired with a deep and abiding curiosity about the world, and that the job of the educator is to channel that drive to learn, in order to harness its power—not only for mastery, but for a person’s better life. Students don't like schools when the schools do not engage their drive to learn.

He contends that “there are three different types of learning: learning to be, learning to do, and learning to know,” and identifies the third as the kind of learning that is concerned with facts. Moreover, “Traditional schools’ forte, learning to know, can come only after learning to be and learning to do have successfully begun” (pp. 7-8). That is, they start with the wrong kind of learning.

What are we saying to kids?
"Buckle Down!" vs. "Explore!"

For me, these two books crystallize two different education approaches that have grown out of our expanding understanding of how the human brain works. 

Although he writes about the brain in an interesting and authoritative way, Willingham seems to represent the group that retains faith in traditional forms of schooling--what I've called the "paradigm of control" in earlier posts. They see unmotivated kids in their classes as basically lazy. 

Aldrich advocates for an alternative way of "doing school," which is more individual in its approach than traditional school as we currently know it. He and others who think like him see unmotivated kids as people who have not been able to connect with their innate drive to learn.

I am a longtime teacher and practitioner of the arts. For me, the idea of long hours of hard work undertaken for no other reward than mastering a skill--and finding joy in that--is really not strange. 

This is because I know that hard work doesn't have to be the same thing as boring drudgery. 

Okay, practicing arpeggios or learning to hit the basket every time (even if it requires thousands of missed baskets) may sometimes seem like drudgery.  But for a person who is passionately interested in music or basketball, the arpeggios and the practice-baskets are not the point. 

One practices them for the same reason someone fascinated with chemistry memorizes the periodic table, or someone enchanted with the precision of numbers learns to figure algorithms. 

It isn't so we can pass a test on them. (Not EVER). It's because we need that ability, knowledge or skill to explore our chosen interest more fluently. 

For my money, this is the kind of education every child and adult needs to experience, and which very few schools manage to deliver reliably. Whether it is flute-playing, basketball, higher math, or almost anything, when our interest and drive to learn is engaged, we learn all we can about it, and eventually achieve mastery, because we are fascinated.

PHOTO CREDITS: Cover art for the two books comes from the Rainy Day Books website. The image of three girls playing flutes came from the website of Grosvenor School, an independent day school in South Nottingham. The photo of little Kai practicing baskets is from the blog, "The Adventures of Stinky Mouse and Go Jee." Many thanks to all!

Who Should Control School Funding?

Throughout the United States, a battle has been raging over school funding and reform for decades—but the Great Recession has opened a new dimension in the struggle.

Cash-strapped states have been slashing school funding year after year, continuing an effort begun by “small government” forces, now joined by “deficit hawks.” Recently, every new legislative session brings another epic battle, in which it seems the best a district can hope for is not to lose as much ground as last year.

Blue Valley West High School is in an affluent suburb of
Johnson County, KS, where school patrons are willing to tax
themselves sacrificially if necessary, to fund their schools.

All the same, some localities—such as Johnson County, KS, where I live—have resisted this trend as fiercely as they can. Johnson Countians have a long history of repeatedly raising their own taxes—even during the current economic situation—to strengthen funding for our schools. We’re lucky we can afford to do this, because not all districts are able.

We understandably resent and resist any effort to hold us back from more fully funding our schools—yet this is exactly how funding disparities widen between “have” and “have not” schools. When public schools were being set up in the 19^th century, the norms of the day and primitive communications led to the natural outcome that schools were funded by local property taxes, and governed locally. And it has stayed that way.

Unfortunately, we now have such an inequitable system that it probably should be ruled unconstitutional. 

Yet Heaven help anyone today who dares to suggest that US school funding should not be sourced and controlled locally! That is especially true in a relatively affluent area where parents clearly understand the value of a good education, but don’t necessarily trust centralized government to make good school decisions!

Educational innovations such as those practiced at this
school for 7-to-16-year-olds in Espoo, Finland, are proving
difficult to "transfer" to the United States.

This presents a real conundrum for reformers, because pretty much all of the countries with students scoring better than ours seem to be run on centralized systems. 

In top-rated Finland, for example, a central government agency controls the schools, mandates a centralized curriculum and educational approach; funds all schools, regardless of neighborhood, at relatively generous and equitable levels; and pays (not to mention respects) teachers more highly than in the US. How do we apply successful methods from the rest of the world, without changing this "central" aspect?

