Kids are never the problem. They are born scientists. The problem is always the adults. The beat the curiosity out of the kids. They out-number kids. They vote. They wield resources. That’s why my public focus is primarily adults.
– Neil DeGrasse Tyson, responding to a question about how society could inspire more kids to pursue space-related science and research.
Two mathematicians, Sol Garfunkle and David Mumford, respond to the concern that America is faring poorly in our math education:
All this worry, however, is based on the assumption that there is a single established body of mathematical skills that everyone needs to know to be prepared for 21st-century careers. This assumption is wrong. The truth is that different sets of math skills are useful for different careers, and our math education should be changed to reflect this fact.
Today, American high schools offer a sequence of algebra, geometry, more algebra, pre-calculus and calculus (or a “reform” version in which these topics are interwoven). This has been codified by the Common Core State Standards, recently adopted by more than 40 states. This highly abstract curriculum is simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life. […]
In math, what we need is “quantitative literacy,” the ability to make quantitative connections whenever life requires (as when we are confronted with conflicting medical test results but need to decide whether to undergo a further procedure) and “mathematical modeling,” the ability to move practically between everyday problems and mathematical formulations (as when we decide whether it is better to buy or lease a new car).
Garfunkle and Mumford (and really, they couldn’t be better named for two mathematicians) make an excellent argument against traditionalism in education, and the picture they later paint – of a holistically minded, culturally relevant math curriculum – just warms my heart. This is what school should be like.
No Child Left Behind “rates” children and schools arbitrarily through multiple choice questions. Standardization and rote learning lead to sub-standard results because they don’t inspire or challenge. My solution: get rid of binary right and wrong answers. Experimentation is learning. Only through making mistakes do we find out what works, what to do differently and how to get better. […] Let’s inspire children by giving them the freedom to get things wrong.
A great piece by Prakash Nair, responding in Education Week to the never-ending call for “education reform”:
Lost in all this hand-wringing is the most visible symbol of a failed system: the classroom. Almost without exception, the reform efforts under way will preserve the classroom as our children’s primary place of learning deep into the 21st century. This is profoundly disturbing because staying with classroom-based schools could permanently sink our chances of rebuilding our economy and restoring our shrinking middle class to its glory days.
The classroom is a relic, left over from the Industrial Revolution.
Indeed, this is perhaps the most fundamental flaw of all education reform efforts in the past several decades, while at the same measure the most stubbornly – even vehemently – ignored. Go back and watch Waiting for Superman, for instance – the documentary widely heralded “to save public education.” You won’t find even a passing consideration in it of the most fundamental elemental of education: individual students and learners. Nor will you find any challenge to the past industrial-era mindset of education as a passive “conveyor belt”-like consumption of knowledge – in fact the documentary almost criminally perpetuates this destructive model, while ignoring a vast decades-old body of scientific research that proves that learning doesn’t happen this way.
Instead of considering this most basic element of education, Waiting for Superman – like so many education reform debates and efforts before it, and I’m sure many more to come – settles for skirting the issue and blowing around more hot air. It seems almost dogmatically fixated on the relatively superficial things in public education, like teachers’ unions and rubber rooms, student tracking and charter schools – incorrectly labeling these things as the root problems of (or, in some cases, solutions to) our system, without even stopping to consider whether it could be something more fundamental.
That’s the problem in the “education reform” world: We’re not lacking for magic answers, for solutions that we’re sure will “fix the system”. The thing is they’re useless, though, and will continue to be, so long as we avoid asking the right questions.
Via Dan Pink and Maria Popova, an article published over 100 years ago in the Ladies Home Journal, which makes predictions about – among other things – the future of education.
Needless to say, makes for an interesting comparison.
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important; force them to plead for their natural right to the toilet and they will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even.
Some thoughts on the slow decline of our American education system, from one of my favorite columnists, Nick Kristof:
My beloved old high school in Yamhill, Ore. — a plain brick building that was my rocket ship — is emblematic of that trend. There were only 167 school days in the last school year here (180 was typical until the recession hit), and the staff has been reduced by 9 percent over five years.
This school was where I embraced sports, became a journalist, encountered intellectual worlds, and got in trouble. These days, the 430 students still have opportunities to get into trouble, but the rest is harder.
