I support Obama. I don't expect him to understand public education. He's never worked as an elementary school teacher. He hasn't spent a career trying to puzzle out how children learn. His comments on education have been conventional.
Obama named Arne Duncan as his secretary of education. Duncan has credentials. He headed up the Chicago public schools, about which I know nothing. Perhaps they are wonderfully successful. Even better, Duncan is about six and a half feet tall and has played basketball with Obama for many years, feeding him the ball. Arne Duncan is the hero's best friend.
Now Duncan has instituted a new federal program called "Race to the Top" (note the competitive sports metaphor).
Under Race to the Top, a state will qualify for a small bit of federal education money if it meets certain requirements. Basically Duncan wants to tie an individual teacher's pay to his or her student scores on standardized tests. Duncan wants a race. There are two problems with this approach: it will continue to reward teaching to the standardized test rather than reward exploration and creative thinking; and few teachers will want to take a pay cut after leading a classroom of students with weak test-taking skills, inadequate English language mastery, or the kind of gnawing hunger and worry that takes a student's eyes off the page.
In any circumstance, most teachers would opt to teach the educationally gifted. It's easier and more fun. Under Duncan, the easiest teaching would draw the highest pay.
If you bench Duncan the Rebounder, you could ask what is at the heart of America's educational problems? You can start with the usual list--little respect or pay for teachers, parental indifference, cultural anti-intellectualism, racism, decrepit buildings and materials, denatured subject matter--and go on to basic information about how children learn. How long will it take us to grasp that each child learns, one at a time, in a different way? A room with 30 children in it is not a factory floor. It holds 30 different learning styles.
The race Duncan plans will not move education forward. He doesn't get it. He thinks he's in the Sweet Sixteen when he's really playing HORSE.
2 comments:
Hi Dad,
I was searching for your post on Liam Clancy and I can't find it! Did you have one? I am so behind in reading my blogs! I appreciate this post... I agree with you. I don't like the competitive metaphor for learning, frankly, and I hate the idea of basing everything on standardized test scores. How is this different from NCLB? And I agree with you about the learning styles, but as I guess we've discussed before, I don't know how teachers (under the current conditions, anyway) teach to 30 different learning styles, except in really elite schools. I feel lucky that at Daisy's Montessori school, for example, something like that really is happening. The kids get a lot of individualized attention and I note that Daisy's teachers have figured out that a verbal accompaniment for a motor task helps her learn it better. So, for instance, instead of just showing her how to put on shoes, the way they might for another kid, they translate it into words as they do it. That must be exactly what you had in mind!
Sarah, you've got me exactly right. If you tell people that education should be individualized (not in every instance, of course), they will respond that it can't be done. But Montessori does it.
Dad
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