Indeed, for jealously protective parents who don’t want “outside bureaucrats” meddling with their kids’ schools, the reaction has often been the exact opposite of greater centralization. 

Instead, the cry of “school choice!” has gone up in various districts. This has led to an explosion in the number of homeschoolers, charter schools, and an assortment of voucher systems since the early 1990s. More recently, it also has led to a rise in “virtual” school districts offering courses online.

This water-damaged school in Newark, NJ--with no funds for
repairs--provides a cautionary lesson about too much austerity. 

Some parents who seek greater school choice want to flee crumbling inner city districts, which they—often with justification—see as dangerous places with more focus on crowd control than on nurturing children’s learning. 

Some religiously observant parents fear secular influences may alienate their children from their faith. 

Others resist integration, or disagree with curriculum mandates, or dislike placing their children in a “class-based” system that demands all children must learn the same things, at the same ages, and on the same timetable, no matter what their gifting or challenges may be.

Not all motivations are equally high-minded, but nearly all of those listed above spring from parental concern over what, how, and under what conditions their children are being taught. Parental concerns and a deep American respect for individuality are part of the forces that keep the "centralizers" at bay.

They are not the only interests that must be considered in reform efforts, however. 

Also influential in decisions made at all levels are the business interests of large companies in what has come to be called the "education-industrial complex" (test publishers and scorers, textbook and educational materials publishers, for-profit school management corporations, and many others have increasingly profited from contracts to provide school products and services).

Add to them the extremely well-funded ideologues who have begun to play such a massive role in US politics, and the politicians who depend on them for never-ending campaign financing needs. 

There also are numerous philanthropic foundations, academics, writers, think-tanks, teachers' unions, teacher-education institutions, and other voices. 

All have points to make, concerns to protect, and all too often axes to grind, because the one who controls the funding gets to have the final say—and in the clearly-failing US schools, a perilous future for all of us is riding in the balance.

PHOTO CREDITS: I took the photo of Blue Valley South High School in southern Johnson County, KS, in February 2007. It is © 2007 by Jan S. Gephardt, and may be used with attribution, but no alterations. The second photo shows a school in Espoo, Finland; 2012 photo by Tuomas Uusheimofor the book, Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? By Pasi Sahlberg. The 2011 photo of the New Jersey school is by Tony Kurdzuk of the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

Troglodyte Textbooks for Digital Natives

Why do US schools miss an apparent "No Brainer"?

For anyone who actively uses digital media to explore their world, it seems obvious that schools need to move away from the traditional "dead trees" textbook format, and begin using digital textbooks.

The advantages are many.


Inkling from Bulent Keles on Vimeo.

The digital option offers an interface that:

• Can open from the main text to a variety of detailed supplementary information.
• Is capable of being lavishly illustrated with zoom-enabled photos, video or audio clips, and interactive maps, charts, and graphs.
• In the best-designed examples, allows individual users to tag, annotate, bookmark, and/or archive notes and passages.
• Is near-instantly searchable on a wide variety of variables.
• Costs a fraction of what a copy of a traditional textbook costs.
• Weighs only as much as the digital device into which it has been loaded.
• Requires no special accommodations for storage, beyond digital memory capacity.
• Will always be a "brand new" copy to each user.
• Can be updated frequently by authors and publishers, because updates can be done at relatively little expense.

By contrast, traditional textbooks:

• Offer only a single "static" text with at most a few sidebars.
• Are limited by practicality to a handful of illustrations, charts, maps, etc. on any given page--none of which can be made interactive.
• Generally cannot be annotated by individual users without leaving a permanent mark.
• Can only be searched via laborious visual scan or a (limited) index.
• Cost a lot of money to buy.
• Are often heavy and cumbersome, especially for younger children.
• Take up a lot of storage space, when not in use.
• Are subject to wear, tear, and vandalism.
• Are difficult and expensive to update.

Back problems from too-heavy school backpacks reached a peak of awareness around 2005.

South Korean students in Goesan use tablet PCs as textbooks.

"Everybody" (on the blogosphere, anyway) seems to believe it's the way of the future, the coming  trend. South Korea and Singapore already have begun riding this wave.


But the switch to digital textbooks in the US has been hit-and-miss, emphasis on the "miss."  Why aren't more US schools joining this trend?

I think there are several reasons, and most of them stem from the basic institution, which is structured so it must prioritize its own needs above those of students.