For the next school year, freshman and junior varsity sports teams are at risk, and all students will have to pay $125 to participate on a team. The school newspaper, which once doubled as a biweekly newspaper for the entire town, has been terminated.
Business classes are gone. A music teacher has been eliminated. Class size is growing, with more than 40 students in freshman Spanish. “It’s like a long, slow bleed, watching things disappear,” says the school district’s business manager, Michelle Morrison.
Coming from Kristof, who’s spent much of his career reporting on developing countries around the world, it’s truly poignant and disappointing to see how far we’ve strayed from the values that once made us strong as a country. Certainly, the nature of ‘education’ has changed – the needs of our society have moved on from the turn-of-the-twentieth-century industrial demands which once pushed the American education system forward. We no longer need (if we ever did) schools to function as factories, to educate and deploy a stable and homogenous workforce. The nature of schools and the function of education is – and should be – undergoing a more fundamental, if conflicted, paradigmal shift. But this is different. What Kristof speaks of here is about how we simply, plainly no longer value education in general, regardless of form.
We treat teachers abysmally, pay them poorly, disparage their unions and blame them for the problems of a system which, at its root, is currently fundamentally flawed and problematic. We bind the hands of school principals and district administrators to bring about larger change, burying them with reports and regulations – done out of the call for “accountability”, a word for which we have neither a clear definition nor proper understanding – and we force schools into operating within whatever is the cheapest and most barebones model of education that will still deliver adequate results on fanciful, made-up tests which have little to do with real education. And the children themselves, those we uphold as “our future”, we’ve disregarded with a whiff of disdain – if we render them any attention at all. Schools have been shaped into concrete prisons, far removed from the centers of our community life; where once schools were integral places in our communities and neighborhoods, as Kristof for instance recalls about how his old school newspaper doubled as the town’s biweekly newspaper, their societal role now has been marginalized and relegated to simply “educating” (or more often just “protecting”, or worse, “containing”) “the children.” We’ve devalued children’s roles in society, no longer recognizing or welcoming what good they can bring as members to community life – and by extension, we’ve done the same to schools and education; we’ve turned the one last place left where children can interact with and contribute to the surrounding community into a static prison, lifeless and bound by burdensome worries and demands, a place where children’s own voices and contributions don’t matter.
Think about it: when was the last time you actually entered and spent a meaningful amount of time in a local school (one your own children didn’t attend)? How often today do you see a local school’s sport team treated like royalty, with the entire population showing to support them at games and players being known and congratulated outside of school? How often are you encouraged in your local community to actually know the children who live in your neighborhood, who aren’t yours or friends of yours? What level of expectations, if any, do you see your local community setting and holding of its schools – and of the children in those schools? What does your community ask of them, and in what ways are children really actually encouraged to contribute and participate? Have you ever read, or had a chance to read, an essay or opinion of a student in the community whom you didn’t know personally? When was the last time you saw a school or group of children really valued by the community, upheld as a prized part of its local community life, and supported with the necessary resources and attention?
We can ask if our schools and education system are in decline, but I think these are some of the more relevant and insightful questions for the moment. I think what matters now isn’t so much the quality of schools themselves, but their decreasing place and importance in our communities. What matters now is something far larger and more central to the whole of society.
I’ve strayed from Kristof’s column and his central point, but I will end with this: I think he’s right. We don’t value education and we don’t support our schools; if we did, our financial budgets and legislative priorities would look different. But I will go further and say that our schools crumble not only because they lack our financial support, and not only because we no longer value education – but because we no longer value children themselves.
We’ve become a society which has no place for children. We’ve slowly but steadily distanced them from our public life and discourse. We’ve removed them, psychologically and physically, from much of our society. And we stand by and let the schools we keep them in rot and fall away, with them inside.
That’s the larger tragedy.
Why do Americans do so badly in mathematics? Because mathematics is a foreign language in America. The vast majority of children grow up in a number-poor environment. We’ve forgotten that the language of mathematics is founded in curiosity. We too often think of mathematics as rules rather than as questions. This is like thinking of stories as grammar. Being curious together can be a really special part of the relationship in families.
