Everyone has gone to bed, worn out from Black Friday shopping and a belated Thanksgiving dinner this evening with a dozen people (five of whom work for public schools, plus at least one education major home from college). So here I sit, listening to Van Morrison sing Rave On John Donne on my iPod and contemplating the words of Greg Thompson on school reform – the incompatibility of an “innovative, creative, vibrant learning environment” and “common standards supported by textbooks and assessed by standardized tests.”
I read a blog by Wesley Fryer (Moving at the Speed of Creativity) and he pointed Thompson’s words out to me a little over a week ago. Since then they’ve haunted me. Frankly, I’ve been scared he’s right. But maybe not.
Part of the problem is how the ideas involved in Thompson’s thesis are grouped. I’m not sure common standards are a problem. Sometimes, the textbooks and curricula that support those standards present issues and provide controversy – especially when placed in the hands of a workforce that isn’t always as well trained or as well motivated as it could be. I really don’t see the administration of tests as a hindrance to the educational process. I suspect that Thompson has a problem with what we are currently looking for in such assessment, not with assessment itself.
Of course, that’s the issue. What are we testing for? It’s a question of defining what we value. Often I get the impression that we’re not sure what we value. If there’s a consensus, it’s not clear to me. Several years of No Child Left Behind seems to have left us able only to say something like this: We want kids to be able to read well and be good at math (things we already wanted long before NCLB came along); and beyond that we’re not sure what we want kids to be able to do, but we want them to be able to do it really well.
Teachers often feel forced into being preoccupied with relatively constant, incremental change. Reading groups that were heterogeneous will be homogeneous this year and the groups that were homogeneous will now be heterogeneous. Math blocks will be expanded by 30 minutes this year. Student progress (grades) will be documented differently. And there’s a new system for tracking the time students spend in intervention sessions.
At the same time, someplace in the background someone is asking this: If we didn’t have any schools and had to start from scratch, are these the schools we’d build? And everyone knows that the question is supposed to be rhetorical. The obvious answer is, “Of course not.”
We have meetings and talk about how we could take what we’re doing, and do it better. And at the end of the day it’s still what we’re doing. Someone says that next week we’re going to try small groups instead of whole groups for this or that part of the reading block. No one ever says that next week we’re going to take the kids outside and have them lie face down in the grass before the dew lifts off and then encourage them to describe the experience (and perhaps read Whitman to them afterwards). If we did that, we’d no longer be doing what we are doing (and we’d probably get phone calls).
I’ve talked about the metaphor before. We’re building an airplane while we’re flying it. The administrators are our engineers, directing us to pop the little rivets into place and screw on a bolt here or there. Small changes. The image (flying in an unfinished plane) mostly inspires fear in me. But that’s not my main complaint. My main complaint is that I don’t want to arrive at my destination in a plane. I’d rather ride a unicorn, or perhaps saddle Pegasus if I simply must fly…
Everyone seems to agree that the system we have in place now needs to be tinkered with in order to make it better, assuming that we’re going to keep it. Most people also seems to agree that profound, radical change needs to occur and that the current system needs to be replaced. But we’re stuck there, because no one seems to know exactly what should replace the current system. And if you really want to create chaos in the room, step up to the microphone and whisper the idea that perhaps the new system could be systems, and that maybe a new uniformed whole isn’t what we need. Maybe alternatives and diversity of educational choices would best serve society. There could be room for more than one idea…
I’m rambling. I think I’ll go stand outside in the snow for a few minutes and then go on to bed like everyone else.