Politics is one major dis-incentive, in at least three ways.

Federal, state, and local education budgets have been slashed repeatedly, throughout the last decade. Digital textbooks may be a fraction of the cost of traditional ones, but schools already have storage rooms filled with traditional textbooks. And outfitting an entire school or district with e-readers is not cheap. Many schools just don't have the money.

A significant and vocal group of voters is old enough to look upon digital devices in schools as an extravagant luxury, and therefore a waste of money. They tend to complain, and they unfortunately are more likely to vote than more moderate thinkers. Thus, their views sometimes dominate school budget battles.

Finally, US school districts have traditionally been governed by the decisions of a local school board. Unlike Finland, South Korea, Singapore, and many other nations with widely-admired educational systems, our schools are not centrally managed by the federal government so that all schools are treated the same. Local control and dependence on local property taxes for a financial base make US schools an uneven patchwork. No Department of Education recommendation can decree that all schools will use e-textbooks. You may see that as a good thing or a bad thing, but it is the way we operate. Districts will (or won't) adopt digital textbooks individually, as they see fit.

This illustration demonstrates textbook capabilities of iPad tablets.

Another important dis-incentive to using digital textbooks is the confusion and discomfort many educators feel about e-readers. Even those who have mastered web surfing, email, and Facebook may be baffled by the dizzying array of options in the rapidly-expanding e-textbook field.

How should educators evaluate the merits of a Nook (left) or a Kindle (right)?

What kind of digital reader should they use? The wrong choice means a whole lot of money ill-used. But there are arguments both for and against using the iPad, Nook, Kindle, and a whole slew of other devices. Which give good advice? Which are just glorified ads?

Textbooks must offer sound, readable information that is aligned with the school's curriculum--and most educators understand how to judge a traditional-format textbook. But what makes a good digital one? And if they do find a good digital reader, is it supported by all of the textbooks their school needs?

They may be dog-eared, but most schools have piles of textbooks.

No wonder so many schools are still relying on the laptop cart in the corner of the classroom, and digging their old paper-bound-in-cardboard textbooks out of the library storage room each year! Besides, with all the other things they have to pay attention to, what educator has the time to do a genuinely-rigorous comparative evaluation?

Institutionally, public schools have never had either the funding or the functional incentives to operate at the cutting edge of technology. Unlike businesses, they have faced no compelling need to compete, so they have had to be dragged, late and unwillingly, into the computer age.

Will that history repeat itself for digital textbooks?

PHOTO CREDITS:
The video clip at the opening of this post is from the iPad In Schools blog/website's "The Future of the Textbook" post. The three views of iPads as textbooks is from the same site's "Why the iPad Should be Used in Classrooms" post.
The cartoon panel from Lynn Johnston's For Better or for Worse comic strip came from the Eclipse Wellness website.
The AP photo of the elementary students from Goesan, South Korea is from the Daily Herald (Chicago area, IL) online.
The photo of a textbook on a Nook is from the Barnes & Noble Booksellers website. The image of the Kindle is from the GEV website. 
Finally, the image of piles of traditional textbooks came from the Beaumont Enterprise (Beaumont, TX) website.
Many thanks to all of these sources!

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
You may also find these articles interesting:
The Schools.com website's "Digital Learning: Final Chapter for Textbooks?" page.Classroom Aid's post, "It's a Digital World, Why not a Digital Textbook?"
Statistics on the Worldwide Center of Mathematics Blog website, in the post "The state of the Textbook Industry: Facts and Figures," by Brian L.
The Kindle-adoption experiment at  Clearwater (FL) High School, as described by the Techno Buffalo site.

How do the Paradigms of "Control" and "Respect" Differ?

19th century factory in Toronto

In my previous post I said, "if you are seeking to design a system that promotes creative curiosity, critical thinking skills, and a lifelong passion for learning, you can find vastly superior models to build upon than those of a 19th century factory or a prison."  I went on from there to assert that respect is the key ingredient missing in today's schools.

But what do I mean by that?  Respect . . . for whom?  And how do the Paradigms of "Control" and "Respect" differ?

First of all, I mean mutual respect--that is, everyone in the system respects and genuinely honors the contributions that all parties bring to the table.  But I also, specifically, mean much greater respect for students and their families, and also for teachers.


There are many contrasts we can draw between the two paradigms.  None of the thoughts I list below is complete: I intend to expand upon each in future posts.  But here are a few "snapshots" of some of the differences, as I see them.