Gever Tulley considers what sort of implications the ‘Gamification’ experience may or may not have in education:
The notion of a reward, some kind of benefit for having done something measurable, carries with it the idea that someone (be it person or algorithm) has judged your effort and found it worthy. At Brightworks, we deliberately avoid judgement-based evaluation of the children’s work and try to let the work speak for itself – both to the child and to the world. If a team of children builds a sailboat and it sinks on the maiden voyage, nobody has to tell them that the boat didn’t work right – the boat tells them that directly, and in a more nuanced and appropriate manner. We may need to help them see the event as just a momentary setback on the journey to building a great boat, but they understand that their boat didn’t work. Likewise, if they make a great boat and sail it across the bay, we don’t need to give them a gold star or an ‘A’ – the boat does this as well, and again, in a more nuanced and appropriate manner.
Carol C. Burris, a high school principal in New York, and Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center:
Evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores is the newest education-policy fad. It has a gut-level appeal that’s usually articulated as “rewarding success.” The argument is that teachers (and principals) should be judged on their students’ test results, with good educators promoted and bad ones fired. In truth, lots of misguided educational policies have a gut-level appeal. Although the ‘gut’ may feel good when such policies are enacted, the unintended consequences do not feel quite as good, especially when they are felt by our students.
Burris and Weiner share five excellent reasons why student test scores are not only a poor indicator of teaching ability, but actually harmful to the education process. They also get bonus points for using the story of high school teacher Jamie Escalante (who served as the inspiration for the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver”) as an example.
The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.
We train kids to deal with teachers in a certain way: Find out what they want, and do that, just barely, because there are other things to work on. Figure out how to say back exactly what they want to hear, with the least amount of effort, and you are a ‘good student.’
Working to involve parents more closely in their children’s schools and education is, almost always, a good thing. But sticking grades onto everything that moves? That, almost always, is not.
Last autumn, at the start of a new academic year, a small school in Scotland gave up classroom computers almost entirely – knowingly doing away with the aging notion of the ‘school IT lab’.
Instead, each child in the school was given an iPad – and since then, the technological shift has transformed the ways the students and teachers within the school integrate technology and the digital realm into classroom learning. Fraser Speirs, the IT director and technology teacher at the school who was the driving force behind the change, did the world an excellent deed by documenting the entire process: from the small, quirky technical decisions they faced implementing the change, to the giant shift in ideology and ways of thinking about technology that the adults at the school experienced. (Of course needless to say the kids themselves didn’t have any problem at all adapting to the change.)
Speirs’ blog post series, ‘The iPad Project,’ is a great read: honest, self-reflective, and a perfect invitation to begin to understand the potential for well-designed technology within education while recognizing the nuance and challenge of “doing it right.”
The Montreal Gazette takes a look at the intriguing science behind boredom, while considering the damage many are now saying it has wrought on our education system. (Also, since you’re wondering: yes, you can literally die from too much boredom, according to the research.)
The science is interesting, but it seems to take a backseat in the article to the discussion about education. As the piece elaborates, many education reformers are now, in fact, citing boredom as one of the primary reasons the American public education system is in crisis. As they argue, our public schools have become boring places: places where curiosity and interest are stamped out in favor of studying a required curriculum and whatever may appear on a standardized test.
McGill University professor of education Jon Bradley puts the blame squarely on political oversight of the education system.
“Teachers haven’t made it boring,” he said. “Politicians have made it boring. Every time there’s a crisis in education, we engage in a kind of fundamentalism. We say: ‘We’ve got to get back to basics.’ In every other profession we rely heavily on new research. Education is the only profession where we go: ‘What happened 50 years go is better.’ “
Schools will continue to be places of boredom, these education reformers warn, until we begin to embrace an inquiry model of learning; allow for play and exploration in schools; and enact other meaningful educational reforms.
As a point of interest: John Taylor Gatto appears later in the article as well, building upon the historic fact – popularized by Sir Ken Robinson – that schools were and still are modelled as factories, outdated relics of the industrial age. Both Gatto and Robinson offer up great perspectives on education, and have tremendous books – that is, if you’re ever bored and need something to read.
The Story of Finland’s Education Success (and How to Reboot the System)
The BBC just broadcasted this new video report documenting the success of Finland’s education system and the story behind it. Finland, as a country, consistently scores at the top of international education ratings – this despite the fact that its pupils spend the fewest number of hours in class relative to the rest of the developed world.
