Toward Genuine Education- This post

Toward Genuine Education- This post involves a meeting of very different -yet similar - minds.

It's clear that something needs to be done about education in this country. Perhaps that answer is to privatize it. I agree, in the same sense that I agree we need to abolish the progressive income tax; it's a cool idea, and it'll never happen.

I'm as conservative as the day is long. So it mystifies people, and sometimes confuses them, when I tell them that I generally think the "Shut up, keep your buttin your desk and learn what we tell you to learn, when we tell you to learn it" model of education does at least as much harm as good to children. The more I hear from friends about the Sudbury school model, the more impressed I am. Don't be put off by the hippiedip language on the website; the beauty of the system is that it not only talks with kids about personal responsibility, it makes them live it from day one. The school talks about freedom - but freedom's companion, responsibility, is right there, too, and I think that's one of the greatest lessons any school can teach.

But back to the world I live in, where I'm underemployed and my kids attend the public schools. And like most conservatives, I'm all over the idea of reforming our schools; the schools seem to be more about serving as social service laboratories than places for kids to learn. Yet you don't have to listen to talk radio very long to get depressed about the right's standard notion for reforming schools, as you hear the umpteenth voice demanding "Focus on Readin', Writin' and 'rithmetic", and "Telling those kids to sit their asses down in those seats and pay attention." Inevitably, calls for "accountability" turn into calls for testing.

And testing students against artificial criteria is just about the worst way to tell whether they're learning, even under the best of circumstances. And best circumstances aren't on the radar these days.

Nat Hentoff writes in the Voice

In the October 25, 2002, Voice, I wrote about disturbing early signs of educational dysfunction in the new chancellor, Joel Klein. In a September 25 front-page story in The New York Times, Klein had been quoted as saying briskly: "Raising test scores should be the paramount goal of city educators." That alone was an ominous augury for the future, but then Klein actually said that he had no objections to teachers "teaching to the test. . . . It is the way our system is measured. This is a system of accountability and we need to conform our efforts."

In other words, it's not about teaching kids - it's about making the numbers.

No "better" than any stock trader (Think that analogy would horrify half of the American Federation of Teachers?).

Of course, there are two ways to raise an average; increase the higher numbers...and decrease the lower ones:

In The New York Times' invaluable series (July 31 and August 1) on the many thousands of public school students being pushed out of school because their test scores would reflect poorly on principals and superintendents, Tamar Lewin and Jennifer Medina omitted Klein's specific contribution to the growing number of push-outs.

That's right - the New York schools "fired" students that weren't putting up the numbers!

"Diplomas are for closers!"

No, the Glengarry, Glen Ross comparison isn't entirely humorous:

Writing in the October 25 Voice ("The High-Stakes Testing Trap"), I noted that Klein was "already making a significant mistake by deciding to give superintendents bonuses of up to $40,000 based on improved test scores in their districts. Before that [with Klein's support] principals have been getting $15,000 bonuses for higher test scores in their schools. But what of the many kids who will still fail the tests?

I think we know the answer to that.

In the series on New York City push-outs in the Times, Don Freeman, who retired last year as principal of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in the Bronx, said something Joel Klein should have heard before he assumed he was knowledgeable enough to run the city's school system:

"Ten years ago you could focus on the kids. The pressures were not the same, and you could take some risks. Now you're supposed to focus on the numbers."

Now, finally acknowledging how many students have been told that, in essence, they're too dumb to stay in school, Klein has told principals:

"It is a disservice to students and ourselves . . . to rely on shortcuts or play numbers games in order to make things look better than they really are." He says he is now monitoring that "disservice." With what punishment for the perpetrators?

OK, so things are bad in New York.

So how is the system in Minnesota any different? The new standards in Minnesota, which are all about "accountability", measure "accountability" with...

Yep. Tests. And numbers. Numbers which are held over the heads of principals and superintendants whose numbers don't improve.

"Budgets are for closers!"

Of course, rather than the frantic chase for numbers, educations should be about learning to understand the things one needs to survive and thrive in the world around one: how to communicate, function, interact, think critically, reason, know something of the background of the culture that is their home. Neither the left's fascination with sociological tinkering nor the right's fixation with numbers addresses all of those.

In the meantime, Katherine Kersten of the Center for the American Experiment writes an interesting essay about the future of civic education:

The heart of civic education is the study of American history and government. In recent decades, however, our schools have fallen woefully short in these areas, as evidenced by the abysmal results from the 2001 National Assessment of Educational Progress, on which more students scored "below basic" in American history than any other subject.

A glance at the textbooks that dominate U.S. history and government classrooms suggests why. Today's standard texts are dry, lacking in detail, monotonous, and politically tendentious. Such books could never inspire students to cherish their heritage of freedom. To foster democratic citizenship, we must fundamentally change the way our schools teach history and government. We must work to tell America's dramatic story in a way that engages young people's imagination, excites their gratitude, and reveals what is at stake in the American experiment.

America's story has two major themes: principles and people. Our challenge is to bring both to life for students. In teaching principles, we should make liberal use of original documents, as well as the stirring rhetoric of the Revolutionary and Civil War eras. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, the great speeches of Washington, Patrick Henry, and Lincoln-all eloquently capture the essence of the American creed of liberty and equality, of majority rule and minority rights.

And we're not teaching any of that, presently. In fact, the multiculturalist's assertion - that Western culture is no better than any other culture in the world by any subjective criteria - seems to hold sway at the moment in the schools.

More to come.

Posted by Mitch at September 16, 2003 04:31 AM