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Education Reform is a Myth
Education reform in America is a myth.
I'm probably among the last people to realize that when people say "education reform," what they really mean is an increased emphasis on standardized test scores to measure education success.
When you think about it, nothing about public education is "reformed."
It remains the same as a hundred years ago: staffing patterns, the school year, curriculum, school buildings and assumptions about what children should know by what age.
Kids still go to school Monday through Friday – nine months a year with summers off.
They still go to school for 13 years. Twenty to 35 students per class gaze up at a teacher for a year and then move to the next grade.
Schools use PTA parents to raise money, plan fairs and volunteer in the classroom. When it comes to substantive matters of personnel and curriculum, principals guard their traditional prerogatives against encroaching parents or community members.
Superintendents were principals and teachers before moving into administration. Many of them have doctorates in education. Professors steeped in public education orthodoxy taught them the ways of 1900.
Educators and parents romanticize their school years. They want the same for their children that they got a generation ago.
Roll all of this into a big ball and you have massive resistance to change. Every fundamental change endangers a fond memory or threatens a bureaucrat's turf.
I learned all of this from some very smart people who are struggling to free public education from its hidebound ways.
Dr. Paul Houston, a former school superintendent, says public education was all about universal access for 170 years – access for blacks and other minorities; access for mentally and physically disabled students; access for homeless kids.
Now, he says, the goal is universal proficiency. All children, even the disadvantaged and disenfranchised, must become productive at school. He seriously doubts that testing and school choice programs are the answers.
"Let's test the kids into being smarter," he says. "If we do the job, OK. But if we don't, we'll let them move to another school."
So, how do we create great schools that students will want to attend?
Well, say Dr. Houston and others, you have to take risks.
You make school a year-round affair. You go to a four-day class week. Students go to clubs and extracurricular activities on Fridays. Teachers get training on Fridays.
Let's say you have three third-grade teachers – all competent employees who earn an average of $40,000 a year. Why not hire a great teacher for $80,000 a year and let her supervise and direct three $25,000-a-year assistants who work with students directly in the classroom?
"Every kid would be touched by a great teacher through this model," says Dr. Houston, executive director of a nationwide association of school superintendents.
Dr. Joe Neely is engaged in really subversive activities at the Dallas public schools. In conjunction with the University of Texas at Dallas, he's working on master's and doctoral programs to produce nontraditional school superintendents.
And the place to train them, he says, is not in a college's department of education.
"The idea is to get them started thinking about alternatives," Dr. Neely says.
Here's an example: Lop off the senior year of high school and use those resources to fully fund pre-kindergarten programs in public schools. This gives kids a better education foundation in early childhood. The senior year is increasingly irrelevant to many students. Community colleges could give them a few classes they need to prepare for college or a job.
"You are bucking so much of the social order to try to do things like this," he says.
Dr. Paul Heckman, director of the Center for Education Renewal in Seattle, is trying to find ways to connect schools more closely with their surrounding communities. He urges principals to reject measuring educational achievement through testing. Instead, he wants to find out what students know and let them investigate their surroundings, embrace where they live.
Dr. Heckman, a research professor at the University of Washington, once worked at a school surrounded by vacant lots and substandard housing. Students studied the overgrown vegetation, chronicled the decaying structures and looked into the local politics of neighborhood improvement.
"Parents saw their kids doing a different kind of work, and they got interested," he said. "Then the community got interested and invited the politicos to come see. The knowledge and skills they acquired was much more consequential to their lives than the old knowledge and skills. It's a matter of creating learning networks."
None of these men – Drs. Houston, Neely or Heckman – believe radical change will occur overnight. They are planting seeds. In rejecting standards-based reform built on testing, they've adopted the credo "Free the mind. Don't box it in."
— Scott Parks
Out-of-the-box ideas on education
Dallas Morning News
2003-08-18
http://www.dallasnews.com/localnews/education/stories/081803dnmetedcol.4785c.html
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
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