The video is short and succinct, but captures well what makes Finland’s education system work. I’d encourage everyone to watch it. In short, though, Finland’s success really all comes down to a few things: a strong sense of trust – both in students and in teachers and schools; a pedagogy based on deep, meaningful, long-term relationships between students and teachers; and a relaxed, non-competitive culture of education, where learning is seen as natural and is valued and encouraged by everyone in society.
Those may sound like simple solutions, but, as anyone within the education field can tell you, that kind of culture takes a lot of hard work to establish – especially when you’re working against the status quo. That may be one reason why private or chartered alternative education settings – like Montessori, Reggio-inspired and Waldorf schools, and democratic schools like Summerhill and Sudbury, as well as Unschooling – often do so well; they start out with a blank slate when creating that culture, and the people whom these settings draw are either already devoted to a culture of living, breathing democratic education or are open to questioning the status quo and searching out new ways of education. That’s not the case with regular public schools, where the ideologies and frameworks of education are firmly entrenched and to question them is to go up against a vast, monolithic 100-year-old system.
That’s why, in a culture of competition and faux-accountability, with an ‘education’ system that has strayed so far from the real nature of education, alternative settings offer a chance to reboot the system entirely.
I was recently reminded of this wonderful essay by the ever-cogent Alfie Kohn, and I think it says it all beautifully – about every part of how we approach children, not just education:
I never understood all the fuss about that old riddle – “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it still make a sound?” Isn’t it just a question of how we choose to define the word sound? If we mean “vibrations of a certain frequency transmitted through the air,” then the answer is yes. If we mean “vibrations that stimulate an organism’s auditory system,” then the answer is no.
More challenging, perhaps, is the following conundrum sometimes attributed to defiant educators: “I taught a good lesson even though the students didn’t learn it.” Again, everything turns on definition. If teaching is conceived as an interactive activity, a process of facilitating learning, then the sentence is incoherent. It makes no more sense than “I had a big dinner even though I didn’t eat anything.” But what if teaching is defined solely in terms of what the teacher says and does? In that case, the statement isn’t oxymoronic – it’s just moronic. Wouldn’t an unsuccessful lesson lead whoever taught it to ask, “So what could I have done that might have been more successful?”
That question would indeed occur to educators who regard learning – as opposed to just teaching – as the point of what they do for a living. More generally, they’re apt to realize that what we do doesn’t matter nearly as much as how kids experience what we do.
To be honest – and to indulge in a bit of selfish reflection – I think this is the common thing, the feeling that has attracted me professionally and personally to both storytelling and education (in the Alfie Kohn sense). It’s all about sharing experiences. Later on, Kohn writes about how the experiences of teachers matters, too, and I think it’s a fitting conclusion:
Finally, as teachers are to students, so administrators are to teachers. Successful school leadership doesn’t depend on what principals and superintendents do, but on how their actions are regarded by their audience – notably, classroom teachers. Those on the receiving end may be older, but the moral is the same: It’s best to see what we do through the eyes of those to whom it’s done.
And I think that’s the crux of it. That’s the crux of everything in life: “It’s best to see what we do through the eyes of those to whom it’s done.”
A pilot program that awarded poor NYC high school students cash based on school performance won’t be continued, city officials announced.
In an announcement at BronxWorks, a nonprofit social services agency, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg pointed to a few examples of success: High school students who met basic proficiency standards before high school tended to increase their attendance, receive more class credits and perform better on standardized tests; more families went to the dentist for regular checkups.
But the elementary and middle school students who participated made no educational or attendance gains. Neither did high school students who performed below basic proficiency standards before high school.
So it turns out you can’t bribe students to learn if there is nothing in school that is intrinsically motivating for them anyway. Imagine that.
A fascinating look at one progressive private school’s attempt to do things differently amid a deluge of private school madness. It is both sad and frustrating to see the pressure schools have to deal with on a constant basis, and the compromises they’ve had to make as a result.
Remember textbooks? Yeah. Forget about textbooks. Students at Seton Hill University are all getting iPads and access to all their textbooks on the iBook store. I’d say it’s one of the biggest changes in pedagogy since the move from the one-room schoolhouse.
It’s now required: First-years at Seton will receive a 13” MacBook and an iPad, in a clear move to unify campus technology and do away with traditional textbooks.
