Peter Berger Educator’s Digest: Volume 44

Most parents have experienced suddenly realizing a toddler is being too quiet. That’s how Poor Elijah feels about administrators in the summertime. They’re quiet, too, which is how he knows they’re engaged in mischief. Here’s a sampling of what the education world’s policymakers have been up to lately.

Don’t expect your child’s classroom to look familiar in September. Schools are increasingly moving to a “Starbucks environment” for learning. Instead of “rows and rows of desks all facing the teacher,” they’re furnishing classrooms with randomly placed “standing tables, stability balls, crate seats, couches, and beanbag chairs.”

Proponents of the new “environment,” dripping condescension, allow that there’s “something orderly, functional, and maybe even comforting” about old-fashioned desks. The same people crow that laptops and smartphones are superior to “bulky textbooks,” presumably because they facilitate students’ efforts to ignore their teachers by surfing the Internet and texting each other.

“Ditch the desk” advocates contend that their recycled innovations don’t constitute “change for change’s sake.” They allege that “21st century skills can’t really be taught” in traditionally furnished classrooms because “traditional educational settings dull the senses” and inhibit “collaboration, creativity, and problem solving.” They also blame sitting in school for “student obesity.”

Creativity and problemsolving aren’t new, and I’ve found it’s handy to have some place to sit and work when I’m engaged in both. Getting off the couch and exercising something besides than their texting thumbs would do more to curb students’ obesity than lying on a rug and writing on the classroom floor. Regarding collaboration, students’ social skills haven’t improved since schools made them part of the curriculum. Besides, you need to know something before you can productively collaborate about it, and knowledge and skills are what most students lack these days. Beanbag chairs aren’t likely to help.

Boosters insist that along with rearranging the furniture, teachers also must “surrender a degree of authority” and “some of their power.” It’s part of “going from a teacher-centered classroom to a student-centered classroom,” a reform cliché that for decades has instigated the decline of American schools.

I offer my students choices and respect. But I’m the adult. I’m supposed to know more and know better than they do. That’s my authority.

Eliminating desks is worse than “change for change’s sake.” It’s changing something we can change because we won’t or can’t change what we need to change – American society, student effort, students’ home lives, and the chaos and disruption, even with desks and chairs, that already exist and that we tolerate in our classrooms.

Of course, it doesn’t matter where you put the furniture if students don’t show up. As part of schools’ everexpanding responsibilities, in addition to teaching students when they’re in school, it’s now our responsibility to get them there in the first place.

A California study of middle and high school students recently discovered that “part-day absenteeism is responsible for at least as many missed classes as full-day absenteeism.”

Classroom teachers were already aware that attending school part-time is a problem. At the middle and high school level, being absent for just my class affects a student’s performance in my class as much as when he’s absent for the whole day. Either way, he’s missed my class. When absent students return, they often miss additional classes to make up tests. They’re working on assignments the rest of the class has already discussed, as well as current assignments, and therefore both unprepared for current topics and doubly burdened with work.

The study notes that fullday absenteeism declines later in high school. This could be because the students who’d been skipping whole days drop out entirely once they’re old enough.

In another less than surprising development, partday students miss first period class more than any other. The study’s authors prescribe “scheduling planning periods for core subject teachers during first period.” That way presumably students who show up late won’t miss anything important.

Unfortunately, their prescription is a scheduling impossibility since everybody can’t take P.E. and art simultaneously. Anybody familiar with real schools would know this. Even more unfortunately, too many people who run our schools are that unfamiliar with how they actually work.

Speaking of experts, a recent journal article examined why education research isn’t “more useful to policymakers.” The article’s author graduated in 1995 with a degree in political science. He’s spent the last seventeen years developing school policy. Along the way he also served as the U.S. Department of Education’s Associate Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement, a bureaucratic title worth reading twice. He now edits a journal and serves as president of a prominent education think tank. Missing from his résumé is any mention of his ever having been a teacher, which means either he never taught or he doesn’t consider it important enough to mention.

According to this expert, many studies fail to “provide helpful information.” He concludes that lots of questions need to be “answered by common sense, ideology, and plain old experience.”

Education policymakers are never short on ideology. As for common sense and experience, guess who doesn’t appear in his discussion of “how we can build better bridges across the researchto-policy divide”?

That’s right – classroom teachers.

The divide between researchers and policymakers may be vast, but it isn’t our schools’ prime problem.

The divide between those experts and our schools is the great gulf we need to bridge. Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor. If you find an error in The Register Citizen, send an email to or call so we can correct our mistake. We are committed to correcting all errors or making clarifications that come to our attention, and encourage readers, story sources and the community at-large to point them out to us. Send an email to factcheck@registercitizen.com and let us know if there is more to add or something to correct in one of our stories. Also see our fact check blog http://registercitizenfactcheck. blogspot.com for some of our clarifications, corrections and additions to stories. You can report errors anonymously, or provide an email and/or other contact information so that we can confirm receipt and/or action on the matter, and ask you to clarify if necessary. We can’t guarantee a mistake-free newspaper and website, but we can pledge to be transparent about how we deal with and correct mistakes. Letters to the Editor: Email editor@registercitizen.com or mail to Letters to the Editor, The Register Citizen, 59 Field St., Torrington, CT 06790; ATT: Letter to the Editor. Rules for getting published: Please include your address and a daytime phone number for verification purposes only. Please limit your letters to 300 words per Letter to the Editor and one letter every fifteen days. We reserve the right to edit for length, grammar, spelling and objectionable content. Talk with us online: Find us at Facebook.com/registercitizen and twitter.com/registercitizen. For the latest local coverage, including breaking news, slideshows, videos, polls and more, visit www.registercitizen.com. Check out our blogs at www. registercitizen.com/blogs/opinion.