The Old Friar's Blog

Problems in American Education - Part 22: Competition

2005-08-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

Sometimes as Americans we seem to feel that we have the corner on the free enterprise system and on the concept of competition as a cornerstone for progress. Perhaps its the Puritan in us that still surfaces, but we want to believe in an underlying theme that implies that success in a free system is evidence of virtue and that only those who deserve to succeed will succeed.

I too have to admit that I am a big fan of competition. I love sports, for instance, and, as a long-suffering Red Sox fan, I am still floating on the romance of what happened last year. Moreso, I believe that competition in a free system can bring out the best in children as they strive to realize potential. There is a nobility and esprit d’corps benefits in demonstrating competitive effort and I believe that nobility is one of the finest by-products we can hope to have surface in the learning process. When I was very young, idealistic, and somewhat naive, I did have some concerns about the lack of a level playing field that led me to pursue some socialistic inclinations in the way I thought; but as I grew older, while I still seriously regretted our tendency to let that playing field slope, I came to realize that ours was still the most effective of all systems as far as affording opportunity for all.

As an educator and also as a coach, I realized that fair and clean competition offered a great chance for students to have fun while striving to do their best in matching their skills against others. In many ways, it looked like, and still looks like, a great motivational tool and very close to a win/win way to approach learning.

The key problem, however, is that, as public educators in what is supposed to be an egalitarian society, we always have to remember that we have a responsibility to teach both the winners and the losers in a competitive environment. One of the unspoken whispers that you hear if you are a thinking educator is the one that says losers don’t count anymore after they have lost. Actually, by definition, it is the system itself that promotes that notion by saying that winning means you go on to a higher level, or a higher grouping, or a better team, or whatever. The trap is one in which educators are told that the kid who wins deserves the fruit of victory while the losers are sharply dismissed to much lower expectations. There are precious few opportunities for comebacks in our system. Very few do what the Red Sox did - win the wild card and then beat the Yankees after being down three games to none. Sorry - had to get that one in.

But I repeat, one of the most important contentions of this series is that winning does not make a child more worthy for ultimate success, just as having wealthy parents does not make him or her more worthy. Conversely, losing at an immature age should not condemn a child to a lower bracketing that forecloses opportunities to step up to that level playing field in the future.

As educators, we do not have the dubious luxury of labeling our students so quickly. We must remember that we are still dealing with children. The nature of children is to make mistakes. That means that sometimes they will lose in the game of competition. Our job in education is, to the best of our ability, to take those losses and turn them into victories - creating steps on which students can rise up to overcome.

This installment is admittedly very philosophical and abstract; but it is not too difficult to take the thoughts and see their application in daily school activities and programs. It covers an underlying principle we see as operative in American education and it is one of those principles that deserves some examination. On one level, it is a principle that can serve a purpose if used in moderation and with good judgement. On another level, one that can be seen to surface a bit too often, it can lead to excess and self-service for those who enjoy early success or who seek to stratify our schools, something that ironically seems to represent the antithesis of what our country is supposed to represent. Think about it and think about what you have seen for yourself in observation of American education. Competition is clearly one of those methodological tools in which you can have too much of a good thing.

Problems in American Education - Part 21: Home and Parents First

2005-08-17T15:45:00.000-07:00

I have recently had some conversations about this series with people I respect. They contend that, while they believe I make some good points, many of the reforms I suggest won’t work unless changes first take place in the American home. Parents, they feel, are the keys to change, and without parental cooperation and commitment, there is not much that is possible.

I really don’t have much of an argument with that point of view. It makes common sense and forging an alliance with parents is certainly a major objective that we must clearly keep in mind as we work on these problems. There is a danger in it, however, and it is a danger I have feared for quite some time.

My experience has been that educators (and I have worked with many who fall into this trap) often use this caution of my friends as an excuse for inaction. If you do nothing about these problems, in other words, it is a little too easy to rationalize your passivity by contending that parents must be on board first. It’s like the old comic routine where something has gone wrong and the group is approached to see who is responsible. As soon as they are confronted, everybody simultaneously points their fingers to blame someone else. The result is that the status quo is maintained and no one takes responsibility for taking the first step in the right direction.

This does not mean that educators are always wrong when they blame parents. Quite to the contrary, they are often correct - maybe most of the time they are correct; but that does not excuse inaction on the part of educators. One of the basic rules of golf is that you play the ball where it lies. You have to work with what you have, not what you wish it would be. If we have problems in education, we cannot afford the luxury of analyzing what other groups need to do. Certainly we can do whatever we can to push those groups in the right directions, but we need to attack the problems directly with all the tools (and resources) we have at our disposal. Ultimately, it is a matter of credibility.

