GETTING THE POINT
If you are a parent or grandparent with a child or children in an elementary school or a middle school, when was the last time any of them came charging out of school so excited about something they’d learned that they could hardly get all the words out in their effort to share it with you?
If nothing like that comes to mind, or if ‘never’ is your response, something is wrong with the learning process in that school. And we mean any school: a private school, a public school, some form of charter school.
Here’s another test: depending upon the grade level, ask a child about a geographic area – like New York City or Philadelphia or Boston or Washington. Or ask about a national park that’s part of our history as well as our geography.
Or ask a question about the Declaration of Independence or our Constitution or about the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. Or ask about the civil rights movement.
See if any of the answers you get sound like there is some understanding involved not just a ‘sound bite” answer for a test.
A young man we know who just graduated from one of the so-called better public intermediate schools in an upscale suburb bordering New York, had just completed one whole week on the civil rights movement and knew a few facts about Martin Luther King. But on questioning it was obvious that he had absolutely no clue about the real fight for equality, about what any of it was truly about, about the real life of Negroes, blacks, African-Americans – today or yesterday. Then, to indulge his favorite Grandfather (and inquisitor), he gamely sat through the movie “The Help” about the years of hard segregation in the South. His reluctance grew into surprise, amazement and disbelief as he saw a number of beautifully portrayed instances of what it meant to be black in the South during that period in our history.
He kept asking over and over again “Is this true, is this really true”?
It took a movie adaptation of a bestselling book to teach him more about the meaning and reason for the civil rights movement than any school will teach him in America today.
That sort of non-learning in school has got to stop.
And so ask those questions and see what answers you get and how you feel.
THE EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT
We keep saying that teaching to the test is not teaching but a substitute for teaching.
And that testing is not about learning but a replacement for teaching.
The facts are plain and deeply concerning. Teaching to the test is failing in New York and across the country. Yet, it continues. Why? Because those in charge of our public school system – the education establishment – know exactly what they can do with what they have and how to control the billions and billions of dollars America spends on educating our children.
What is the educational establishment? They are those who control the nation’s public school system. In no particular order of importance –the Federal Government’s Department of Education, the Education Departments in our States, Governors and Mayors with control over education, Federal and State legislators, Commissioners of Education, the educational industry, the testing industry, the teachers union.
The educational establishment knows these truths to be self-evident: Teachers graduate from Schools of Education without being properly prepared to teach – and this has been so for years. After they begin teaching, teachers have no valuable, practical, enriching. on-going, mandated professional training to help them become better.
So what has the establishment done to fix these critical problems and teachers? The truth is – nothing.
Here’s another difficult truth: The education establishment knows that parents are no longer part of the educational equation which had always helped children learn; that parents often pay little more than lip service to any real involvement.
So what has the educational establishment done to fix that important piece of the equation? Very much the same thing they did with the problem of training teachers – they did what’s easiest, cheapest, quickest. They put politicians in charge and told them that testing will bring all schools up to an acceptable standard…And that the best schools will offer competition to the others…because competition works to make things better.
And so testing has become what school is all about. The education establishment knows from national polling that half the parents in America approve of all the testing because it’s the only way they know how well or poorly their children are doing.
Tests and more tests provide too many parents with what they want to be true: that they really know from test results how their children are doing…The fact that testing doesn’t help them know if their children are learning doesn’t seem to figure into it.
Because increasingly, professional educators claim that parents are ONLY interested in grades and not in learning. Good grades mean eventually a “good” college and a “good” career and success.
And as testing continues to fail to bring our public education system back to its better days, the educational establishment came up with another idea: evaluate teachers…provide evaluations to help us know the good teachers from the bad ones.
Because the establishment knows that a teacher evaluation program – even one as senseless and baseless as the one developed in NY State – will help parents arrive at the impression that they know whether their children have ‘good’ teachers. They are not close enough to know that from their children’s activities but the evaluations will tell them so.
These are all excuses for problem solving, not answers that bring excellence.
And as long as parents remain at arms length from the process, America’s education system will continue to slide to the bottom of all the industrialized nations in the world.
TAKING SCHOOLS BACK
But what was true yesterday doesn’t have to be true tomorrow.
Teachers need help and they know it.
Teachers have become – after all else has failed these past 30 years – the scapegoats for America’s sinking public education system.
Teachers know that they are unprepared to teach after graduating a School of Education. When they get a job and get absolutely no help…they feel they are being thrown to the wolves. And more than half of them quit the profession before the end of five years.
The educational establishment has not and will not help these teachers. They’ve put testing and teacher evaluations ahead of assisting teachers and teaching children and will do little to change this pattern as long as money keeps flowing into the system and no one is challenging them.
Parents must resume their original role in the equation. Parents must come forward and take back the schools from the testing companies, textbook companies, the consultants, the hedge fund operators and the politicians who are trying with increasing success – to privatize our public schools.
Parents must demand an end to testing. It is happening in a few schools in New York and around the country. It is just beginning, but it is happening.
Parents must demand that schools institute a proven professional training/mentoring program Involving all teachers in a school. These programs exist and can be successful if a commitment is made to them.
