eduskeptic

In a recent Harpers magazine article, the thinking of several speakers and writers about education and national policy has been explored. In short, according to the article, there exists among some the stance that we educate simply for return on investment (ROI). The author, Mark Slouka, makes the point that by dehumanizing the educational process, we short change ourselves, and manage, in the process of doing so, to provide a vast disservice to the children we are educating.

Slouka makes a strong case that the business of education has become the business of business. If you have a child in school, regardless of the grade, you will by now have heard that what we have to do in the classroom is get these children ready to be productive once they leave school. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, part of that statement about productivity is that they will be productive in the workplace. If one listens well to the news regarding the state of education in America, one could easily believe that that is the point of education: get them ready to compete in the global, national, or regional marketplace.

Consider this statement by District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee: “This is exactly what life is about. You get a paycheck every two weeks. We’re preparing children for life.” Really? That’s what education is all about? There’s more. Brent Staples, a New York Times editorialist wrote that the the system is failing “to produce the fluent writers required by the new economy.” It just may be that good writing has more value than that. Slouka goes on to quote Thomas Friedman, who wrote about a speech given by Bill Gates, in which Gates says that our high schools are obsolete, that even when doing what they are designed to do, they “cannot teach our kids what they need to know today”. Friedman goes on to further quote Gates, “If we don’t fix American education, I won’t be able to hire your kids.” Slouka has an entire article full of this kind of corporate view of what American education is doing, or not doing.

What are these people thinking? This writer teaches with the idea that his Kindergartners will leave his classroom at the end of the year with a better understanding of the world around them. This writer, a Kindergarten teacher for the last 23 of 34 years teaching, isn’t, by any stretch of the corporate imagination, preparing his students to be pay-check-every-two-weeks robots. With such an outlook on education, why is Michelle Rhee still employed by the District of Columbia School District? Has Bill Gates lost his billions of marbles? Thomas Friedman, whose writing I admire, seems to have adopted the company line as well. Evidently, so has President Obama. Arne Duncan is not an educator, never has been, and probably has no plans to become one. He played a bit of professional basketball in Australia, and is a business man. These are probably the skills he needs to be the Secretary of Education. Would a deep background in education, in the classroom, make a difference in his outlook? It couldn’t hurt.

The purpose of education must be much more broad than this twisted corporate view. If our children are to be leaders and innovators, now and in the completely unknown future, they have to be able to work together, understand history (let’s see–Viet Nam/Afgahnistan/Russia, hmmm), create things that don’t yet exist, engage in civil discourse, and be ready and able to stand up for their reasoned, researched positions. Democracy isn’t an easy road to be on. One can only hope that a well rounded education, strenuously applied, will keep it alive. Narrowing the focus to a paycheck every two weeks ignores the care that a functioning democracy demands. What are these people thinking about?

There exists in eduspeak the theory that, no matter what the mix is in ones classroom, each child/pre teen/teen can be taught as if they are alone in the classroom. That is, one teacher can simply “differentiate” instruction so that, in a class of 20 or so students, each student is receiving instruction for exactly where they are on the learning curve. This writer, over the last 35 years of teaching, has not been able to do any such thing.

The people who make these all inclusive statements about how education can be delivered in the classroom seem to lack one important ingredient: they are not classroom teachers of young children, or, if they were, it was an awfully long time ago. Most University and Community College instructors, in the direct experience of this writer, haven’t the requisite experience in the classroom to know how far off base this all in one classroom actually is. There are, as always, some exceptions to this. John Shefelbine is an exception.

I am pretty sure that the time it takes to teach a concept (a letter sound, digraph, blend etc) to a bright, well fed, enthusiastic child is quite different from the time it takes to teach the same concept to a child who has entered my classroom damaged by life, or who is significantly younger than his peers.

The disruptions caused by children in any classroom, who are unable, for a variety of reasons, to stay on task, take up quite a bit of teaching time, turning it into non-teaching time. Because of the NCLB requirements, children who are under performing will get the bulk of a teachers time. Children who are disruptive to the teaching time in the classroom severely interfere with not only the time that under performing students need and deserve, they interfere with the possibilities for the children who are more than capable of meeting and exceeding whatever the state/federal requirements are.

It is time to restructure, as Arne Duncan likes to say, the way the classroom is run. It is time to allow the very capable students to be in classes that will allow them to accelerate, while the children who are working very hard at basic understanding get the teaching time they need as well. Somewhere in all of the deep thinking, by whoever “they” are who do the deep thinking, but not the classroom teaching, there should be a program developed for the disruptive, at least for a majority of the teaching day, in a classroom of their own. Tracking, you say? Absolutely. Let’s get back to it. Let’s hire enough teachers to separate the learning levels, for a majority of the teaching day, into their own rooms, so that they may, finally, learn at the pace they are capable of. It is patently unfair to inflict disruptive classroom behavior on students who are paying attention, in the name of “mainstreaming” or “full immersion”. While that sort of theory may feel very good to the adults who put it forth, and who aren’t classroom teachers, it simply doesn’t work well in the real world of the everyday classroom.