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The Big Goal in Education
The last few weeks have been an interesting time for obsessive watchers of education policy and punditry. Everybody seems to be chiming in on what should replace NCLB.
The Obama administration is dangling waivers from the most damaging parts of that law, provided states meet their criteria. The Fordham Institute put out a report wondering if we're letting our highest achievers stagnate, and Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute wrote a much-discussed article challenging us to move past what he termed “Achievement-Gap Mania.”
The whole education policy scene seems to be convulsing around what we really want to make our top priority in education. The rhetorical goal is easy: Every student in the United States should get a great education. Dig past that, however, and things get trickier.
I'll cop to a bias towards closing the achievement gap as the top priority, though I think of the achievement gap as running deeper than differences in performance on limited, low-quality tests.
I taught low-income twelfth graders in the Twin Cities metro area who wrote like fifth graders and struggled to parse texts targeted at middle schoolers. That's what the achievement gap looks like to me, and I'll admit to difficulty conjuring up much sympathy for policy approaches that don't place that injustice front and center.
I recognize, however, that the above is an emotional response rooted in my classroom experience. Our entire system struggles under the weight of a test-driven policy structure that doesn't encourage composition or original thought, and this hurts all students. We must aim higher for every student. We will continue to fail some students for years to come, but this shouldn't stop us from increasing our ambitions.
If our next generation of leaders is going to be equipped to handle the industrial, economic, and environmental crises of the coming decades, we need a big goal even bigger than our current one.
Those who complain about proposed alternatives to NCLB weakening “accountability” are missing the point; our targets are so off that any accountability system founded in this testing climate will constrain our teachers to a narrow instructional range. Our policymakers need to fundamentally rethink what our schools should be accomplishing. The future is not on a bubble sheet.
Posted in Education | Related Topics: K-12 education NCLB Race to the Top Student Assessment
3 Comments
October 20, 2011 at 7:47 am
The target of everyone reaching profiency by 2014…...or declaring the school to be a failure was always nuts. In my opinion, this part of NCLB was a Trojan Horse, designed to have nearly every school in the state declared as “failing” as a ploy to push for privatization. I can’t figure out why Ted Kennedy and a whole bunch of Democrats went along with it. The goal was so obvious from the start.
The only good thing that came out of NCLB was to give us clear, overwhelming evidence of the gap between kids of color and white students. The gap isn’t new, but now we have the data and it’s so stark we can’t pretend it’s not a problem.
I believe the gap is caused by a whole lot of factors—poverty, 400 years of racism and the lack of equity play big roles and are largely outside of schools’ control.
That being said, the education system needs to act on the factors it actually can control: putting the best possible teachers in the classroom, getting rid of chronic underperformers (both teachers and principals.), retaining and inspiring their top performers, etc.
I agree with Ginny—the teachers who engage and inspired me are the ones I remember. We need to pay them more!
October 19, 2011 at 12:05 pm
I agree: the education gap is the most critical issue. I also think that the most important function of schools—from grade school on up through college—is to teach our children to think, to reason, and where and find and analyze information. Who remembers the stuff that was on our tests? I do remember some of the “blue-book” questions and concepts, though. And I remember the way my thoughts were set in motion by the most interesting and literate and well educated teachers (not all teachers are well educated; I had a social studies teacher, a coach, who came in every day and read from our textbook—what a waste). And I most appreciated those teachers at all levels who threw out new ideas and challenged us to consider them. Who inspired us. Who engaged our attention.
Teachers like these are the ones who possibly for the first time made me set my sight on higher education—for me, a B.A. and an M.A.
And I also think that our brightest students are really not in much danger. They will find ways to educate themselves, and most of them probably do, and find classes boring and easy.
Yi LI You says:
October 24, 2011 at 6:27 am
I feel K-12 students have one comprehensive test every year is necessary. Without test, how a student knows how he/she is doing. For this, I think NCLB has doen a good thing.
But when we know the results of the tests, we should not punish those schools for “most students not perform well on tests”.
Instead, we should equip those schools to set up more Before and after-school program to help those “bad performing” students.
Most importantly, push those schools to set up more “parent workshops”, make these parent workshops mandataty for those not-perform-well students.
I myself benefited a lot from the parent workshop of “How to help your child read” organized by Burnsville school district in 1999-2000. At that time, my kids are 6 and 4 years respectively. I start to read them English books to them 20-30 min every day before they go to sleep. 10 months later, I noticed they can all read by themselves.
Now my older son become above average from the typical ADD symptoms; He never go to special ed program at all. My younger son is a gifted student all of his schoolings up to now: junior in high school. His ACT score at end of 10th grade is: 35. His SAT score at end of 8th grade was 2100. That is all because he started to read when he was 5 yr old when he entered kindergarten class.
Stop any political talks, start to do some concrete works to help those “bad Performing” students. They cannot waste any time in their academic learning.