Problems in American Education - Part 20: Progressive vs. Permissive

2005-08-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

I used to argue all the time with an old principal of mine about what it meant to be a progressive person or (shudder the thought) a liberal in education. He was very conservative by nature and application and was not ashamed to admit that he thought of liberals as being permissive and indulgent, the kind of educators who had allowed the state of education to get to the point where standards were eroding or were already destroyed.

Actually, we got along just fine and enjoyed a relationship of mutual respect, but he loved to needle me on this issue. He knew that I was proud to be considered a progressive and that I embraced change and tended to look askance at the kind of daily pragmatism that I felt was the default stance of traditional administrators. I believed that good educators needed to stand for something more than just doing things the way they always had been done; and, although I thought he was a good principal, he did get to me when he took a stubborn stance or did what was expedient when it was time for examination of new ideas.

In an attempt to avoid drifting too far from the question at hand, I do contend that it is very possible to be progressive without being permissive. Progress when applied to education, it should be remembered, simply means a state of willingness to accept change and a new and better way of doing things than the way they were done before. It has nothing to do with being permissive.

Actually, I was and still am quite far from being permissive. While I do embrace change, I am a great supporter of structure as part of that change. Children do need structure in order to ground themselves in the learning process and in all of the other foundations that are necessary to grow up.

That structure, however, is not the sole property of “traditionalism,” to brand a term. It is a somewhat aphilosophical state or reality that we should promote in schools to help students to learn self-discipline and direction creation in their lives.

Once again, this story cites an example of the evil we do when we label people and then draw conclusions about them and their motives derived from expectations associated with the label. Education is often plagued by such faulty reasoning and the malady has had a tendency to slow process and even lead educators and parents down roads that are counterproductive and divisive.

Problems in American Education - Part 19: Some Good Ideas from the Recent Past

2005-08-09T04:44:00.000-07:00

We really should not talk about the tendency to reject innovative ideas if we do not have a list of innovative ideas to promote as good ones that would represent significant progress in education if used in a widespread manner. The purpose of this essay will be to examine and summarize some of the best ones observed over the past couple of decades. All of these, if applied assiduously, consistently, and with commitment, hold promise for the future in that they fit the needs of what students will find in the world of the 21st century and because they imply the flexibility for change that has become such an important part of our lives. None of them are radical, or even very new. You will recognize most and some you will note have been around for a long time. The trick is, as asserted, to consistently apply them and to promote widespread and sincere use. These are some of the things your public schools should already be using if they are employing best practices.

Heterogeneous grouping as much as possible - especially in grades elementary through grade 9

This concept has already been beaten to death in these blogs. ‘Nuf said,’ but it is crucially important.

Performance Based Assessment

My senior project program is a great example of this, but it is something that should be employed in many other programs at all levels. It’s beauty is in its simplicity; but, unfortunately, that simplicity is still lost on some school systems. The idea stresses that students should not be evaluated only on what they know and what discrete skills they have. They also should be evaluated on how well they can apply what they know in order to get a job done. Why? Because that is the “way of the world” and that is what we should preparing students to do in order to be successful in the real world.

Cooperative Learning and Student Team Learning

The concept of cooperative learning has been around for a long time, but many teachers feel they do it when they just tell kids to break down into small groups of three or four in order to try something or work on a project. A more significant commitment to this great idea is necessary in most schools in order to gain its full benefit. As was the case with Performance Based Assessment, use of cooperative learning is based on the desire to create an environment similar to the adult work place and to encourage student interaction. In the adult work place, however, it is rare that people are asked to break down into small groups for just a few minutes, or even just for a few days. Rather, the more frequently used business model is one in which workers are assigned to teams of workers for longer periods of time in order to complete a task or to set procedures for repeated completion of similar tasks. There is very little of that kind of thing done in most schools, with the possible exception of on athletic teams.

One of the best procedures I ever used that incorporates this attempt to institutionalize teamwork was developed by a man named Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University back in the ‘70s. It was called Student Team Learning. Student Team Learning was orginally devised to promote racial and ethnic integration in schools, but its benefits, once developed, touched many other areas of learning. In terms of cooperative learning, what it did was structure team assignments in such a way that all the teams assigned were characterized by total heterogeneity and a mission that lasted for a while. Students were encouraged to get to know each other and were required to find ways to work with one another even if teammates were not students who would normally be in association with one another. Teachers intentionally structured teams in such a way that races, genders, and perceived ability levels would need to work together on the same team and would need to support each other as much as possible.

Differentiated Instruction

This used to be called individualized instruction. The basic idea is to assess the current needs of individual students and design instruction to flexibly meet those needs. Many teachers have feared this approach for as long as it has existed because they understandably worry about how difficult it would be to devise plans for so many different students, particularly in the kind of heterogeneous classes emphasized in these essays. This is one of those ideas that is obviously a good thing but that requires some creative thinking to employ. Passive individualization is one way to do it that gains the benefit while minimizing teacher fears.

