While I agree with the nuts and bolts of Education Week's latest opinion essay, "Reimagining Schools in a New Year," it is the loftier - and, perhaps thus more out-of-focus - goal of "develop[ing] youngsters who are innovators" that needs to be examined more closely. "Innovator" is a kind of spin word, meant to excite and inspire, but it doesn't necessarily have anything at all to do with schooling. Of course, no teacher wants to smother her students' creative spirit. But is it really the job of three million U.S. teachers to turn every one of our 55 million students into "innovators"? How much innovation can humanity really stand? And when does constant and endless innovation turn into nothing much more than an inability to commit?
Yes, we can and should reimagine and reform American education. But let's do it backwards, as if we were planning a lesson. What habits of thought and action should characterize a well-educated American in the 21st century? Once we've figured that out, we can innovate just enough to achieve it.
Friday, January 3, 2014
Saturday, December 21, 2013
All Teachers should be (M)asters
Although I was gratified to read The New York Times' description of Finland's high school curriculum as "one of the most rigorous . . . in the world, including physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, music and at least two foreign languages" - words that could easily describe the curriculum where I teach, minus the philosophy - I was even more interested to read a Q. and A. with Arthur Levine, a prominent U.S. teacher training critic, who advocates not only higher graduation standards for preservice teachers, but higher admissions standards for teacher training programs.
I don't see why teacher training should be an undergraduate program at all. Maybe I'm biased because, in so many of my recent classes to obtain my Ohio teaching license, I was the oldest person in the room (including the professor). But if no one can become a doctor or lawyer as an undergraduate, why should anyone be able to become a teacher with just a B.A.? I've never been able to figure out how 23 year-olds manage classrooms full of 17 and 18 year-olds anyway. It seems like, with few possible exceptions, a recipe for disaster.
Teacher training programs should only be open to Masters' candidates who already have a Bachelor's degree with at least a 3.25 GPA, or substantial life experience. There should be the teaching equivalent of the LSAT to get in as well, measuring general aptitude for the teaching profession, with questions describing difficult teaching situations and asking the candidate to choose among four possible approaches to enhance the learning of the greatest numbers of students.
The problem is that, with fewer teacher license candidates and fewer undergrads majoring in education, schools of education won't have the power or prestige they now enjoy. At my teaching alma mater, the whole department recently moved into a spanking new building with fancy, interactive computer monitors at the entrance telling you where each professor's office is located.
That building was paid for in part by some of my fellow teacher candidates: English teacher hopefuls who couldn't punctuate their sentences in formal style during an e-learning chat, candidates for licenses in grades 4-9 who used "their" for "there," and aspiring math teachers who stopped doing any class assignments after Halloween. There were just as many hardworking students who simply did not understand our education textbooks, and who kept their grades up by parroting back the chapter we were supposed to read that week instead of taking the advice it gave to heart, or thinking critically about it.
We were all paying the same tuition, and part of that money inevitably flowed into the new building. As any teacher worth her salt knows, behavior that is rewarded gets repeated. Too many "Schools of Education" within U.S. universities are being richly rewarded for taking all comers, regardless of their abilities or their future students' needs.
I don't see why teacher training should be an undergraduate program at all. Maybe I'm biased because, in so many of my recent classes to obtain my Ohio teaching license, I was the oldest person in the room (including the professor). But if no one can become a doctor or lawyer as an undergraduate, why should anyone be able to become a teacher with just a B.A.? I've never been able to figure out how 23 year-olds manage classrooms full of 17 and 18 year-olds anyway. It seems like, with few possible exceptions, a recipe for disaster.
Teacher training programs should only be open to Masters' candidates who already have a Bachelor's degree with at least a 3.25 GPA, or substantial life experience. There should be the teaching equivalent of the LSAT to get in as well, measuring general aptitude for the teaching profession, with questions describing difficult teaching situations and asking the candidate to choose among four possible approaches to enhance the learning of the greatest numbers of students.
The problem is that, with fewer teacher license candidates and fewer undergrads majoring in education, schools of education won't have the power or prestige they now enjoy. At my teaching alma mater, the whole department recently moved into a spanking new building with fancy, interactive computer monitors at the entrance telling you where each professor's office is located.
That building was paid for in part by some of my fellow teacher candidates: English teacher hopefuls who couldn't punctuate their sentences in formal style during an e-learning chat, candidates for licenses in grades 4-9 who used "their" for "there," and aspiring math teachers who stopped doing any class assignments after Halloween. There were just as many hardworking students who simply did not understand our education textbooks, and who kept their grades up by parroting back the chapter we were supposed to read that week instead of taking the advice it gave to heart, or thinking critically about it.
We were all paying the same tuition, and part of that money inevitably flowed into the new building. As any teacher worth her salt knows, behavior that is rewarded gets repeated. Too many "Schools of Education" within U.S. universities are being richly rewarded for taking all comers, regardless of their abilities or their future students' needs.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Finland's PISA Panic
Amazing how the latest results of the Program for International Student Assessment tests provoke similar reactions in the Finnish as well as the U.S. press, although a few years ago American educators were feeling Finnish envy. Just shows to go ya: There are no win-wins when the "ed biz" becomes a race, whether to the top, the bottom, or the death.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Poverty and PISA
So it's the first Saturday morning that I've had off in more than a month, and, like Mr. Scott in The Trouble With Tribbles (about 6:15 minutes in), I'm relaxing by catching up on my journal reading. Education Week had a link to Diane Ravitch's blog post about the US's apparently slipping standings in the global education pennant race, and it stirred up memories of how the German press reacted to PISA results when I lived there.
