What has been will be again

When Poor Elijah started teaching two decades after college, the cuttingedge, bold reforms debuting in his 1990s inservice workshops sounded nearly identical to the cuttingedge bold reforms his professors had debuted in his 1970s education classes.

The problem was schools had supposedly abandoned those bright ideas about nongrading, permissive discipline and “studentcentered” education after they’d been condemned in “A Nation at Risk,” the 1983 report that blamed 1970s reforms for the “rising tide of mediocrity” that had engulfed schools and sunk student achievement.

To test his theory that rhetoric was repeating itself, Poor Elijah devised a quiz to identify whether a reform quote came from the 1970s or 1990s. If you can remember that far back, give it a shot.

1. “Clear goals were established that committed the school to enhancing selfesteem.” What’s that? You guessed 1996? Try 1978.

2. “The program is ungraded, individualized, and selfpaced … and may be pursued in a variety of ways including guided independent study, group projects, educational trips, or apprenticeships in the community.” Hint: Try 1975.

3. “The pilot program … will reflect an emphasis on skills, not letter grades. The class will be projectoriented. Students will go into the larger community for field work.” Nice try, but this one’s 1993.

4. “Failing grades were eliminated.” No, sorry — 1978 again. Yes, I know you just read it somewhere.

5. “In schools of the future students never fail.” Wrong again — 1997. This one sounds familiar, too, doesn’t it?

There’s a reason. Welcome to 2019 and yet another “innovative approach to education” guaranteeing “dynamic classes” and communitybased “learning opportunities” that deliver “relevant” knowledge, “maximize student success,” and “better prepare the next generation for career and life.”

Would someone please find me a school that trumpets sluggish classes dispensing irrelevant knowledge, that deliberately limits students’ success so they’re less prepared for work and life?

Signature 1970s innovations included the “open classroom,” which promised to break down the educational barriers between students, teachers, and subjects by literally removing the physical barriers between classrooms.

Maybe you experienced one of those newly constructed, 1970s stateoftheart schools without classroom walls. Remember how students and teachers promptly discovered they couldn’t hear themselves think? Remember how students’ minds and bodies wandered more than ever? Remember how schools quietly ran out and bought truckloads of room dividers and filing cabinets to take the place of the walls the experts had insisted we’d be better off without?

Now consider a high school principal whose

“innovative approach” in 2019 features “removing walls between classrooms” and recycled plans to “combine subjects and teachers.” In a move that should sound familiar, teachers won’t be teachers anymore. Instead they’ll be “facilitators” and “negotiators of learning.” Classrooms will become studentcentered gatherings that “increase student voice,” where “students own their learning” and “explore deeper the particular unit that interests them the most.”

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t believe in basking in the spotlight or ruling like a petty despot. I encourage my students to think out loud, and I often remind them to talk to each other instead of just to me. But if I have the most knowledge to offer and skill to impart, which I should, this will rightly place me at the center of learning.

Under the new regime, content disciplines will disappear, again, to be replaced, again, by interdisciplinary “crosscurricular courses” organized around “thematic educational units,” another noninnovation. Instead of specific courses in social studies and English, for example, students will be treated to “humanities.” Based on interdisciplinary education’s track record,

this should ensure that more students graduate without mastering either social studies or English.

The combined math and science class will address “four thematic units — what is life, what is death, how is the world going to end,” and “how you can save the world.” Through these novel math and science themes, students are somehow expected to explore the “realworld application of math” as they determine the “math skills that are relevant.” Advocates “hope to inspire more interest and excitement” about math and science, apparently without getting bogged down in actual math and science.

“Risk” spoke clearly about student choice and contentlight classes, describing the resulting secondary school curricula as “homogenized, diluted and diffused,” a “cafeteriastyle curriculum” where “appetizers and dessert” are “mistaken for main courses.” The report concluded that “this curricular smorgasbord, combined with extensive student choice, explains a great deal about where we find ourselves today.”

The schedule “redesign” provides a daily 40minute “flex period” for “multiple purposes, including school meetings, advisory pro

grams and unstructured time for students to meet with teachers.” In addition, cuttingedge 85minute “free blocks,” formerly known as study halls, allow students to “complete work they need to do.” Free blocks also enable students to “be where they need to be,” whatever that means.

Like all reform manifestos, this one is seasoned with jargon, from “paradigm shift” and “critical thinking” to “electronic portfolios” and “competencybased grading.” Teacher workshops are rechristened “educational cafés.”

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong, or right, with change. Some schools and teachers do need to “shift” the way they “operate.” But something is wrong when old by default means obsolete. Something is wrong when the gauge of educational truth and instructional virtue becomes “students no longer sit in rows.”

Something is wrong when past proven follies are peddled as if they were new without regard for that past and their forgotten failures.