From an economic standpoint, at least, it’s probably a great decision. I still hurt from paying for those textbooks in undergrad, and unfortunately most weren’t even necessary in print form. Cutting out those print production costs and instead providing textbook materials in digital format would undoubtedly save bundles for students. From a pedagogical standpoint, I can’t say enough good things about trying to incorporate a more democratic, multimedia form of information into higher education settings.
Johnny Truant, asking the inevitable big question that so many people are too afraid to ask: Just what, exactly, is the point of “education”?
My son Austin is five. The kid is brilliant. I know that all parents think their kids are smart, but this is no joke. […]
This year he’ll go off to kindergarten, and he’s going to be bored as a motherfucker. He got bored with preschool over a year ago, and the fact that he’s the oldest kid in his class isn’t helping. They have to move at the speed of the slowest kids, so as not to leave anyone behind. You get a spectrum of kids with different abilities, but it’s one class with one teacher… and so one size must fit all.
I find myself wondering about this, and other things I’ve never thought about when it comes to school, and education, and development.
All the things I’ve always taken for granted as immutable truths — school starts at five and continues for thirteen years, college follows high school, job follows college — are suddenly coming into question.
All at once, I’m no longer sure that what I learned in school is what I’d most like for my kids to learn.
Truant follows by examining the nonconformist childhood backgrounds of entrepreneurs and proposing that their independent mindset may just be among the most crucial to instill in our children for the future – and how Unschooling may be the right education approach to making this all happen.
Interesting results that might add some weight to Jamie Oliver’s efforts to fight childhood obesity:
Today an audience of prestigious economists was told that the healthier school dinners introduced by the celebrity chef had not only significantly improved pupils’ test results, but also cut the number of days they were off sick. The effects, researchers said, were comparable in magnitude to those seen after the introduction of the literacy hour in the 90s.
The proportion of 11-year-olds in Greenwich, south London, who did well in English and science rose after Oliver swept “turkey twizzlers” and chicken dinosaurs off canteen menus in favour of creamy coconut fish and Mexican bean wraps, according to a study of results in the south east London borough.
I haven’t read the full study yet myself, but it’s hard to argue with the idea that having a good lunch might have at least some kind of positive impact on kids in school. You could also say this provides some additional support for approaching education more holistically as well.
Former assistant education secretary Chester E. Finn Jr., commenting in the Wall Street Journal on how to improve our education system:
In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance. Schoolchildren in China attend school 41 days a year more than most young Americans —and receive 30% more hours of instruction. Schools in Singapore operate 40 weeks a year. Saturday classes are the norm in Korea and other Asian countries—and Japanese authorities are having second thoughts about their 1998 decision to cease Saturday-morning instruction. This additional time spent learning is one big reason that youngsters from many Asian nations routinely out-score their American counterparts on international tests of science and math. […]
[N]early every young American needs to learn more than most are learning today, both for the sake of their own prospects and on behalf of the nation’s competitiveness in a shrinking, dog- eat-dog world. Yes, it will disrupt everything from school-bus schedules to family vacations. Yes, it will carry some costs, at least until we eke offsetting savings from the technology-in- education revolution. But even Aristotle might conclude that this is a price worth paying.
Sadly, Finn Jr. has fallen prey to so many misplaced and inherently flawed assumptions in his eloquently-assembled article, and I only wish I had the time to go through them all. A few key points: More of the same kind of education doesn’t get you better results. Our education system is flawed, but not for lack of time our kids spend in school – rather, that our schools are wasting our kids’ natural talent. Another thing: Schooling has never necessarily equaled learning, and a child’s future success isn’t necessarily dependent on their learning classical literature or many of the other things that we still use to compile our definition of “academic performance.” In truth, that phrase – that concept of academic performance – has arguably never been a good indicator of a child’s future success, either personally or economically (which is more often the concern in these Compare-U.S.- Education-to-Other-Countries games).
The simple paradox here, as Sir Ken Robinson has written about before (and as even the business community and the likes of Seth Godin and Dan Pink understand all too well), is that in order to improve our education system and help America “compete”1 in a global market, we have to stop worrying about the big and instead concentrate on the small – individual children and how they best learn. We have to help our schools be the best they can be for each individual student, enabling them to find out what they’re good at – what their “element” is, as Robinson writes – and then helping them develop that talent. Cookie cutter education doesn’t work anymore. We have to make small change first, with an individual child-centered education, and only then the changes ripple outward and we’ll begin to see a meaningful and real difference at the macro level.
