Borderland

Since many people, including Linda Darling Hammond who offers (exceptionally) a comparative international perspective on education reform, are giving testimony in Washington this week at the ESEA reauthorization hearing…

“We’ve learned a lot, and we shouldn’t ignore that evidence,” said Miller, who is leading the overhaul of the law in the House, which starts this week. “What we’re trying to do in this reauthorization bill is to look for those changes to make this a smarter, fairer, better law.”

…I’ll give my testimony, here:

Congressman Miller, “Smarter, fairer, better” is not the same as smart, fair, or good, which is too much to expect from federalized management of our decentralized system which employs over 3 million teachers, who every day must address the consequences of decisions that are neither smart nor fair.

What’s missing from the media cheerleading for education reform is the mention of any responsibility that the business community may have for supporting fiscal policies that benefit poor people. We hear that “Corporate leaders have complained for years about job applicants who don’t read, write or think well enough,” and that “American companies are increasingly looking abroad…for workers with the training and skills to compete in a globalized economy.” But when we hear this, we should note that this is not an appeal to economic equity and social justice for minorities, but an economic defense of the status quo. And how is it that schools alone should be expected to help the poor?

The core assumptions that link testing to teaching are that education is an individual psychological experience that can be reduced to observable inputs and quantifiable outputs. It can be, but learning is also an emergent property of human consciousness which is not reducible to its constituent parts, just as mind is an emergent property of our neurological functioning, and creativity is an exercise of the imagination.

Learning involves growth which isn’t always linear or obvious. And test scores don’t tell us who we are, what we’re worth, or what we can expect to be. The very fact that there is a debate about this demonstrates that learning to read, write, and do math does not ensure that we can also think clearly enough to recognize a simple truth. This entire proceeding is ridiculously utopian, which makes it all the more lamentable.

Sound old rulers, it is said,
Left people to themselves, instead
Of wanting to teach everything
And start the people arguing.
With mere instruction in command,
So that people understand
Less than they know, woe is the land;
But happy the land that is ordered so
That they understand more than they know.
Lao Tzu

We need to clean up the mess this law has made, and we need to address the larger social problems that nobody wants to talk about.