Traditional school bureaucracies are by their nature "top-down" affairs.

Traditional school bureaucracy would have to stand on its head.  Years ago, my father told me that in his long education career he had observed an immutable order of things: that administrators set rules to suit their needs, teachers add rules to make their lives easier, and students are at the bottom of the heap.  In the graphic you'll note I've added a few layers to that hierarchy, based on recent trends, but the principle remains sound.

This system by its nature cannot prioritize the students' or their families' needs first.  No matter how fervently or genuinely the adults in the system may protest that they're "doing it for the kids' benefit," the actual truth is that the system serves its own needs first, and acts upon students--who have no input in the decision-making.

A master teacher and a student
from Tufts University work
together on a challenging problem.

The answer to "what is a class?" would change.  Public education systems in the U.S. have a long tradition of treating students kind of like standardized production runs, considering each class sort of like a "lot" produced during a specific time frame.

We all know that people learn at different rates and with different levels of capability, but in traditional classes all students are somehow (magically?) supposed to finish the same material at the same time.  In practice, this means some students "get" it right away, and then have to wait for all the others to come straggling in . . . while some never quite figure it out, but hope they can "fake it" well enough to get by.  This process doesn't respect the students at all, in my opinion.

A better approach--one that respects the student's time and needs--would take these natural variations into account.  The best motivation for learning is a moderate challenge that can be met with some effort.  Students don't succeed too easily (and therefore get bored), but they also are not completely baffled and defeated by demands too far beyond their skill.  They work at what they're learning until they master it, then move on to the next challenge.

Anyone who has played a well-crafted video game will recognize this approach.

It also is similar to the guiding principles of what educators call "standards-based" education.  Some schools have begun to try this idea.  Our own Kansas City (Mo) School District began phasing this approach in during the 2010-11 school year, on a trial basis in a few schools.  I believe this is an approach that should be explored more widely.

Parents in Tampa FL pick up their kids after
school.

Schools' daily schedules would become more flexible. You may be surprised to learn that school bus schedules normally dictate when schooldays start and end.  This is an outstanding example of the bureaucracy meeting its own needs first, with little regard to student needs.

Because of this priority alignment, most school schedules are radically out of sync with many students' natural circadian rhythms, and often create a "latch key" situation for young children whose parents' work schedules are different from the school schedule.

Under a Paradigm of "Respect," much greater effort would be focused toward scheduling school days and events at times when students are alert, and on schedules that are in harmony with working parents' job demands.

Passing period can be hectic for older students, and it is a
poor substitute for a break, in most cases.

The lengths of activities during school, and the number of distractions and time-wasting interruptions, would change.   Large portions of each school day are wasted on things that have little to do with education and a great deal to do with administrative needs.  Bell schedules enforce an unnatural sequence of work interruptions for students, with no regard for their individual learning processes.  They exist almost entirely for administrative convenience.

For example, being required to think about algebra for an arbitrary period of time, then abruptly being interrupted, forced to move, and next being required to think about something completely unrelated, such as history or language arts, is an unnatural and impersonal means of ordering students' time that completely disregards their achievement of understanding, need for practice, or experience of "flow" in their work.  No system based on respect would do this to someone.

Young footballers in Northbook, IL
get some healthy exercise in a physical
education class.  Unfortunately, recent
budget cuts threaten art, music, and P.E.
most of all, despite their benefits.

Students' needs would be respected, and recognized as important.  In many schools, preparation for standardized testing eats more and more of the school day, while recess, even for the youngest students, is being systematically cut shorter and shorter.

For older students there are very few breaks at all, other than passing periods, when they are expected to secure any books they need, get from one classroom to another (even if it's several floors away), take care of restroom needs, and also do a little socializing if there's time--all in 3-5 minutes.  This is scarcely on a par with the mandated break times at many workplaces.

Budget cutbacks and increased emphasis on subject areas targeted by mandated tests also have contributed to nationwide cutbacks in art, music, and physical education classes--thereby cutting back opportunities for students to switch up their routine, express themselves, and get some exercise.  A system that respected students' needs would never make this tradeoff.

Students take a math exam at an
unidentified school.

Testing would be done for legitimate, learning-related purposes.  Testing doesn't really need to be a high-stress, high-stakes affair that requires massive amounts of money, effort, and time, although a good deal of today's "testing experience" is precisely that.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has mandated sweeping standardized testing programs that (1) are not pedagogically helpful in any way, and that (2) in practice have functioned to penalize ever more schools throughout the US.