Passive Individualization

One of the great things about Student Team Learning mentioned above is that it allowed for passive individualized. Rather than attempt to devise different programs for all students, an impossible task, Student Team Learning simply offered the same material to all students in the class, but it structured a way to individualize expectations and the pace students would learn. It was a little complicated to plan at first, and it was sometimes difficult to explain to parents in the way different results were expected from different students, but it worked beautifully. Much of the beauty came from the fact that it was unbelievably flexible. Students learned at their own rate and were challenged daily to stretch themselves to higher levels, exactly what every teacher should hope for in his or her classroom. It also took away the excuse for failing to individualize.

Block Scheduling

Ever since classes were scheduled, especially on the middle school and high school levels, there has been a debate about how long those classes should be. Compromise has almost always been the rule of the day - compromise between the opinions of the teachers and administrators involved and compromise designed to meet other scheduling priorities in the school. Seldom has the decision been made based on learning theory and the needs of students.

Predictably this has led to some of the worst possible choices in regard to the length of classes. Most middle school and high school classes are 45 to 50 minutes long, too long to sustain student interest in traditional “I talk, you listen” classes and not long enough to sustain continuity in project-oriented classes in which students learn effectively by actually doing something, sequential activities, instead of listening and taking notes. The 45-50 minute time slots allow for just enough time to squeeze in the number of courses that satisfy traditional values and political concerns, and they also satisfy the need for the unions to get their teachers into a measureable and discrete modular day that can be easily negotiated.

One of the best innovations I have seen that deals with this issue is block scheduling. When I was finishing my teaching career and just before I went into administration, I had the opportunity to participate with a team of educators who were investigating block scheduling for possible implementation in our high school. We visited two high schools on Cape Cod and found that everyone loved it. It was later implemented in my school after I left.

Block scheduling calls for a program in which students attend classes that may be as long as 1-1/2 to 2 hours long, but the classes do not meet every day. The total number of hours is about the same, but much more continuity is possible in each class because students are given the opportunity to immerse themselves in the work for substantial amounts of time. There are some shortcomings related to logistics, but the overall effect is very positive.

Perhaps the most significant consideration in moving to block scheduling is that if forces teachers to teach in a different way. Traditional teachers find it very difficult to do if they fail to make significant changes in the way they deliver their subject matter. Long lectures simply do not work because students cannot maintain focus for that length of time. Teachers, therefore, are forced to make their classes much more activity oriented and must plan for projects and for student involvement in performance-based assessments. If you think about it, that is not such a bad corollary benefit. An honest assessment here would need to admit that this perceived beneficial change is a large reason for our support of this idea. It changes teaching in a way that is much needed. You can easily predict which teachers will oppose this idea and which ones will embrace it, but there is little doubt that it is advantageous if strong school leadership can stick with it and make the necessary adjustments.

Structural Systems Approaches

Structure is a good thing. That may sound a little surprising to some coming from a writer who admits to a progressive philosophy, but that’s why labels don’t work when it comes to categorizing people.

When I first started to teach middle school in the late ‘70s, I thought I might leave the field of education at the end of the year. I tried to teach my eighth and sixth graders the same way I taught my high school students in my previous job, and it simply did not work. As so often happens in life, the trauma I experienced that year actually led to something good in that it forced me to reassess my teaching to make significant changes.

I spent a great deal of time thinking through the problem. What did my students need and how could I meet those needs in a more effective manner? Some of the answers came from ideas I have already explored in these pages; but another significant adjustment came in the form of understanding their need for structure. Like most human beings, and perhaps to a greater degree, adolescents are insecure and need the stability provided by knowing what to expect, by repetition of structured process that allows them to comfortably transition from one day to another knowing that they can be successful in what they are doing in a class. By introducing a very organized systems approach in my classes, I was able to promote that comfort level that allowed me to relate to my students and for them to relate to me in my attempts to make intellectual contact. In the eighth grade many of them were still struggling with the classic middle school transition from concrete to abstract thinking, and systemized structure and organization made that possible and comfortable.

I designed my courses in such a way that students could systematically and measureably accumulate points toward their grade. I introduced repetitive approaches to use in sequencing their work and assessments that allowed them to easily predict how to approach their study. We introduced high-interest media presentations about the subject matter and supported those presentations with consistent media evaluation tools that students could learn how to use and then use again in predictable formats. The significant impact on the classes was one in which stability and comfort were promoted and the volatility normally associated with adolescents was largely replaced with focus and purpose. It worked and, quite frankly, it helped me to become a better teacher - a fact that I am quick to use when teachers tell me that they cannot make the transition from being high school teachers to being middle school teachers. A peripheral thought here is that I sincerely believe that one of the best things that ever happened to me in my career was that I was forced to teach at so many different grade levels. That experience made me learn how to teach and afforded me the opportunity to see the big picture, something that many teachers never have the opportunity to observe.

