Bloggers have been all over the Michelle Rhee story, lately.
Know-nothing writers like Amanda Ripley kill perfectly good trees to fill pages with crap like this:
“The biggest problem with U.S. public schools is ineffective teaching, according to decades of research.”
Did you get that? Decades of research? Now instead of weighing school research by the pound, Time measures it by age. Of course there is no such decades of study tagging teachers as the “biggest problem” in schools. Ripley made that up. But in this era of researched-based policy making, you can sell anything by adding the words, “research shows.”
It’s worth pointing out that Amanda Ripley admits on her blog that she really is a know-nothing writer: “I knew our schools were troubled,” she says, “but I hadn’t realized the compounded effects of all that mediocrity.”
The same should be said for uncritical reporters who wander into political hotbeds they don’t understand and merely repeat what they’re told. Perpetuating myths and exploiting fear is how the Bush administration sold the war in Iraq. Instead of WMD, educational mediocrity due to ineffective teaching needs to be rooted out. Now. So they say.
Jim Horn also pushes back:
If Ripley were to look beyond the talking points prepared for her by pay-based-on-test-scores advocate and Hoover Fellow, Eric Hanushek, she would see that it is not teacher rights that are eating away DC Schools nearly so much as it is a long-standing malignant neglect and a continuing history of unaddressed poverty. If teacher job security and unions were the culprit, it seems that the suburban schools would be suffering the same as the urban schools, yes Amanda?
The graph he shares from a research report by Boe and Shin published in Kappan in 2005 reveals that US schools are not doing as poorly for white students as the naysayers want people to think. Boe and Shin observe that “…achievement scores of white students in the U.S. were consistently higher than those of students in the Western G5 nations, even though these nations were predominantly white.”
They conclude that the low scores of minority students reduce the comparative standing of US schools in international surveys, and that, “…public schools in the U.S. face the problem of providing a type and quality of education that will compensate for the background disadvantages of minority students and make up for deficiencies in their schooling.” Well, yeah. The achievement gap is what everyone is worked up about. I also understand that it’s mostly just a bat to beat us with, and that most of the criticism is coming from people who don’t give a damn about the well-being of poor kids.
But what would this compensatory education look like? And how might it benefit everyone? For starters, we should read Marion Brady’s “Primer for Education Reformers” [pdf link] to learn about the history of the standards and accountability movement and its articles of faith, which include
- What the next generation most needs to know is what this generation happens to know.
- If schools will just “raise the bar,” students will clear it.
- Students turned into failures by their unwillingness or inability to meet standards won’t be a problem.
- The subjects and courses for which standards are written give students a comprehensive, balanced view of what’s worth knowing.
- Simply absorbing information is more important than learning how to create and manipulate it.
The assumptions built into curriculum structures are at least as important as any other single factor weighing on relevance and excellence in school. Working harder and raising expectations might benefit the people who already can, and who are personally invested in working the system. But those other poor people who are already in over their heads, and who see the whole enterprise as a forced march, what about them?
There’s a big difference between making someone work harder, and making someone want to work harder. When a parent tells me that this is the best year their kid has ever had in school, or when a young teacher approaches me at a professional meeting to tell me that I was her second grade teacher and credits me with her desire to become a teacher herself, I don’t believe it was because of my hard work. Rather, I believe it may have something to do with the quality of my relationships with my students, and my willingness to interpret the curriculum in such a way that our time together is meaningful, interesting, and maybe even fun. Sometimes.
Yesterday, Marion Brady, a frequent contributor to the Eddra listserve, posted a series of questions and answers about how knowledge is organized, and the role played by academic disciplines as an organizing principle, suggesting that systems theory might offer a more “holistic, systemically integrated perspective on reality.” He linked to a draft for a course of study he co-authored called Investigating Systems, written for adolescents as a way of teaching them how to organize and integrate subject area knowledge. This intrigued me. I see conventional curriculum as a major obstacle to learning, whether it be the “21st century” variety, or any other. I downloaded and looked through it, and it seems doable, and maybe worthwhile.
A Kappan article on Thinking Big might offer some insight on where he’s coming from with this. One thing for sure, we could all use some fresh ideas – big, or not.