Parents must demand that Schools of Education lose their accreditation unless they accept the recommendations of the national accrediting agency to educate teachers as physicians are trained – with three years of student teaching before graduation and certificates to teach – not just 10-14 weeks.
Parents have never before reached this deeply into the system to take on Schools of Education but we are in crisis mode. These are our children. This is about their future and the future of the country.
Pressure must be applied. When Governors and Mayors continue to play into the hands of the education establishment they must be challenged by parents who know the score – who recognize the game being played, the pretense being foisted on their children.
When something outrageous happens in a school – a sexual incident, an environmental hazard, a cheating scandal, a decision by a Principal that defies logic and fairness – name your own happening – parents are suddenly in the street protesting. The media is alerted…newspaper reporters, television trucks with their cables and cameras are all called to the scene.
Well something far worse is happening to our children than anyone of these events because it is happening everyday: our children are not learning and what passes as learning is not only a pretense it is a scam. Our kids are being cheated of the best years of their lives to learn.
Until parents accept this truth, the make-believe schooling of their children will continue.
Martin I. Hassner
Executive Director
Liberal Party of NY
This posting is absolutely brilliant. Today education seems to be linked to one thing and one thing only – that the student be trained to jump the hurdles to a “useful to society” job. Learning – that experience the enables us to decide who our leaders should be – how are laws are created and executed – how society should operate in a humanist and caring community for the benefit of all – this learning is nowhere to be seen.
Philosophy, history, geography, literature, the arts, music – all those elements that tend to make cruel reality bearable and which help to create culture – those things are now frivolous.
Our president has suggested that student loans should now be tied simply to the fact that a student will be able to earn enough money to pay back the loan – a loan that enrichs an already rich bank.
What kind of world will this type of “education” – an education measured by filled in circles on a computer sheet – what kind of world will this be? One without joy without the joy that true learning brings. Testing does not encourage critical thinking and what this world sadly lacks is critical thinking.
A university education in the pat was respected because it was thought to enable a wider and clearer knowledge of how to deal with daily life in all its aspects. Today it has been criticized for being a tool that creats liberal elitists.
The initial purpose of mandatory public education was to teach the populace what they had to know to be responsive citizens able to help govern themselves.
Though it can often sound and feel Orwellian, some believe that w hat we have now that passes as public education has been designed to purposefully leave citizens in the dark, lost in ignorance, unable to understand what government is doing and what powers are working to influence government policies and activities. While we not yet convinced of such a plot, it is obvious that 30 years of diminished education makes it especially difficult for people to understand complex laws and program procedures. Maybe a plot didn’t exist but the result is the same.A more serious problem is this…many of today’s young parents hae no idea what a sound, complete education that is described here, is all about. And increasingly fewer and fewer teachers are being taught the subjects listed here. Neither the buyer nor the seller has any idea of how good the product was, so they can’t possibly imagine how good it can be again. Lots of work has to be done.If parents begin to see how their children are being shortchanged we might see a real involvement.
I’m a conservative education reformer. You say you’re liberal. But MOST of what you say is what I say. You say you want children to learn more fundamental knowledge. YES! But you seem to think that testing is the problem. Look deeper.
“Teaching to the test” is a propaganda term. It suggests at least that something is actually being taught. Not so. Our problem is that little is taught and little is learned. I say it’s planned this way. (Clearly, much more could be done with less money if the people in charge were sincerely trying.)
My indictment of the Education Establishment is that they teach as little as possible, and then keep everyone distracted with marginal debates.
Here’s the deeper problem. Whole Word doesn’t teach reading. Reform Math doesn’t teach math. Every theory and method is suspect. Everywhere you look, you see dumbing down by design. John Dewey started all this. He was a socialist and obsessed with social engineering. I think of him as a super-lib. I think he would agree.
Of course, if you’re using Liberal as in Jeffersonian Liberal, then this all makes more sense. I’m one of those myself. But you know that most people don’t use it that way.
(If you want more on any of these points, let me know.)
Bruce Deitrick Price
Where would you get the idea Dewey was a Liberal? Guess we were taught this in K-12 but I, as a die-hard Liberal, perceived (my viewpoint was shared by some at Teacher’s College) him as an elitist snob who was dedicated to placing lower class students in “suitable” employment. I agree that Dewey started some of this although my memory is vague on his actual philosophy – just remember him as being boring and rather irrelevant to the job of actual teaching. My parents were fanatic snobs and demanded that I bring home an “A” everytime and so I basically spent my middle & high school years reading with a flashlight under the covers all night, sleeping through class, and cramming for tests. Every once in a while I met a great teacher who got off curriculum all the time and really brought home the purpose and joy of my class. It was rare. My grandchildren are now going through the horrors I did – only their teachers have no chance to leave the assinine curriculum and relate the subject to real life. They HAVE to bring home A’s or they will not be able to go to a decent high, middle school or college. And they have to suffer through idiotic auditions and interviews based on HR corporate job searches. In my short teaching months I remember wondering whyI was there torturing these poor students rather than doing what I always wanted to do – that is – TEACH so that my pupils would have an expanded idea of the world they would face. And NO I have not – never have at any time – retained a single idea from my days of testing. They were just marathons that I endured to satisfy my teachers and bureaucratic idiots.