Oddly, the only good point that I see Finn making is one that he interprets completely wrong:
With continuing advances in hardware and software, the boundaries among “learning in school,” “learning in other settings” and “learning on your own” will gradually disappear, with potent implications for time spent learning, which need no longer be confined to the classroom hours stipulated in the teachers’ union (or custodians’ union) contract or the 180-day year prescribed in state law (and, in some jurisdictions, not allowed to start before Labor Day).
It’s absolutely true: there is no meaningful boundary between where learning occurs. If anything, though, that’s a reason to advocate for shortening the school days and years, not to increase them. Hopefully there will be a day when schools, as we know them, are gone forever – replaced with active learning that occurs out in the world, mediated and encouraged by mentors and a child’s community, and facilitated by local learning centers, libraries, personal technology and more.
Schools are very good at teaching history. In England, they all know about the Battle of Hastings and the War of the Roses but they haven’t the faintest idea about how the corner shop works or how to get a mortgage.
The focus should be on the world today, what you need to know now rather than what happened three- or four-hundred years ago. Education is way behind where it should be. This education revolution… it’s the same old stuff all over again.
– Edward De Bono, commenting on his native Australian government's supposed "Education Revolution."
A great collection of thoughts from Anna Golden, on what it’s like to be an Atelierista (or resident artist/studio teacher) in a Reggio Emilia- inspired American preschool.
I love Anna’s blog dearly; it’s one of the relative few that talks about kids where I feel at home.
I’ll leave you to read Cruz’s piece, but here are a few quick thoughts:
There is no “quick fix” for education. If there was, we would’ve found it long ago. Education is a continual process, not somebody’s toy model that just needs a bit of glue.
While I’ve generally been supportive of the charter school movement and structure as a mechanism that would eventually allow for and cultivate a broader spectrum of educational philosophies (as well as more focused school leadership), I don’t at all see how turning the charter school movement into what is in essence a corporate takeover of schools is a good idea. For Duncan’s education department to be serious about making charter schools work, they’ll have to lay out some pretty clear guidelines for interested parties about what is required to start up charter schools – including, I adamantly believe, a stipulation that they be nonprofit and have a clear, articulated educational vision and philosophy.
To put it another way: the charter school movement works when it’s about engendering a free gathering of pedagogical ideas and philosophies. It doesn’t work when it’s simply about free market capitalism and which corporation can make a more efficient assembly line.
We are relying on the same criteria for measuring charter school performance as what we’ve previously used with older, pre-charter schools – but not stopping to consider whether the measurement tool itself is faulty? Surely we should stop to question this. While there are many philosophies about what purpose education serves (which in turn play into the ways we choose to evaluation education), and it is valid to differ in this regard, there is still a valid and strongly research-based argument to be made that you can’t shoehorn the benefits of education into a simple congregate of school testing scores. Something more’s gotta change.
I think this starts to get at the most fundamental question that has to dominate our efforts, if we’re to be serious about education reform. That question is, simply: What is education really about?
The actual mechanism or mechanisms for how we enact education reform matter far less than the philosophy that drives our efforts. Education in Sweden and the Netherlands, for instance, operate on a partially voucher-based system but seems to consistently fulfill their cultural expectations for education – as well as rank consistently high in global education ratings. Sure, I think there’s a bare minimal chance that a voucher system would be an (immediately) good thing in the United States – but the point is, these (and other) types of mechanisms can have a wide range of effectiveness simply given a country’s cultural and philosophical expectations of education. This is why vouchers can work in Scandinavian countries, but not here in the United States.
A real answer to this “question” of the effectiveness of charter schools, and of the topic of education reform in general, would surely take more words and space than a website can offer – but I will say this: My intuition is that the real key to “fixing” education doesn’t rest at all in the mechanical elements of reform… but rather in the cultural arena, in our collective values and how we approach education altogether.