A classic "bell curve" shows a
normal distribution of results.

Logic alone should tell us that the NCLB Act's requirement for all children to reach "proficiency" in reading and math by an arbitrary date (the 2013-14 school year) is an impossible goal, a fool's errand.  Unless we can somehow find a way to turn the bell curve into an L shape on the "high" end, or unless we move to Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average," no school with actual children in it can achieve 100% "proficiency" (whatever that is: definitions vary).

Real testing--respectful testing--focuses on the goal of discovering what the student has already learned, and what s/he still needs to know.  This keeps the teacher from wasting the student's time with things s/he already knows, and helps focus lessons on things the student still needs to know.

Pedagogically valid tests help teachers evaluate what should be incorporated in the lessons to come, so the student can achieve mastery of the topic under study.  Ideally, the teacher should write his or her "final" first, based on the learning objectives for the class.  All the lessons should be structured to help answer the question, "how can I help the student learn what s/he must know to meet these learning objectives (and, incidentally, ace this test)?" The best test is all about the student, and helping the student learn.

It's radical, I know.  And the practicality of some of the things I am proposing raises serious questions.  I hope you will continue to read along with me, as I attempt to outline ways that we might just be able to pull this off.

PHOTO CREDITS: The image of the 19th century Abell Street factory in Toronto, ON is from the Heritage Canada Foundation. The "Top-Down Hierarchy" chart is copyright 2011 by Jan Sherrell Gephardt, created for this post.  The photo of the Tufts University student and her mentor in the STOMP program is from Teachers EFGI.  The photo of the hectic passing period is from the +Plus Magazine . . . Living Mathematics website.  The photo of soccer-playing kids in Northbrook, IL is from the Northbrook School District.  The photo of the math exam is from The Situationist blog.  The graph showing a classic bell curve is from the University of Kansas Medical Center website.  

A Thought Experiment Begins

I recently looked back over my last several posts to this blog, and thought, "Woman, you are such a whiner!  Why don't you write something positive?"

It is true that I find much of today's education news deeply depressing--but my nature is to be optimistic, which is probably why I went into teaching in the first place.  So I've decided to start a series of posts that explore some of the ways we can make schools better.

Education has been conducted on much the same paradigm
since this engraving was made in 1826. I think it's time to change
the paradigm, if we want to improve our 21st-century schools!

Why should I be able to do any better than the Gates Foundation and the Secretary of Education at prescribing the best recipe for education reform?  Well, I'm not sure I can!

But I've been playing with an idea for several years that I haven't seen widely discussed, and I'd like to share it here.

I think the only way we'll manage to have meaningful educational reform is to change the paradigm.  I don't mean moving away from the goal of providing the best possible education for our kids.  I just think we're going about it from the basis of an unhelpful paradigm--the paradigm of "Control."

What does that mean?  To explain, I need to go back to the 19th century, when the whole idea of universal public education was just starting to gain traction in the United States.

No one should dispute the fact that reformers such as Horace Mann wanted to help improve the lives of children. But schools also developed as they did for several other reasons--and those don't often make it into the history books.  Understanding these origins, however, is essential to understanding the current paradigm.

Public education pioneers got powerful backing from industrialists in the northeast during the middle of the 19th century.  These businessmen had found that they really needed as many minimally-educated, compliant, dependable factory workers as they could find.  There was a chronic labor shortage that continually nagged the effort to keep the mills and factories humming.

Children turned out to be unreliable, easily-killed factory
workers, although mill owners tried for years to use
them. These little girls are depicted in a British textile mill.

At first, it seemed that child labor would be a partial cure for the labor shortage, but employers and floor bosses discovered that children actually made very poor factory workers.  They were distractible, too weak, way too easily injured or killed, and generally unreliable (see David Bakan's 1971 article, Adolescence in America: From Idea to Social Fact for details.  Unfortunately, the article does not seem to be available online, except for a price through JSTOR).

But the unemployed children of factory workers caused problems in the burgeoning northeastern cities, too.  They became a growing public nuisance.  Unsupervised by their factory-worker parents, who were busy working 10- and 12-hour shifts six or seven days a week, they had nothing to do.  There was no farm work to keep them busy, as there would have been in earlier times.  They ran in gangs of street urchins, sometimes begging for work, and other times shoplifting their lunches from food vendors, vandalizing or robbing people's property, and generally causing trouble.  A new term was coined: juvenile delinquent.

