Let’s get real with education
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 CEOs. 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 Chris Ragsdale and Marietta Superintendent Grant 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.