August time for inoculation against school reforms

Now that August is waning, it’s time to reinoculate ourselves to deal with the glowing rhetoric experts and officials use to describe what’s happening at school.

“Student-directed learning,” for instance, employs the term “learning” loosely. The theory is that children should be allowed to pursue their interests rather than conform to prescribed content curricula, which explains why even many capable students know so little about so much but everything about whales or dinosaurs.

Consider the sixth-grade science program where texts are outlawed, “teachers get out of the way” and students just “follow the science,” leaving them free presumably to rediscover that the sun revolves around the Earth.

Along with their rejection of specific content requirements, these reformers commonly also reject tests, preferring instead that students demonstrate what they know through individualized projects. Experts contend that in addition to better demonstrating what children have chosen to learn, students enjoy projects far more than tests, an assertion my students have laughingly disputed each year when I’ve assigned their first history project.

Consistent with this penchant for projects, the Los Angeles Times reported that many schools are “ditching final exams” in favor of “oral presentations” and senior “exhibitions” as a “better way to assess a student’s academic achievement” and “readiness to graduate.” One Times-profiled senior offered a PowerPoint presentation “on the challenges of trading stock options and what he learned while attempting to climb Mt. Rainier with his father.” In case you’re imagining he learned economics, geology or botany, his presentation explored his selfesteem realization that “he failed because he didn’t believe enough in his abilities.”

A “growing number of educators” are reportedly receptive to this new “different approach to assessment.” I’ve enjoyed attending several of my former students’ senior presentations myself. Unfortunately, presentations and portfolios aren’t new. In fact, the failure of similar performance assessments to measure anything reliably triggered No Child Left Behind’s standardized testing obsession.

Another senior project that made national headlines involved a student who pretended to be pregnant for six months in order to “explore people’s reactions if a top student, someone you wouldn’t expect, were to get pregnant.” In on her “ruse” were her mother, principal and boyfriend. His parents were outside the circle and “thought it was going to be a boy.”

Described variously as a “social experiment,” a blow “against stereotyping,” and a statement about “Latina teen rates,” the Associated Press reported that her project “resonated with viewers of popular teen mom reality shows.”

Let’s set aside what lionizing pregnant children says about our society, and that there is some reasonable middle ground between tattooing scarlet letters on girls and giving them a TV series. Let’s also set aside whether a girl who deceives her boyfriend’s parents into thinking they’ll soon be grandparents really qualifies as “empathetic.”

Let’s examine the project’s scholastic merit.

Pretending to be pregnant in no way “shines light on Latina teen rates.” Since her high school was 85 percent Hispanic, and since teen pregnancy is far from unheard of in any ethnic group, her classmates probably already knew someone who was really pregnant. It’s unclear how she uniquely “reached her peers” and, given that pregnancy is a notable condition, hardly surprising that she found “she was treated quite differently when people thought she was pregnant.”

In short, while her project got her to Good Morning, America, it, like many “innovative” school activities, is distressingly light on academic content. Before we leap onto the projects bandwagon, it’s worth considering that students’ time might be better spent learning the comprehensive body of content knowledge and skills too many never master.

When students aren’t engaging in academic projects of dubious value, they’re increasingly likely to find themselves sorting their lunch scraps into buckets. If this sounds unremarkable, consider that they’re sorting their food under the watchful eye of their school’s Farm to School Coordinator. Authorized by Congress and active thus far in over 40,000 schools nationwide, Farm to School programs work to “build links with local farmers,” incorporate “farm and food-related topics” in classroom discussions, “encourage students to integrate more fruits and vegetables into their diets,” and promote “just” food delivery systems.

Naturally all this takes time and money. One typical cash-strapped New England school received grants for $36,000 to fund food field trips, “free” fruit for snacks and a school garden. Except grants don’t last forever, money for school operations is painfully finite, and most school boards are struggling mightily to reduce school budgets.

At school and in our classrooms, time is even more precious. That’s why as far back as 1983, A Nation at Risk warned that the “rising tide of mediocrity” in academic achievement was largely due to our having “lost sight of the basic purposes of schooling” and the “often conflicting demands” on time, money, and expertise that we’ve placed on our schools.

That’s why we should consider carefully adding even activities as seemingly benign as Farm to School. It’s why we should be even more wary of other touted initiatives, pilot programs, and allegedly cutting-edge, research-based bandwagons.

Before we leap this September onto anything new, we need to ask ourselves if we want our students doing more of these innovative things.

Or more of something else.

Peter Berger teaches English and history in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.