The mainstream media coverage of the Program for International Student Assessment, as I experienced it in Berlin in the 1990s and Bavaria in the early 2000's, makes more of the fact that there's a gulf between rich and poor German students. But it does so with twists that reflect the centuries of cultural development dividing modern Germany's "states," or Laender (plural of Land). For instance, in Berlin - by far Germany's most diverse city, and a Land in and of itself - public officials were whipping up hysteria about Germany's educational future just as they are here in the USA, in my humble opinion with the same underlying goal of alarming and thus appealing to voters at higher middle income levels.
But the PISA results in the early 2000's, after I had moved to Bavaria (Germany's least diverse, most conservative, biggest geographically and wealthiest Land), elicited a kind of smugness that I found typical of many people there: "If Bavaria was a European nation, and not just a Land in Germany, we'd be in the top five among OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) states."
Ravitch makes the point that US schools with a low proportion of students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch rank first in the world in Science and Reading and fifth in Math (well ahead of Finland on all counts, to the possible chagrin of Monty Python music fans). Schools with higher proportions of poor students skew the overall average, just as they do here in Ohio and back in Germany: Berlin schools are dealing with the same kinds of challenges as the school at which I am now teaching (27% lower income students), while Bavaria is more like where I student taught (11% lower income students). No place in Germany, as far as I know, is anything like the Cleveland municipal school where I did my first field experience (97% free or reduced price lunch).
The class I'm teaching now, which is an enhanced study hall for students with GPA's of 2.0 or lower (I'm working with an elective curriculum of study skills, time management, executive functioning, etc.), is incredibly well-supported by my school's administration. My only job is to help these kids bring up their achievement in all their subjects, and I have received everything I need to help me do my job. The students are homeless, have dying parents, are new to the district, variously diagnosed, and overwhelmingly African American; they need tutors, conferences with teachers, therapy, and Internet access - and they get it all. But what they really need, in order to do well in this fairly middle-class school, is a thoroughly middle class past.
Yesterday, I overheard a conversation in my classroom about whether or not one of my students has to pay for lunch. With slightly widened eyes and an air of barely stiffened nonchalance, she shrugged, "No." The millions of American students like her are what make the American education system seem second- or even third-rate by global standards. But in my eyes, she is the reason why public education is now seen as a global good - and she proves that a US public education can still be considered among the greatest in the world: as the "scissor opens wider" (the idiom Germans use to denote the growing gap between income haves and have-nots) here in the US, our ability as educators to keep pace with countries that have much more economically homogeneous student bodies is still cause for celebration.
The mainstream media coverage of the Program for International Student Assessment, as I experienced it in Berlin in the 1990s and Bavaria in the early 2000's, makes more of the fact that there's a gulf between rich and poor German students. But it does so with twists that reflect the centuries of cultural development dividing modern Germany's "states," or Laender (plural of Land). For instance, in Berlin - by far Germany's most diverse city, and a Land in and of itself - public officials were whipping up hysteria about Germany's educational future just as they are here in the USA, in my humble opinion with the same underlying goal of alarming and thus appealing to voters at higher middle income levels.
But the PISA results in the early 2000's, after I had moved to Bavaria (Germany's least diverse, most conservative, biggest geographically and wealthiest Land), elicited a kind of smugness that I found typical of many people there: "If Bavaria was a European nation, and not just a Land in Germany, we'd be in the top five among OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) states."
Ravitch makes the point that US schools with a low proportion of students who qualify for free or reduced price lunch rank first in the world in Science and Reading and fifth in Math (well ahead of Finland on all counts, to the possible chagrin of Monty Python music fans). Schools with higher proportions of poor students skew the overall average, just as they do here in Ohio and back in Germany: Berlin schools are dealing with the same kinds of challenges as the school at which I am now teaching (27% lower income students), while Bavaria is more like where I student taught (11% lower income students). No place in Germany, as far as I know, is anything like the Cleveland municipal school where I did my first field experience (97% free or reduced price lunch).
The class I'm teaching now, which is an enhanced study hall for students with GPA's of 2.0 or lower (I'm working with an elective curriculum of study skills, time management, executive functioning, etc.), is incredibly well-supported by my school's administration. My only job is to help these kids bring up their achievement in all their subjects, and I have received everything I need to help me do my job. The students are homeless, have dying parents, are new to the district, variously diagnosed, and overwhelmingly African American; they need tutors, conferences with teachers, therapy, and Internet access - and they get it all. But what they really need, in order to do well in this fairly middle-class school, is a thoroughly middle class past.
Yesterday, I overheard a conversation in my classroom about whether or not one of my students has to pay for lunch. With slightly widened eyes and an air of barely stiffened nonchalance, she shrugged, "No." The millions of American students like her are what make the American education system seem second- or even third-rate by global standards. But in my eyes, she is the reason why public education is now seen as a global good - and she proves that a US public education can still be considered among the greatest in the world: as the "scissor opens wider" (the idiom Germans use to denote the growing gap between income haves and have-nots) here in the US, our ability as educators to keep pace with countries that have much more economically homogeneous student bodies is still cause for celebration.