Let’s Get Real with
Education
Published in Marietta (GA) Daily Journal, 2/16/20
When I heard the learned astronomer / When
the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me / When I was shown
the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them / When I, sitting, heard
the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room / How
soon I became tired and sick / Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by
myself in the mystical moist night air / And looked up in perfect silence at
the stars.
In other words, poet Walt Whitman just
couldn’t take it anymore. Acknowledging
the value of astronomy, he still believed that looking up “in perfect silence
at the stars” was more enlightening and inspiring than lectures on arcane
academic knowledge.
We
appreciate teachers, scholars, and lecturers, but after a while we need to know
the point of it all. Learners need
lessons and educational practices that keep them hinged to the real world, not
wallowing forever in the abstract or the theoretical. Visit the abstract and learn from it, but
then get back to the valley of everyday life away from intellectual clouds.
The
field of education too often pitches its tent in the land of the abstract
instead of the land of the living.
Instead of majoring on the tried and true (reading, writing, and
arithmetic, anyone?), it more often than not chases the now and the new: the
current educational fad, the ideas proposed by professors of education who
haven’t taught children or teens for decades, or the “inclusion” topic of the
month such as transgenderism. Ignoring
Cicero’s phrase, “the tyranny of the present,” modern education is quick to
jump on a new trend and hold tightly.
The best example of this is the testing bandwagon onto which professors,
editorial boards, and Department of Education bureaucrats latched themselves in
2002, though classroom teachers did not.
The
No Child Left Behind law – or NCLB – made standardized testing the main measure
of school success. Testing, of course,
seems logical. Teachers teach, then they
test to see what was learned. But
testing per se wasn’t the problem. It
was the magnitude of it all. The testing
bandwagon was long. Perched upon it and waving jubilantly were elected
officials and corporate CEO’s. The
testing movement had begun. Its
watchword was accountability. Its
strategy was “Test those boogers.” Education
finally had found its fix. A business
model it would be.
Classroom
teachers knew better. But they kept on
teaching, except they now had to deal with the time factor as well as the
effect of all the testing. Standardized
testing took vast amounts of time from teaching, and the unfortunate effect was
the impulse and often the necessity to teach toward the test, a killer of broad
learning if there ever was one.
NCLB
had been preceded by the Clinton administration’s “Goals 2000” which provided
the states with money to write their own academic standards, but President George
W. Bush’s so-called Texas plan went further.
To stress accountability, schools would have to test more. Bush’s strategy was to measure and then
punish or reward. Data became king and
the states and individual school systems scurried to produce higher test
scores. Diane Ravitch, the respected
education historian who first favored NCLB, stepped away from it saying that it
was “all sticks and no carrots.”
Thankfully,
the testing craze has abated somewhat.
Locally, sensible voices like those of Cobb Superintendent Ragsdale and
Marietta Superintendent Rivera are making a difference. For the most part No Child Left Behind was
left behind when Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2017, a bill
that retained most of the accountability requirements but meted out less
punishment. The Trump administration has lifted even more accountability
regulations.
Our
18-year emphasis on testing points to two truths. One is that over-regulation and over-testing
kills the spirit, the joy, and the purpose of teaching and learning. Teachers deal with human beings, not products
or commodities. NCLB fostered the idea
that whatever can’t be measured doesn’t count.
What a horrid approach to such a human activity as teaching.
Secondly,
all of the history recounted above is proof that the 10th amendment
of the U.S. Constitution is being violated.
That amendment declares education to be a function of the states, yet
for just over half a century the federal government has stomped its way into an
activity that was intended for the states.
Ask
a veteran teacher why he or she teaches.
Their answer will put to scorn most of the educational fixes of the last
half century.
Roger Hines
2/12/20
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