Urchins on the loose in northeastern cities caused many problems.  The boys in the little gang at left were a danger to themselves and a traffic hazard, running the streets unsupervised.  At right, children begging for work were such a common sight in New York that they inspired this cartoon in the humor magazine Judge, a spin-off of the more famous Punch.  Click on the image to make it large enough to read the joke at the bottom.

It is no coincidence that Massachusetts and New York were the first states to make compulsory school attendance laws.  Similarly, the innovative New York House of Refuge was established by early reformers in 1824, ushering in the start of the juvenile justice system.  Reformers wanted to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents through education, rather than throwing them into jail with older criminals.  The juvenile justice system developed parallel to the public schools.

Nineteenth-century schools were specifically designed to keep students off the streets, and to turn out cooperative, dependable factory workers.  They were all about control and conformity.  This beginning profoundly affected the nature of the schools that resulted.

First-graders at Lakewood Elementary in Houston,
TX learn to walk quietly in a line during the first
week of school.

Consider the industrial "form" of schools, which lingers still today: they are designed to run kids through their programs in uniform "lots" called "classes." Their norm is to teach everyone the same, mass-administered lessons.  They follow a strict schedule, and have stated production goals ("students will learn these things by the end of the semester").

The paradigm of "Control" is evident in many aspects of daily school life.  From this point of view, the most important thing is to control students at all times.  Often, this means they are made to do innately unnatural things.

They must walk quietly in line.  They must sit in rows.  They must raise their hands for permission to talk.  They may not eat until the teacher allows it.  They even have to ask for such basic essentials as permission to go to the bathroom.

They are told what to think about, where to go, and when they have to be there.  They must adhere to adult-imposed schedules that may be wildly out of sync with their own natural circadian rhythms--or face punishment if they don't.  Large portions of their lives are consumed by forced participation in activities they do not choose, and may not like or see any reason for doing.

The adults may enthuse about what a wonderful, nurturing place of learning the school is, but most of the kids are not fooled.  In my years of teaching, I have had many conversations with students in which I tried (sometimes unsuccessfully) to get them to believe I did not go into teaching just so I could gleefully and ruthlessly oppress children.

If school reform is to succeed at the high levels our policymakers profess that they want, it will mean that vast numbers of currently-unwilling students must embrace the entire school experience with an enthusiasm we have heretofore not seen, or even realistically imagined.  Students who are doggedly resisting our efforts to teach them do not learn as well as students who cooperate.

For most of our students to embrace education with enthusiasm, we will first have to convince them that our primary goal is not child-oppression--and we will have to show them we mean it with action, not just words.  All but the very youngest have heard all the words before.

We have no choice.  We have to change the paradigm.

PHOTO CREDITS: The 1836 school image is from Teach US History.org.  The Victorian child mill-workers are from Lisa Waller Rogers' blog.  The New York urchin band are from the Street Children website, and the cartoon from Judge came from Mike Lynch's blog about cartoons.  North Forest Independent School District proudly displayed the image of first graders in line on their Lakewood Elementary webpage.

The Public School Devastation Project

Recently, I had lunch with a fellow art teacher.  We have known each other for several years professionally, but this was the first time we'd gotten together socially.  The more we talked, the more things we found we had in common.

We both are women of a certain age, whose teaching careers have been cut short by forces not within our control.

We both had built popular high school programs focused on teaching students about publications and print media. We both had seen our students move from these programs to graduate and seek post-secondary education, preparatory to going into related careers.

When I was forced by a drop in enrollment to leave my program, it ended. Now she is being forced to leave her program, because the district is terminating it.

Talking together, we worried about our students who were only partway through our programs when they were ended. We worried about what will happen (has happened, in my case), when other students with similar aptitudes and interests come along, but no program exists to excite and guide them toward interesting careers.

This is our perspective on the fruits of “school reform” in the age of slashing budgets. Class sizes are going up. Good, passionately engaged teachers are being thrown away. Options are narrowing for students. Fewer and fewer different learning styles are being accommodated.

We are at a loss to see how this will improve education.

The Most Crucial Standard of All, And Why Schools Aren't Built For It

Whatever national standards emerge from the current debates, simple facts are actually only a small part of what people need to know. We are rapidly developing into a world where anybody can have access to answers via cell phone and Internet, wirelessly, with the stroke of a touch-screen.

