In schools, don't place form above function

My latest op-ed, "In schools, don't place form above function," appeared today in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and online at ajc.com. 

In it, I tell the story of Bachar Sbeiti, a student who finished eighth grade three years ahead of schedule, but whose school district refused to allow him to advance because of his age. I argue that it is time to abandon the practice of sorting students according to age and imposing a near-uniform curriculum on every student in a particular age cohort.

You can find the article at http://www.ajc.com/opinion/in-schools-dont-place-731869.html. If you enjoy it, please consider passing it along to others who might be interested.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

Debate: Will standards save public education?

I recently read Deborah Meier's Will Standards Save Public Education?  The book is a "New Democracy Forum" debate produced by the fantastic Boston Review (www.bostonreview.net).

It includes contributions by Deborah Meier, Jonathan Kozol, Ted Sizer, Gary Nash, Linda Nathan, Abigail Thernstrom, Richard Murnane, William Ayers, and Bob Chase (former NEA President). The book was published in 2000, but it is more relevant than ever because of the Obama administration's push for national standards, the recent release of the Common Core standards in reading and math that are likely to serve as the basis of these standards, and the ongoing debate about the future of No Child Left Behind, a piece of standards-and-accountability legislation that has transformed the educational landscape in ways positive and negative, expected and unexpected.

Here are excerpts from a few of the essays to give you a sense of the debate:

From Jonathan Kozol, "Foreword":

Education writing, as John Holt observed when he and I were teaching high school English in the summer at the Urban School in Boston more than thirty years ago, is frequently a way of speaking indirectly of our own biographies and longings and unveiling our own souls. In speaking of "the aims of education" for a city or a nation, even for a neighborhood, we draw to some degree on who we are, and what we like (or don't like) in ourselves, and what we wish we might have been.

So when I listen to debates on education - whether about standards, pedagogic styles, or objectives, or "assessments," or whatever else - I listen first to voices. Before I pay attention to ideas, I want to gain some sense of character and value - lived experience - within the person who is telling us what he or she believes is best for children.
...
I do think...that there's such a thing as "bad" and "good" and "better" when it comes to books for children or to any other facet of our cultural endowment. ...So the question, for me, isn't if we ought to have some "standards" in our children's education. It is, rather, how and where they are determined, and by whom, and how we treat or penalize (or threaten, or abuse) the child or the teacher who won't swallow them.
...
Many of the teachers that I know in the South Bronx could teach in universities but choose to teach in elementary schools because they love the personalities of children and they also have a moral vision of a good society and want to do their part in bringing incremental bits of justice to an unjust city and an unjust world. They come with all the treasures they have gleaned from their own education. They want to share these treasures with the children, but they also want to find the treasures that exist already in those children, and they know they cannot do this if they're forced to march the kids in lockstep to the next "objective," or, God help us, the next "benchmark," so that they'll be ready - and God help us, please, a little more - to pass the next examination.

They worry about scripted journeys where there is no room for whimsical discoveries and unexpected learnings. They worry about outcomes that are stated in advance. ...These are teachers who have standards; but their standards may resemble those of Thomas Merton, or Thoreau, or Toni Morrison, more than of a market analyst or business CEO. The best teachers of little kids I know are poets in their personalities: they love the unpredictable. ...If we force them to be little more than the obedient floor managers for industry, they won't remain in public schools. The price will be too high. The poetry will have been turned into prose: the worst kind too, the prose of experts who know every single thing there is to know except their own destructiveness.

In this way, we'll lose the teachers who come to the world of childhood with ministries of love and, in their place, we'll get technicians of proficiency.
...
So the question, again, is not if we "need" standards in our schools but with what sensibilities we navigate between the two extremes of regimented learning with destructive overtones, on one hand, and pedagogic aimlessness and fatuous romanticism on the other. Somewhere between the world of Dickens's Gradgrind and John Silber and the world of pedagogic anarchy, there is a place of sanity where education is intense and substantive, and realistically competitive in a competitive society, but still respectful of the infinite variety of valued learnings and the limitless varieties of wisdom in the hearts of those who come to us as students.

Excerpts from Alfie Kohn's "Unconditional Teaching"

I am a fan of Alfie Kohn, whom I discovered when my mother was in education school. I purchased his The Schools Our Children Deserve as a junior in high school, and it was my first encounter with education as a discipline. I often disagree with his views, but I always find them challenging and provocative.

