Lets be real, what honestly can I do?
March 1, 2007
“Education has always been the gateway to a better life in this country, and our primary and secondary schools were long considered the worlds best. But on an international Math test in 2003, U.S. high school students ranked 24th out of 29 industrialized nations surveyed.”
Recently while listening to NPR on my commute I learned a little about the philosophy that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation holds in regards to education. I was amazed to hear the spokeperson for the foundation speak to the role of buisiness in education. Those of us in education are constantly bombarded with what the government is doing or not doing for education reform. We form well meaning and well founded opinions on this subject almost daily in the land of the public educators, yet rarely do we consider solutions lying in the business sector. This is most likely becasue it is not the business arena breathing down our necks to raise test scores or else. At the same time we as educators search for solutions.
In starting this post I attempted to get ahold on what may have brought us to this point of such debates in education reform. I wondered when and how this all became such a problem. The answer I came to, at least in my own mind was change. Education is in a constant state of change as the world and the world economy changes. Yes of course we all know this, what we don’t always know is what to do about it.
The above quote is from an article that Bill Gates wrote for the Washington Post where his wife Melinda is a director. He speaks to innovation. This idea of innovation brought together a theme of ideas becasue we could come up with a curriculum for any subject that is an A. We could hire highly qualified teachers that work around the clock, we could allocate all the funds in the world, yet without inovation we would lack success.
Here is where the testing idea comes into play. Standardized testing has become the model for education. I made a strong attempt in my earlier posts to understand how it is this came into play. Is standardized testing and the No Child Left Behind Act a Trojan Horse? Is this a way for the administration to convince us that they have our childrens’ best interests in mind only to switch in the form of witholding funds once in the desired offices? Maybe our elected officials are simply too far removed from public education given the economic status they hold. Perhaps after generations of the best public and private schools they have forgotten or become out of touch with the way it really is in the trenches. The idea that schools should shape up (AYP) or get the ax sounds a little like “Let them eat cake”. Even worse, maybe our nation’s success does not require all students to be ahead. Is there a benefit to having unskilled labor around to do the jobs we would not think of? Maybe it creates balance to have a certian percentage of lower level achievers around to sweep and mop. After all it is America and when they get sick of the floors we will let them pay to attend our higher education facilities. Because we are so education-oriented and concerned for these sweepers we may even give them government loans to do so.
I hope it is not all that sinister. I wonder if maybe we do want our nation to perform on top and we just have not figured out how to do it. I wonder if the goal not to leave children left behind is noble in its intent just misguided in implimentation. I do not think there is an educator out there that does not believe in assessments and while it is very easy to slam the administration for attatching a consequence to it, do we not all do this? In our classroom we assign grades, sadly most of the time these grades are static. We also have policies on attendence, behavior, etc. So is it hypocritical for us to expect that we as teachers and school districts would not also have consequences and rewards based on our performance. Do we tell Billy that he does not have to complete paper A because his mother works nights and his father is gone? Do we have a separate rubric for students who have to work during high school or earlier? Is the federal government just trying to make teachers more accountable for the work they do? I would hope that this is in fact the case. I hope law makers just want to make sure all students have dedicated teachers. If this is the case, are they doing it right? Is this law helping kids? I think we all or I guess not all, not enough of us are getting the fact that its not working. We are missing the point. Innovation and teaching to standardized tests are polar opposites. In fact we are leaving children behind evey day, perhaps more now than ever in history. Our testing is moving us further and further away from innovation.
Long ago I heard someone say that students in America did not always test as well as other countries but overall we produced the most successful students/adults becasue we had a cuture in education that fostered critical thinking and problem solving. We are fast losing this because we do not have time to ensure AYP and promote innovative learning. If we do not make AYP we can forget all learning because the money we need to opporate will be yanked.
”During the past 30 years, U.S. innovation has been the catalyst for the digital information revolution. If the United States is to remain a global economic leader, we must foster an environment that enables a new generation to dream up innovations, regardless of where they were born. Talent in this country is not the problem– the issue is political will.”
In the classroom when we focus on the process we support innovation. When we are not hasty with grades, when we encourage students to keep working at it, when we enpower students by using tools that excite them, we suceed and they are not left behind.
In the full text Gates sites a school in San Diego that is having huge success with a project centered curriculum. This is perhaps what we as educators also need to look toward. If we can find model schools and foundations that are willing to donate huge grant dollars we are taking our own hands on approach to education reform.
