Making Sense of What's What


Welcome to Making Sense of What's What!!!


This blog is devoted to addressing those issues which impact our daily lives. Political, educational, relational and transitional issues are all grist for the mill. Life is personal and my need is to personally share with you those things and issues that impact me and others of us as we move through our daily experiences.

Thank you for checking in.

Saturday, May 28, 2011

How to Remove Ignorance from Education Policy



How did California go from the most envied of public school systems in the country to its present state of disrepair? What has happened in the past 40 years to compromise our children’s public education?

There are three reasons for today’s public school difficulties.  First, we have had special interest groups and politicians creating poorly conceived school policy.  Secondly, trained, credentialed and experienced professional educators were not brought into these policy discussions.  Third, there was no consideration of the consequences of these policies prior to their implementation.

Three examples of these failed policies from the past serve to illustrate the point. Relevant Education believed that, instead of following a prescribed college preparatory curriculum, high school students needed to be presented with courses that were of interest to them. The result?  Students were not prepared for college.

 The Whole Language approach to reading removed the teaching of phonological awareness from reading along with word attack skills. The result? Generations of students did not learn how to read or write.

And finally, the decision was made to present  more complicated materials to children at an earlier age.  The result?  Large number of boys became frustrated with language oriented tasks and dropped out of school.  All of these policies failed, all dismantled curricula that had been effective and all turned teacher training on it’s head.   

Today, we have similar ignorance reflected in policy decisions. High stakes testing equates teaching children how to take multiple choice tests with learning the curriculum that the test is suppose to evaluate. It telescopes what is presented to children because other courses do not lend themselves to multiple choice tests.  It has been demonstrated, often times, that when a child is given a test, other than the one that s/he has been prepped to take, s/he does poorly.  So, in effect, the child is not learning the material that the test is suppose to be measuring.

Then we have the notion that if we take these misleading tests scores and couple them with certain statistical techniques, we can evaluate how well a teacher is doing.  This can be done without an evaluator even going into the teacher’s class. No such statistical technique exists.  So, here we are, laying a flawed foundation for evaluating future generations of teachers.

Then, we have corporate management principles being implemented into public schools.  This approach suggests that the more an administrative trainee knows about education, the more hampered they will be in making sound administrative decisions, that is, to see the “broader picture.”  Also, these folks assert, that untrained “teachers” do as well as credentialed, trained and experienced teachers.  Do we really want to trust our children to these same folks whose philosophy of management resulted in the 2008 financial disaster?

Finally, we have the present love affair with charter schools. Charter schools have proven to be no more effective than public schools. Present policy is to close down an underachieving school and hope that some charter school, somewhere will provide a better program than the school it is replacing.  This seems more like a game of craps, than a well thought out education policy.  Also, did it ever occur to someone to sit down and evaluate what it was about a school that was not achieving to determine what needed to be done to make that school more effective?

So what to do?  Don’t allow special interests groups and politicians to make education policy. Create communities of trained, credentialed and experienced  professional educators to be an integral part of any educational policy decision that is considered.  And, for god's sake, think through the consequences of any policy decision before it is implemented. We cannot afford to derail  the educations of future generations of children who have been entrusted into our care.

Thanks for stopping by,

Namaste,

Jim Farwell