Here are a few excerpts from Kohn's wonderful article "Unconditional Teaching":

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The current version of school reform is changing what we value. If the sole goal is to raise achievement (in the narrowest sense of that word), then we may end up ignoring other kinds of learning beyond the academic. It’s exceedingly difficult to teach the whole child when people are held accountable only for raising reading and math scores.

Moreover, when some capabilities are privileged over others, and a broader approach to education is sacrificed, we begin to look at students differently. We come to lose sight of children “except as they distribute themselves across deciles” (Hogan, 1974, p. iii). That means that some kids – namely, the high scorers – are prized more than others by the adults. One Florida superintendent observed that “when a low-performing child walks into a classroom, instead of being seen as a challenge, or an opportunity for improvement, for the first time since I’ve been in education, teachers are seeing [him or her] as a liability” (Wilgoren, 2000).
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A diminution in what we value, then, may affect whom we value. But the damage isn’t limited to those students who fail to measure up – that is, by conventional standards. If some children matter more to us than others, then all children are valued only conditionally.
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Psychological theorists and researchers (e.g., Deci and Ryan, 1995; Kernis, 2003) are coming to realize that the best predictor to mental health may not be one’s level of self-esteem but the extent to which it fluctuates. The real problem isn’t self-esteem that’s too low (“I don’t like myself very much”) so much as self-esteem that’s too contingent (“I like myself only when…”). Conversely, kids who have an underlying sense of their own value are more likely to see failure as a temporary set-back, a problem to be solved. They’re also less likely to be anxious or depressed (Chamberlain and Haaga, 2001).
...
When children receive affection with strings attached, they do indeed tend to accept themselves only with strings attached.
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If “You are the best!” just means “You can do A.P. calculus,” then this suggests that only those who master differential equations are “the best.” Surely, says (Nel) Noddings, “a student should not have to succeed at A.P. calculus to gain a math teacher’s respect.”
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Unconditional teachers are not afraid to be themselves with students – to act like real human beings rather than crisply controlling authority figures. Their classrooms have an appealing informality about them. They may bring in occasional treats for their students – all their students – for no particular reason. They may write notes to children, have lunch with them, respond from the heart to their journal entries. Such teachers listen carefully to what kids say and remember details about their lives: “Hey, Joanie. You said on Friday that your Mom might take you to the fair over the weekend. Did you go? Was it fun?”
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Imagine that your students are invited to respond to a questionnaire several years after leaving the school. They’re asked to indicate whether they agree or disagree – and how strongly – with statements such as: “Even when I wasn’t proud of how I acted, even when I didn’t do the homework, even when I got low test scores or didn’t seem interested in what was being taught, I knew that [insert your name here] still cared about me.”

How would you like your students to answer that sort of question? How do you think they will answer it?

Alfie Kohn
--"Unconditional Teaching," in Educational Leadership, 9/05.

President Obama's education plan

President Obama has used the economic stimulus bill and the budget to divert historic amounts of money to funding for education, and today he spoke about his plans for reform.  The story is here, commentary from Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times here.  Obama's full remarks can be read here.

Key elements of the plan [with some of my initial thoughts in brackets]:

--Pay successful teachers more, usher unsuccessful teachers out the door.  [no word on how this will be measured, though.  In general, test scores are used as the benchmark - a measure that almost certainly would do more harm than good.]

--More funding for early childhood education.

--Cutting funding for wasteful education programs, i.e. any federally-funded education programs that have not been able to demonstrate that they are working.

--Expanded access to daytime child care for working parents.

--More funding for successful charter schools.  Removal of state-level caps on the number of charter schools allowed as a trade-off for more accountability.

--"Better standards and assessments," i.e. national standards. [yet another set of high-stakes tests?  Or would the implementation of national tests entail doing away with the state-level tests?]

--A fund to invest in innovation at the district level.

--Improved data-sharing to track students' educational progress from childhood through college. [this raises serious privacy concerns]

--Using the stimulus to avoid teacher layoffs.  Improve teacher recruiting and retention.  

--Alternative certification programs.  ("Alternative routes to teaching").

--More time in school through a longer school day and a longer school year. [will teachers be paid more as a result?  How would this affect kids' ability to participate in extracurriculars, athletics, and summer programs?  How will the extra time be used effectively?]

--Extra pay for math and science teachers to make up for shortages.

--New efforts to discourage dropping out.

--Simplify federal financial aid assistance forms to encourage the pursuit of higher education or vocational training.  Increased Pell Grants and Perkins Loans.

--Increased adult education and job training options, especially delivered through community colleges.