Maybe It Was a Bad Idea to Begin With

An interesting discussion of the state of education appeared in the New York Times.  

I’ve been a day sub and a long-term sub.  I’ve taught in a federally funded Title 1 program.  I taught in a public school, then a private school, and again in a public school.  All together, I dedicated more than 35 years to continually push back the frontiers of ignorance.

I’ve seen numerous attempts at educational reform – writing labs, performance based education, longer class periods, shorter class periods, brain based learning, visual learning, and a whole slue of other attempts at pushing back those frontiers, attempts at making student learn.

Sometimes reforms work.  Other times they don’t.  They might work for some students and not for others.  Sometimes large numbers of students are affected, and sometimes students still fall between the cracks of the system no matter how laudable the reasons for the reforms.

And, sometimes, the reason change doesn't work is because it was a bad idea in the first place.

I certainly don’t have the answer to the nation’s education woes.  No one really does.  If they say they do, they’re selling you a bill of goods.

What works in one school district doesn’t always work for a district in the neighboring county.  What works for one teacher doesn’t always work for the teacher in the next classroom.

I considered myself to be a fair, but strict, teacher.  I referred to a teacher down the hall from me as the “Mother Earth Goddess” of the high school. Students who liked a stringent, take-no-excuses approach tended to do well with me as their teacher, and students who liked a touchy feely approach tended to do well with her.   When touchy feely students were in my classes, they tended to be, well, not as successful. We always had a running joke about scheduling that if we could ever figure out a way to pair up students based on the type of teacher with whom they would do best, we could make a lot more money being consultants.

We have come to a point in this country where we think that the test scores are the be all and end all of education.  Yes, test scores, are a measure of how we are doing, but it is only one measure.  And, frankly, it is a rather unimportant measure.  Does it really matter where we rank in reading and math compared to other nations?  Why?

When we go to the doctor, we don’t ask him or her what grades they received in med school.  We’re sick, and we just want to get well.  When our sink is backed up, and we’ve depleted the store of every kind of liquid drain opener, we call the plumber. We don’t ask where he trained or what kind of grades he received. We just want the sink to stop overflowing. 

It might matter how a person is inclined, whether they are geared to more academic or technical pursuits, but, really, does it matter what grades they receive in school or how they do on tests?  What matters is the ability to do their jobs proficiently and correctly.

My 35 years in education taught me some things about student success.   Parental involvement in their children’s progress is important.  Students’ involvement in other activities in a school is important.  Community support for a district and its teachers is important.  Still, one thing seems to always be forgotten when discussing school improvement – the role of the teacher’s desire to affect change.

The most effective changes in education always start from the bottom up rather than top down. When a superintendent or principal comes up with a program, or when, God forbid, state or federal officials come up with an idea, selling it to all teachers and getting them to buy into it, well, simply, that isn’t very effective.

But, when one teacher tries something in the classroom and it works, another teacher sees it and asks, "Hey can you show me what you're doing and how to do it?" Then another teacher, then another, and it spreads through a department and maybe a school. Then another teacher tries a variation and it spreads.  We teachers tend to talk to each other about what is working in our classrooms and what isn’t.  We learn from each other.  We really do want our students to learn and succeed in life.

What is needed is the ability for teachers to explore and, yes, experiment, with new methods and ideas in their individual classrooms. Then, when something works, keep it going.  If we try something and it doesn’t work, we won’t keep doing it.  And if it stops working, we’ll try something else.