While I had to laugh at how the New York Times tried to paint summer school as some fun, nostalgic thing for kids – I think “living nightmare” might be closer in description to how many students regard it– the Times did make a fair point in highlighting how a lack of summer program options seems to have a disproportionately worse effect on lower-income families. Many of these families live in perhaps less play-friendly or safe neighborhoods, in addition to having fewer resources and finances to spend on “constructive” outlets for the summer hours. Without these other options, often these kids can just end up at home in front of the TV. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but speaking as a former kid it is nice to have options.)
Still, not having summer school around - regardless of how important you portray its benefits - doesn’t necessarily have to mean kids’ summers are devoid of substance, no matter the kids’ socio-economic status. As Parent Dish points out – while considering the threat of a summer without another hallmark pastime, summer camp – there’s plenty of perks to just not planning anything:
Dr. Alvin Rosenfeld, psychiatrist and author of “The Overscheduled Child,” tells Newsweek, “Boredom is not necessarily our children’s enemy. It can stimulate [children] to think, create, and hear the soft murmurings of their inner voice, the one that makes them write this unusual story, draw that unique picture, or invent some new game.”
It really is all a matter of perspective. We don’t have to have our schools and camps direct every moment of summer for our kids “so they won’t get bored” – and we don’t even have to worry about making those three months out of school “productive.” If we just give kids a library card, a couple of bucks, and full permission to roam the neighborhood, good things are bound to happen on their own.
Of course nothing has stopped policymakers and education hawks from constantly asking whether lengthening the school year and making school days longer will somehow miraculously “fix” the education system, but now there’s a spectacular $100 million dollar failed attempt in Florida – where a county school district tried to do precisely this, without success – which will hopefully finally lay the matter to rest for the so-called ‘education reformists’.
According to the Florida project’s final report:
The School Improvement Zone was a three-year push at 39 elementary, middle and senior high schools throughout the county. Students participated in a specialized reading program and had a longer school day than students at other schools. They also had a longer school year.
The zone was former Superintendent Rudy Crew’s pet project. It was praised in education circles across the country.
But the investment yielded few results when it came to student performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Tests, according to the district analysis. And both students and teachers said they were exhausted by the extra hour a day in the classroom and the heavy workload.
Stated another way, the “longer school days, better results?” question is like asking whether buying more lemons will net you better orange juice: no, of course it won’t.
It’ll be a great day when we finally realize that “successful” education isn’t so much a matter of quantity, but quality. Just as “real” education can’t be reflected on a test, “real” school reform can’t simply be a matter of money or time.
“Education is not preparation for life, but is life itself.” – John Dewey
A recent Boston University study (whose efforts initially emerged out of the Boston Schoolyard Initiative, a public-private partnership established in the mid-1990s to restore Boston’s playgrounds) considers the important role of environment and play in education, examining whether better school playgrounds have an impact on student achievement.
“I really wasn’t expecting to find anything,” says Russell Lopez, a School of Public Health assistant professor of Environmental Health, citing the relatively small sample of schools. “I thought, even if there is a real effect, there are so few schools involved that it doesn’t have a lot of statistical power.”
When Lopez studied the 2003 results of the fourth-grade English language MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System), standardized tests that almost all public school students must take, he saw no discernible differences between children at the 70 schools with new playgrounds and children at schools with old playgrounds.
But when he looked at math scores, he saw a very different picture. In schools where fourth graders had new playgrounds, 25 percent more kids passed the math MCAS. And that remained true after he and his team controlled for factors such as demographics and the number of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches.
The researchers suggest several reasons for the association between better schoolyards and improved test scores. It may be that students at schools with upgraded playgrounds get more physical activity, which may make them more willing and able to learn once they’re back at their desks. It could also be the result of more parental involvement in the schools. Or, Lopez says, “It could be that students and teachers feel better about going to schools that are not dreary, jail-like settings and that look more inviting. That might set up people to want to learn.”
While Lopez acknowledges the limitations of his ecological study, I believe we’d do well as a society to consider education from a more holistic perspective. Lopez seems to think so, too:
Lopez believes his findings are particularly important at a time when the slumping economy is forcing schools across the nation to tighten their belts. “I worry that the first thing that gets cut is the outdoor space,” he says. “There are a lot of people who think that it’s not important, that all kids need is reading, writing, and arithmetic. And I think what this shows is that getting kids to learn is a broader experience. How places look and how they’re used are as important as what goes on in the classroom.”
