School days make up a large chunk of our life’s calendar. Education is one of those rare commodities that everyone shares in their experience, yet every time education pops up in public discourse, the vocabulary of the discussion is nothing short of bizarre. The commentary (and I’m speaking not of public figures here but rather the person-on-the-street banter) on our school system seems to boil down to two themes: a genuine admiration of teachers and a visceral disgust with how schools are treated and managed.
Every time someone hears that I teach for a living, I’m still flummoxed by the gushing response. There seems to be a sense of awe – as if I have a talent most people consider far beyond their own abilities. It’s kinda like being a movie star, really, and I do get a very similar reaction when people learn that I’ve acted onstage. Shoot, if that’s why teachers are placed on a pedestal, where can I score an Ari Gold who will negotiate my handpicked course schedule and seven-figure salary? Yeah, I know the teachers have collective bargaining agreements that pre-determine salaries; so do actors and athletes. Seems like all of society’s golden jobs have a strong union, but how come instructors don’t get to also have individual representation? If the politicos want to talk about “merit pay”, why don’t we go this route? Let the teachers hook up with the same predatory agents that make damn sure their clients are paid to the maximum extent of their merit. Maybe the Yankees could open a charter school….
See how easy it is for our education conversation to veer into absurdity? The complaints lodged against the bureaucracy that governs teaching and learning bemoan low international standings, high dropout rates, a lack of equity, an excess of tests, dwindling resources, and the expansion of homework along with its corollary – the expansion of the school child’s backpack. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform was published in April of 1983, and it seems in every year since (or at least every election year), both sitting and aspiring public officials trot out a new crush of transformative ideas. With so much attention paid to the issue so consistently, you would think our prospects would have greatly improved, yet the whole discussion of education reform seems stuck in the mud. The wheels turn feverishly, the engine roars, but the school bus stays entrenched.
Our schools are still at risk nearly thirty years later; reform of education is still imperative. However, the dialogue could be enriched tremendously if all parties took a hard look at the lexicon that shapes it. It used to be schooling was said to focus on the three R’s: “Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic”. This was a simple summary of education based on what students were expected to learn. A Nation at Risk added a few S’s – social science, computer science, plus physical and life science – along with a strong push for foreign languages. The report also encouraged secondary schools to maintain programs that focused on vocational training and the arts. In sum, many early ideas of reform concentrated on what students learn in schools – boosting the curricula as the key to enhancing student learning.
President Reagan, leery of mandating curriculum at the federal level, responded to Risk by championing two financial measures – tax credits for tuition and school vouchers. The latter concept is the brainchild of Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, who conceived of a system where a student’s place of enrollment wasn’t limited by his/her home address. The voucher, as Friedman originally proposed, would cover the full cost of educating a child in a government school (he disliked the term “public school”) or a set dollar amount that could be applied towards tuition at a parochial or other non-government school. By allowing parents the freedom to enroll in several different schools, the theoretical invisible hand of capitalism would bring out the best educational practices. Schools would have to compete for clients, just like any other service industry, and that would compel them to upgrade and innovate their practices.
The critics who rail against voucher programs are many, and their complaints often have merit. In fairness to Friedman, however, he intended every family in America to get these vouchers. He wanted 100% participation in the parent choice movement, regardless of any social circumstances. Nine states currently run voucher programs, over 1,700 students will finish their studies with Opportunity Scholarships from the District of Columbia (which has ceased accepting new students), and both Illinois and Tennessee are weighing similar proposals. Incredibly, none of these programs – current, closed, or considered – issues vouchers unconditionally. Every single state, thus far, has limited the families who can receive these scholarships based on income level and/or the performance of their local public school. Friedman calls these “charity vouchers”, and even he admits that they are not effective.
Moreover, the emergence of voucher measures, even if they bastardized the principles Friedman first laid out in 1955, profoundly shifted the jargon of educational reform in the 1980’s. Families in several states could now access government funds if their schools didn’t perform well (and, typically, if the family itself struggled financially). How do you measure the performance of a school, though? Do you take the GPA of the student body? Is graduation rate a good indicator? Could we look at its curricula and determine its “toughness”? Boy, I wish there was a test we could use to compare schools directly, but “reading, writing, and arithmetic” can all be measured a hundred different ways.
And here is where you get the explosion in content standards. The goal was not to expand the curriculum, per se, but to revise it so that every student’s performance in every subject in every school could be assessed by a mass test. Pundits, principals, and more than a few parents wanted to measure learning so that schools could be compared. This notion spread far beyond the handful of voucher states and into our national discourse, especially once “No Child Left Behind” became law. The profession of teaching may still inspire awe, but the institutions of learning have very rapidly fallen under a skeptical glare. We love our teachers, but we’re very suspicious of our schools.
Teachers aren’t feeling the love, though, when they hear educational reform discussed in this manner. For starters, they know first-hand what a rigorous process academic evaluation is, so the notion that any single mass-produced test can accurately determine one letter grade for an entire student body befits a farce. Secondly, teachers aren’t stupid. If a school is criticized for poor performance, actual or perceived, that indicts the practice of the faculty. President Obama’s support of merit pay, even as he emphasizes that test scores should not be the prime determinant, further underscores a growing presumption in America’s education discussion: teachers cannot be trusted. We cannot trust the grades they assign to students, so we must pull students out of class to administer an entirely different test. We cannot assume that every teacher in every school is trying their best to bring every student to a new plane of wisdom; only the test can prove whether or not that effort is successful. We cannot trust teachers to be intrinsically motivated to educate well; only a raise will push them.
The instructor in my administration class introduced us to the new set of “three R’s” for the 21st century: “Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships”. And so, the conversation has morphed completely from curricula and content -- what the student learns -- into pedagogy and practice -- how the teacher teaches. The litany of content standards seems to have already faded into the background like the dots in a Georges Seurat painting, and every faculty is charged every August with creating a new pointillist masterpiece. We gather in front of a large blank canvas, each armed with a finely sharpened brush and a unique palette of half a dozen colors. Some artisans are perched atop ladders and scaffolding, others kneel by the lower edge, and all are tasked with creating a portrait of the successful student who shall graduate from their school.
Officials from the state, the county, the nation, and the neighborhood all hover nearby, studying every move the teachers make. The grip on the brush, the angle at which the bristles strike the plane, the choice of color and the size of each spot are all meticulously measured. Reams of data shall stream from the district printers when the process completes, but before it begins, a wide-eyed, young instructional aide from the Special Education department raises her hand and turns toward her gallery of assessors:
“What does our learned student look like?”
No comments:
Post a Comment