Thus, no matter how easy it is to bubble in fact-answers on a computerized answer sheet, our essential education standards for the 21st century have to reflect a different reality. Skill-sets are far more vital to our future prosperity than fact-sets, and the most essential of all skill-sets are the cognitive skills.

We need above all to be teaching our students to THINK CRITICALLY.

However, if there is one “single-worst” failing I’ve observed in the schools with which I’ve been associated over the years, it is that thinking—sharp-eyed, well-informed, critical thinking—is not given remotely enough attention in schools.

The reasons for this are mostly practical, ironically enough. As noted above, it’s easier to test fact-regurgitation than it is to test thinking processes or evaluate the quality of a student’s logic. But that’s only a small part of the problem.

Teaching a person to think causes lots of trouble in a contemporary school setting. For one thing, it requires time. It’s a messy process, requiring an adult to engage one-on-one or in small groups for fairly extended periods of time, doing a lot of free-form exploration. A teacher with 27 teenagers in one classroom can’t do it consistently. A teacher with 20 Kindergarteners is just as hard-put.

I remember being taught in a professional development series how to use a variety of “classroom structures” to engage students in cooperative learning. We were given the advice that, while students need “think time” to respond to prompts, the wise teacher will hold those snippets of “think time” down to 30 seconds to two minutes at the most. Sure, I thought ruefully. Anybody can think deep thoughts in 30 seconds to two minutes. Ri-i-i-ight.

Teaching a person to think also requires creativity, on the part of both the student and the teacher. I believe many teachers are innately creative, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are very self-actualized in this area. Most teachers were themselves poorly taught to be creative, and often seem afraid to let their students' creativity blossom fully.

Creativity itself is a messy, unpredictable process, even when handled well. It rarely fits comfortably into the narrow confines of a 40-minute class period, and often results in more noise and physical activity than many educators are comfortable tolerating.

But the most difficult part of teaching students to think is that once you’ve taught them how, and told them it's a good thing to do--they’ll tend to do it! This causes all kinds of problems for schools.

When a critical thinker bumps up against something that doesn’t seem to make sense, s/he questions it. Unfortunately, there are so many rules and procedures land-mining the typical school day that really don’t make any sense from the student’s point of view, it takes almost no time for critical thinkers to become questioners of authority.

You can see what a horrifying prospect that is. No efficiently run human-warehousing institution happily tolerates questioners of authority. Moreover, controlling imaginative, independent thinkers (not to mention staying at least one jump ahead of them and keeping them engaged) is much harder than controlling and knowing more than a group of compliant conformists who all think alike, and don’t think very hard.

If you buy into the “teacher must always know more than the student” fallacy, or if you are an ardent devotee of straight rows of desks and pin-drop silence in the classroom, then you very clearly don’t want imaginative, critical thinkers occupying those desks! I am here to tell you that contemporary US taxpayers, politicians, and educators all cherish the ideal of quiet, orderly schools, headed by highly-qualified teachers who can pour standardized wisdom into the supposedly-empty heads of their students, who will therefore score above proficient levels on their standardized tests. It is literally an official mandate.

And that's why I say our current schools aren't set up to teach and support the most vital skill needed by students who hope to thrive in the 21st century.

Include Top Experts--Teachers--in Setting Standards

I want to be clear on the subject of national standards for education. I think that it absolutely makes the best kind of sense to establish broad answers to the question, “What do people need to know, in order to compete in the global market?” If we as a nation do not answer that question, clearly and consistently “from sea to shining sea,” we will continue to decline into has-been status in the world.

But who will provide those answers? And how will they be framed?

In the US, it’s politics and money that dictate our approach, so we know we’re in for a rough ride. Already the debates have begun. I would like to add my voice to the chorus of people saying, “This time, don’t leave out the teachers!”

In June, Education Week published an article about leaders from the major math and reading professional education associations publicly voicing concerns that they are being shut out of the process in favor of the national testing companies (“Subject-Matter Groups Want Voice in Standards,” published June 15, 2009).

Recently, developments seem to be headed in the direction of greater teacher inclusion. Education Week’s July 1 story, “Expert Panels Named in Common-Standards Push,” describes the addition of significant numbers of representatives from teachers’ subject-matter organizations to the panels developing drafts of proposed standards. This seems to me to be the only rational approach.