13 Comments
@Doug
Great post. There seems to be many who quote the tag line “research says….” without ever looking at the actual research. The joys of myths. I look forward to reading the links from your post. You do great work!
Hi Charlie,
One of the things that drives me crazy when people site “the research” is the assumption that it all points in the same direction. What fun is that?
I’m not sure, but it is possible the the research is being cited as general research on learning and teaching. If that is the case, the results could be called on as a whole to say that current teaching is ineffective for not using the effective methods research has shown. From what I’ve been reading, that sounds fairly accurate, and could have research from the last few decades to back it up.
Who made the poor, poor? Who put who in whose families living in what part of what nation?
My point is because the poor learn different lessons that the less poor or even the rich, who are you to assume you are their savior and have a right to spoil what is their private class room? Did the poor ask for your help? Did they come running to you? Or are they too ignorant to ask so you need to step up for them? Are you even helping the poor at all or just a voice because it’s convenient being just a voice? Are you just talking about it to make noise? Tell me what poor person you helped yesterday?
When there are stories all over the place of poor imigrants who seem to negotiate the system and make a life for themselves and learn at the same time, the private, peculiar and particular lessons that came with their life, who are you so say you know better for that person? If the can find a way through the maze, can’t the poor do the same? Is there something about the poor that makes them blind to the same opportunity that an immigrant who can’t even speak the language, who does’t have a single relative, who “just” cherishes an opportunity and the chance to pursue it, finds and makes something of?
You ever heard of Chrysalis? Can you respect it? Can you say it is possible you might not know what is best for anyone on the planet besides yourself, if that?
Just some questions…. that’s all.
You never know, do you?
I’ve been sending out the Marion Brady link to all my educator friends – striking a chord with us all. Thanks again for writing!
Thanks, Newman. If you do anything with it, I’d be curious to hear how it goes.
Nice post. I love the distinction between ‘work harder’ and ‘want to work harder.’ It’s the difference between thinking of students as a button to push and a human being who might need a little more than a hot stick in the stomach to get better grades. Or something like that…
Excellent post, Doug. I’m slowly making my way through James Loewen’s _Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your US History Textbook Got Wrong_, and just this morning finished a chapter called “Land of Opportunity” that intersects with your post on several levels (and that I’d recommend “Questioning” above read).
I was about to write a monster comment here trying to sketch those intersections, but I think I’ll take a page from Downes and post it on my space, and link back here.
I downloaded the _Investigating Systems_ packet and skimmed it, then went to Brady’s webpage. Intriguing stuff. I’ve often thought about how life didn’t start to make any sort of “systematic” sense to me at all until I was well into my 30s – and that my quest to figure it all out started _after_ high school, when I was in my 20s – and have spent most of my teaching career trying to get students in my classes to make connections from my classes to all their other classes. To unslice the pie.
And it’s that slicing that fails, to get back to your post, to seem to make most students _want_ to work harder.
Unslicing the pie is a good way to think of it. I tell students that pizza was invented to help us teach fractions. But unless we spend some time putting the pieces together, that’s all we teach – bits and pieces.
@Clay Burell
Clay I finished “America’s Hidden History” over the Thanksgiving holiday. Sounds like a similar strand I think you’d like it.
@Questioning
The parents of both my poor immigrant students, and non-immigrant-been in the country at least as long as my ancestors-parents at consensus level rates indicate that they want their children to go to college. They have no idea how to support their kids getting there, they may unintentionally undermine efforts for their children to get there, but they have the same dreams for their kids to go to college (and not just on sports scholarships). Also, can I point out not all immigrant groups are the same? I have a large population of S.E. Asian refugees at my school from Cambodia/Laos and they have college attendance rates in the 1-3% range (although that seems to be changing).
Regarding developing a more integrated curriculum, there has been quite a lot of discussion in the UK about this.
The RSA recently released a report based on a survey of schools and a review of inspections of schools who are using our Opening Minds framework to plan a more integrated curriculum – http://www.thersa.org/projects/education/education-v.2/education-news/ofsted-rates-opening-minds
And governement sponsored review recently advocated a themed approach in primary schools, provoking quite a bit of comment – http://rsaeducation.wordpress.com/2008/12/08/the-rose-review-beware-flying-mud/
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