More change and old trends: Sifting through the silly and the bad ideas

One of the charges flung at education reform skeptics like me is that we’re afraid of change. The assumption, of course, is that change is necessarily good. The incoming administration will give us all a chance to test that thesis.

Change itself is neutral. I’m not afraid of it. I’m simply against education reform’s preferred varieties of change — bad change and silly change.

I’m also not a fan of arrogant people who glibly impose their poor judgment and lack of experience on other people, who then suffer as a result.

Our President-elect is busy today tweeting about expanding our nuclear arsenal and his willingness to engage in an arms race. Sooner or later, though, he’ll find time to devote 140 characters to the future of public education.

In the meantime, here’s a survey of what reformers have managed to achieve without a Twitter account.

A few years back the Washington Post gleefully declared that “elementary school is not what it used to be.” For starters, students learning subtraction no longer “borrow,” an archaic term which used to mean that one ten is equal to ten ones. These days, in what experts apparently regard as a radical move, modern students “regroup,” a cutting-edge term which means one ten is equal to ten ones.

Reformers also point to the rise of “keyboarding” in place of “penmanship.” Has anyone stopped to consider the size of the average eight-year-old’s fingers relative to the size of the average keyboard? My classmates and I still learned to use pens even though we had typewriters. Even in our app-glutted world, students still need to learn to write legibly.

Education watchers complain that school buildings themselves reflect the “factory model” and “impede education.” They don’t like “long corridors separating rows of classrooms.” These advocates suggest that students would learn better if schools resembled “shopping malls,” which typically consist of long corridors separating rows of retail outlets.

Consider the intriguing proposal to run a junior high school at a zoo outside Chicago. And don’t forget the education-savvy architect who proposed that “a hospital can be a great school.”

Before anybody starts crooning about how marvelous it would be for students who like science to go to school in a hospital, we need to remember what hospitals are like. First, they typically consist of long corridors separating rows of sickrooms. They’re also usually full of sick people, and everybody knows how eager the average sick person is to spend the day overrun by hundreds of frenetic adolescents. Besides, before Johnny can help out reading your X-ray, he probably needs to learn to read the alphabet.

Most learning doesn’t demand an exotic setting. All you need is somewhere to listen, think and talk. Writing happens at a desk. Most “hands on learning” can happen there, too

Another architect chimes in that schools should “be like life.” That, presumably, explains why his design includes a “rock-climbing wall” in the gym and a “food court” instead of the standard cafeteria.

No, it never came down from Sinai that students have to slide their trays down the familiar school chow line. But let’s not pretend that the right assortment of fast food and “healthy” alternatives, or a climbing wall instead of a rope that hangs from the rafters, will catapult American students to the top of the global academic heap.

Yes, some school layouts, like some house and hospital layouts, get in the way. In fact, critics frequently and rightfully sound off about gigantic schools where students and learning can get lost. Meanwhile, school innovators – often the same critics – blithely go about the business of consolidating smaller schools into regional behemoths.

Naturally, the new behemoths will avoid all the failings of the old behemoths. That’s because they’ll be arranged around “pods.” A pod is a “set of interlocking classrooms.” This allegedly “new” arrangement “coincides with the trend toward team teaching.”

Does anyone remember the “interlocking” classrooms without walls that surfaced in the 1970s? Does anyone remember the team teaching trend promoted by reformers in that same decade? And does anyone remember what A Nation at Risk said about the decline of education during that decade?

One of the benefits of pods, claim boosters, is they facilitate another new trend. This one highlights “multidisciplinary projects,” such as “solving a fictional crime, using English, biology, and geometry skills.” Innovators complain that traditional schools don’t teach students to “integrate” their skills.

Integrating skills is great, but first you need to possess them. Unfortunately, this is precisely where our students are falling down. This is where a generation of “trends” has been letting them down.

On the other hand, maybe possessing skills isn’t that big a deal. The way one cuttingedge superintendent sees education, “the idea is to get communities of kids together.”

By that standard, the point of a hospital is to get communities of sick people together.

This trendy philosophy would simplify things, though. Because if the point is simply to get kids together, sending them to the mall instead of a school clogged with classrooms and books might be the way to go.

Change itself is neutral. I’m not afraid of it. I’m simply against education reform’s preferred varieties of change — bad change and silly change. I’m also not a fan of arrogant people who glibly impose their poor judgment and lack of experience on other people, who then suffer as a result.