I know it’s currently fashionable to look down our noses at teachers, and question how “highly qualified” they are. But the fact is that I don’t know any teachers who got into this gig for the money, and have no interest in their students’ well-being. Much political hay is made about tenured teachers who have burned out, given up, and don’t care any more. That such teachers exist is unquestionable. But, like Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen,” they mostly are the fixation of fevered ideologues’ ranting.

In my experience, no one thinks longer and harder about what students need to know, and how to teach it to them, than teachers do. Most of us care deeply, and constantly try to do better and better at our work. Our opinions are expert opinions, as opposed to the all-too-common ignorant bumbling of laypersons who may care, but who often have no clue what the craft and art of teaching is really like.

Any push to create national standards surely must involve the prominent participation of the nation’s best experts on the subject--Teachers!

Local Control of Schools

I have recently been reading The Tyranny of Dead Ideas. Its author, Matt Miller, says the recent “standards” emphasis is a positive move away from a piecemeal “local control” approach to school curriculum, which he sees as pretty much the root of all our problems with schools today. He points out that the lack of a coherent, nationwide policy on how schools are run has resulted in the educational equivalent of “jumping on our horse and riding off in all directions.” Every little school board is its own power center, for good or for ill, and that, plus tying school funding to local property taxes, results in spotty successes and rampant inequity in our nation’s schools.

I agree with many of his points. I live in the Kansas City metro area, where we have an elephant-in-the-living-room-sized example of just how crazy and dysfunctional local control can get. But I’ve got to say that I think in our consumer-oriented society, where individualism is prized so highly and everyone wants to have everything “their way,” local control is much more likely to morph than to die. Any successful national standards initiative is going to have to recognize and accommodate this.

The history of local school control is too long in this country, and the suspicions of national or central control are too firmly grounded, for anything else. Aside from the long tradition, in some ways local control of schools makes good sense: who knows better than the parents and teachers of the individual students in question, how to teach them?

I also am an advocate of what are called “democratic” schools—schools in which teachers and students seek out the ways that work best for them, and inform policy changes and rules of operation for their school in a kind of “ground-up” approach. That’s why I think that if they are to truly revolutionize U.S. education, national standards must set agreed-upon goals—but NOT force-feed specific approaches.

Specific approaches, rammed down our throats, are about all we’ve had so far, thanks to the “education-industrial complex” of test-makers, large textbook companies and other special interests busily spending millions to lobby Washington. The trouble-plagued “Reading First” program is a good example. A textbook company with connections within the Beltway foisted a questionable program on millions of young readers, at huge cost to taxpayers and school districts. The Department of Education vigorously pushed it for several years; now it has been discredited.

For most of the country’s educators, the whole “No Child Left Behind” effort has been an expensive, heavy-handed and questionably effective social experiment that I think is guaranteed to set up greater resistance to future national initiatives.

School Choice—Who’d ‘a’ Thought?

I’ve always been highly dubious about so-called “school choice” initiatives, because they usually take the form of a voucher system to use public money for private schools.

I always figured these had the not-very-secret agenda of glomming onto tax dollars, to publicly fund either white flight from racially integrated schools, or evangelical flight from the teaching of evolution and sex ed. I don’t hold with any of that.

But recently I stumbled on a different understanding of “school choice,” and “market forces,” as well. Teaching professionals tend to cringe when laypeople talk about “market forces” in education, because in many ways it’s an inappropriate approach. Neither term has been on my “favorites” list, but events beyond my control may be changing that.

For all my belief in free public education as the bedrock of American democracy, I also have been increasingly critical of the way the “education-industrial complex” runs schools, these days. I want to find alternative ways that seem more rational, nurturing, and effective than the way it's usually done.

My “aha” moment came when I realized that in the time I’ve been an adult we’ve seen:

• the emergence of special education mandates
  
• the homeschooling movement
  
• the “small schools” movement
  
• multiculturalism
• magnet schools
  
• a huge influx of English language learners into our schools
  
• the rise of charter schools
  
• a boom in computer-based “distance learning” that I predict is only warming up.

Talk about “school choice!” When I was a kid the only alternatives were public or private—but whichever you chose, school was run just about the same, and if you didn't fit in, too bad.

But now, in very real ways, market forces are remaking schools with startling variety.

The thing is, I think we’re still a long way from what school will eventually look like. When all the experiments have shaken down and been evaluated over time, I think those who remember today will be amazed at what all changed.

For me, that’s a really exciting thought. I think we still have a lot of changing to do.