The Educational
Not-So-Merry-Go-Round
By Hank Morgan, Progressive Charlestown guest columnist
Here we go again. The purveyors
of public education policy, hard on the heels of the “New Standards,” and the
concomitant “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top” initiatives, have
ushered in yet another round of school “reform,” and its current name is
“Common Core.”
These soi disant educational “gurus,” (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
and his private sector cohorts) are careful not to call it what it essentially
is -- a “back to the basics” emphasis on fundamental skills and traditional
knowledge in the core subject areas English, math, science, and social studies.
For those not old enough to remember, the
catch phrase “back to the basics” recalls the reform movement our government instituted
shortly after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite and, with it, a
mythological space race and a manufactured educational crisis.
Will it go ‘round in
circles? You bet it will, especially in
the realm of public education, where the ostensibly noble objective of “reform”
is actually a crusade to keep educators in perpetual and dizzying cycles of
pedagogical practices and policies. In
public education, the only constant is change, and instability does not breed
success. It is one method that Corporate
America uses to discredit and dismantle public schools (and their real targets – teacher unions) while
producing and promoting private and charter schools.
In the 50-plus years since
Sputnik, educational theorists have foisted upon the public such fallacious
“reforms” as the “Whole Language” approach, which downplayed the emphasis on
fundamentals such as lexical decoding, spelling and proper grammatical usage in
favor of immersion into the rhetorical aspects of written communication, as
well as the “New Math,” wherein the final answer was not as important as the
process used to arrive at it, regardless of the accuracy. It was the journey and not the destination
that mattered.
Educational policy has completed
another revolution in its perpetual orbit. Pearson Education, a textbook and
educational materials publisher that promotes and inculcates the Common Core,
also creates beginning, mid-year, and end-of-year assessments.
Among the skills that 10th
grade students are expected to know include, among other arcana: the meaning of the suffix (-id) – of or
pertaining to -- to determine the definition of a word like “squalid” (foul,
repulsive, neglected, filthy, pertaining to squalor), the proper use of relative
pronouns, the difference between a regular and irregular verb, and analogous
word pair groupings.
None of the above is tantamount
to rocket science, and some of it is essential knowledge, but it is light years
away from the Whole Language approach, which “reform”-minded theorists championed
and instituted for years. It also why
jaded educators have always referred to the latest “reforms,” whatever they
might be at the time, as “old wine, new bottles.”
Further evidence is found in the
latest teaching strategies and methodologies that the Common Core gurus
encourage and district administrators expect lockstep conformity to. One is called the “Flipped Classroom.” As
little as 5 years ago, school administrators were encouraging teachers to
eschew the lecture. The chalk-and-talk
was passé. “No longer be the sage on the stage, but the guide on the side” was
the prevailing credo to encourage heuristic learning.
The flipped classroom, however, entails
students going home and watching lectures
on video. Surely they’ll pay more
attention while enjoying the comforts of home, as soon as they finish fulfilling
their social media rituals, playing their video games, or watching television.
The Common Core State Standards,
although expecting students to be able to correctly identify tone, methods of
indirect characterization, irony, and figurative language, among other literacy
skills, suggests a 50/50 instructional balance of fiction and non-fictional
text at the elementary level, but a 70/30 emphasis on non-fiction for the
middle and high school levels. Herein
they are marginalizing a tried-and true educational tradition extant since the
Sumerians and cuneiform while expecting students to be sophisticated
interpreters of literature by the 9th grade.
Those at the top of the
educational “reform” movement cherry pick research as justification for their
policies. Thus, they ignore the evidence
that indicates the best way to turn reluctant learners into enthusiastic
learners is by allowing them to select their reading material. Instead, they
insist that teachers force-feed students the literary canon, a surefire method
to create reluctant readers, as research indicates.
Reformers ignore the evidence
that teachers and students need more, not less, time teaching and learning, but
justify the essentially useless “advisory” period by citing research that
claims students have a better chance of succeeding if they get to know at least
one adult in the school well. That may
be true, but any teacher will tell you the best way for students and teachers
to become acquainted is via the teaching and learning process, in the
classroom, not through videos watched from home.
Instruction is more effective in
homogeneously grouped classrooms, where proximal teaching – tailoring
instruction according to student knowledge and ability levels – can occur. Instead, districts, with wholehearted
endorsement from Common Core, insist on heterogeneous classrooms wherein
teachers are asked to “differentiate” their instruction according to the
various student abilities – and disabilities.
This is not only a nefarious recipe
for teacher burnout and classroom chaos for even the most experienced and
skilled teachers, but it also deprives all students of the most effective
learning environments. School
administrators claim teachers have a moral obligation to differentiate their
instruction, but they fail to implement policies that enable it to be done
effectively. Relative moralism rears its
hypocritical head again.
Government intrusion into the
public school classroom is both insidious and incessant, and it has been for
over a half a century now. Now Big
Business, in pursuit of the millions to be made in education-based computer
programs and products as well as the dismantling of teacher unions, is
involved. Unfortunately, students become pawns in the political game, a game
that will end only when public schools become obsolete.