March 27, 2007--Youth Week: Children Left Behind
Fully 15 million children are enrolled in low-performing public schools. About a third of all of America’s students. The NY Times reported yesterday that next year fully 10,000 “struggling” schools are likely to be declared “failing” under the provisions of No Child Left Behind.
Even sadder than these statistics is that this is old news. Decades after the 1983 A Nation At Risk report declared that our schools represented a “rising tide of mediocrity,” they are still mired in crisis. Ours are the most dysfunctional schools in the West; actually by every objective measure, they are worse than half the schools in the so-called developing world. And this after wave after wave of reform.
In the 1960s we had the movement to turn schools over to community control, and that didn’t work. Then we said that smaller schools designed and run by teachers, administrators, and parents would get the job done; but we now know that these charter schools also do not work. Along came the privatizers—the Edison Project most prominently—who claimed that they could transform the schools and make a profit to boot; but that also has not proven to be effective. Then there were the voucher advocates—since the public schools aren’t working give low-income parents the money they need to pay for private schools; yet this too hasn’t proven to work. More recently we were told that the problem with public schools is that their standards are too low for both students and educators; and thus to solve the problem more academic rigor was demanded of children and teachers were forced to get more specialized education in order to be certified to teach. Thus far this as well has been a failure.
This is just a short list of the “innovative reforms” that have come our way—we’ve also seen the same-sex school movement, academies where military-style discipline is imposed, mandatory dress codes, schools based on the theory of “multiple intelligences,” and a growing list of places where state education departments have taken over failing school districts—most recently in St Louis—in the erroneous belief that state control would work better than local control.
None of these approaches have proven to be effective; and, as a result, 15 million kids are still languishing while the rest of the world seems to have figured out how to do a better job with their youth.
In the same front-page NY Times article which reported about the 10,000 struggling schools, the latest panacea is rolled out—longer school days and longer school years. In desperation, more and more educators are seeing this to be just what we need to do to make our schools work. If I were a betting person, I would mortgage the house and bet that this too will fail. The problems in our schools are no more about time-on-task than they were about how kids dress or if “the community” controls the schools. (Article linked below.)
The problem is about at least three things, all of which, fortunately, are addressable.
First, good news, for the past 40 years at least there have been many more employment opportunities for women so that talented, career-minded women have had the option to become, say, lawyers rather than teachers. There was thus a flow of competence and ambition to other fields of work. It may not be politically correct to point this out, but it is true nonetheless.
Then there was the movement to “professionalize” teaching. In the past, teaching had been viewed as a craft; and, as in other crafts, one learned to teach by acquiring skills of effective practice from “masters” in practical ways. People are trained in crafts; but when teacher training (that’s what it had been called) was transformed by universities into a profession teachers were required to be educated in more and more theoretical ways. Yes, student teaching such as it is still exists, but most courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels (and now teachers must earn masters degrees to be licensed) are about theories of learning and developmental psychology. If there were evidence that this professionalized approach was producing more effective teachers this would be welcome news, but no such evidence exists.
And then there has been the media revolution—from TV to the Internet. This is where kids have been spending most of their time for at least 50 years; and it has had a profound effect on their consciousness, perhaps even on their neurobiology. Wiring up classrooms and having computer labs in schools is not a sufficient way to engage young people who have had and are leading media-saturated lives. In fact, this very reality will work against any effort to extend school days—rather, we should be looking for ways to engage children in learning rather than compelling them to spend more time in class sitting still and shutting up.
The truly good news is that there are structures and methods to engage most children and to help them acquire necessary skills and to become active learners. Some of these approaches have already proven to work at scale and at no more per-pupil cost than at present (the $17,000 per child-per year that Newark spends should be more than enough to get the job done). So money is not the problem. It’s the reluctance on the part of educators to “replicate” other people’s proven approaches. One outcome of educating teachers as professionals is that with all that theoretical preparation they then want to be creative and devise their own methods and materials.
There is, though, no evidence that that works. And thus there are still those 15 million.
Even sadder than these statistics is that this is old news. Decades after the 1983 A Nation At Risk report declared that our schools represented a “rising tide of mediocrity,” they are still mired in crisis. Ours are the most dysfunctional schools in the West; actually by every objective measure, they are worse than half the schools in the so-called developing world. And this after wave after wave of reform.
In the 1960s we had the movement to turn schools over to community control, and that didn’t work. Then we said that smaller schools designed and run by teachers, administrators, and parents would get the job done; but we now know that these charter schools also do not work. Along came the privatizers—the Edison Project most prominently—who claimed that they could transform the schools and make a profit to boot; but that also has not proven to be effective. Then there were the voucher advocates—since the public schools aren’t working give low-income parents the money they need to pay for private schools; yet this too hasn’t proven to work. More recently we were told that the problem with public schools is that their standards are too low for both students and educators; and thus to solve the problem more academic rigor was demanded of children and teachers were forced to get more specialized education in order to be certified to teach. Thus far this as well has been a failure.
This is just a short list of the “innovative reforms” that have come our way—we’ve also seen the same-sex school movement, academies where military-style discipline is imposed, mandatory dress codes, schools based on the theory of “multiple intelligences,” and a growing list of places where state education departments have taken over failing school districts—most recently in St Louis—in the erroneous belief that state control would work better than local control.
None of these approaches have proven to be effective; and, as a result, 15 million kids are still languishing while the rest of the world seems to have figured out how to do a better job with their youth.
In the same front-page NY Times article which reported about the 10,000 struggling schools, the latest panacea is rolled out—longer school days and longer school years. In desperation, more and more educators are seeing this to be just what we need to do to make our schools work. If I were a betting person, I would mortgage the house and bet that this too will fail. The problems in our schools are no more about time-on-task than they were about how kids dress or if “the community” controls the schools. (Article linked below.)
The problem is about at least three things, all of which, fortunately, are addressable.
First, good news, for the past 40 years at least there have been many more employment opportunities for women so that talented, career-minded women have had the option to become, say, lawyers rather than teachers. There was thus a flow of competence and ambition to other fields of work. It may not be politically correct to point this out, but it is true nonetheless.
Then there was the movement to “professionalize” teaching. In the past, teaching had been viewed as a craft; and, as in other crafts, one learned to teach by acquiring skills of effective practice from “masters” in practical ways. People are trained in crafts; but when teacher training (that’s what it had been called) was transformed by universities into a profession teachers were required to be educated in more and more theoretical ways. Yes, student teaching such as it is still exists, but most courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels (and now teachers must earn masters degrees to be licensed) are about theories of learning and developmental psychology. If there were evidence that this professionalized approach was producing more effective teachers this would be welcome news, but no such evidence exists.
And then there has been the media revolution—from TV to the Internet. This is where kids have been spending most of their time for at least 50 years; and it has had a profound effect on their consciousness, perhaps even on their neurobiology. Wiring up classrooms and having computer labs in schools is not a sufficient way to engage young people who have had and are leading media-saturated lives. In fact, this very reality will work against any effort to extend school days—rather, we should be looking for ways to engage children in learning rather than compelling them to spend more time in class sitting still and shutting up.
The truly good news is that there are structures and methods to engage most children and to help them acquire necessary skills and to become active learners. Some of these approaches have already proven to work at scale and at no more per-pupil cost than at present (the $17,000 per child-per year that Newark spends should be more than enough to get the job done). So money is not the problem. It’s the reluctance on the part of educators to “replicate” other people’s proven approaches. One outcome of educating teachers as professionals is that with all that theoretical preparation they then want to be creative and devise their own methods and materials.
There is, though, no evidence that that works. And thus there are still those 15 million.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:55 AM
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