Computer Assisted Instruction

Although this has been an important part of education for close to 30 years, it is still new in relationship to traditional approaches used for many years before computers were invented. Once again, the computer revolution was an event to which education was slow to react. As with so many other transitions, it was obvious to everyone in the late twentieth century that the computer was taking its place with telephones, radio, television, automobiles, and other advances as an instrument that would change the world; yet many educators were skeptical. Some interpreted it as a toy that would not represent substantial and meaningful progress; yet others felt that it would be counterproductive in their attempts to have children master basic skills and understand traditional subject matter. Unfortunately, these were rationalizations for inaction and only served to slow what was inevitable.

Eventually, however, the transitional importance of computer technology took on such massive proportions that virtually all educators were forced to realize that computer literacy was about as important as reading, writing, and simple computation when it came to establishing skills required for all teachers. We are still, however, sorting out how to most effectively use this technology in the classroom. Some of this indecision is due to the complexity of the technology, but a more important reason for hesitation now has to do with the need to think in different ways.

The most important understandings that need to used in meshing computer approaches with traditional curricular offerings are (1) that the computer has to be seen exclusively as a tool (or a means) to achieve goals or ends of educational programs, not as an end in itself, (2) that it should be seen as something that accelerates learning, (3) that it makes certain extended and sophisticated processes possible that would otherwise not be possible, and (4) that it creates opportunities for creativity in learning that need a kind of attention and planning never seen before.

Yes, there are great dangers associated with opening the door to cyberspace for our children. We cannot watch them every second and assure ourselves that appropriate use is always the norm. We have seen a terrible problem with the use of the Internet, for instance, that rears its ugly head almost daily in our schools and spills over back and forth between the school and the home. As a junior high assistant principal, that problem nearly drove me crazy. Nevertheless, we cannot allow these distractions to keep us from making progress in this extremely important area of 21st century education and preparation for adulthood. Children make mistakes. That is part of growing up. The computer, just by its nature, expands the playground opportunity for those mistakes to take place; but that does not give us an excuse to deny access to this critically important tool.

What many educators failed to recognize early on was that the computer actually solved one of our major problems of the 20th century - the evolution children as couch-potatoes. Another major invention of that century, the television, had nurtured generations of young people devoted to a very passive approach to life. Creativity and expanding horizons were stifled and we all felt helpless in our attempts to find a way to deal with the pervasive problem. The computer took that same window, the monitor, and turned it around, making it an active process in which young people were forced to interact with the machine and, the key, transform it into a tool for creation. As with all other aspects of life, it is our duty as adults to show children how to use this powerful tool tastefully and for positive purposes - to avoid excessive use of video games, for instance, and to create opportunities for academic and vocational project orientation instead. That is how the computer is and will best be used in education.

Problems in American Education - Part 18: Real Life Education

2005-08-05T04:22:00.000-07:00

One of the great mysteries in education, in my opinion, has to do with our reluctance to readily accept even common sense, “no-brainer” solutions to problems. We tend to be suspicious of everything, no matter how pure the motive or how logical the plan. It’s like we Red Sox fans used to be before last year’s championship, always expecting that the worst is just about to happen and convinced that the worst will happen if we allow ourselves to indulge in optimism about new ideas. Most theorists believe that we must take risks to make progress, but the conservative nature and political consciousness of many educators makes them very reluctant to take even minimal steps in directions that deviate from what has been the norm. This may be the biggest single reason for the stagnation we have seen in education over the past century. It leads us to always play catch-up and, when we get there, we have failed to deal with new issues on the horizon because of the same cautions we failed to deal with them before.

Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock was one of the most popular books circulating through academia back in the ‘70s. Toffler seemed to put his finger squarely on the pulse of what was bothering us as a society and, not only did he identify what most of us had been feeling for quite some time, but he also offered a logical plan for dealing with the ailment.

It is probably unfair to capsulize Toffler’s thesis, but we need to in order to get to the point. Toffler’s contention, you may remember, was that we were being overwhelmed by the speed of change in twentieth century America and that the resulting confusion threatened to destroy many of our beliefs about how society plans to move forward into the future. Further, he quite logically concluded that his thesis, if true, had profound implications on how we needed to educate our youth if they were to lead successful lives.

As obvious as Toffler’s theories seemed to be in a newly computerized world, they were as challenging to education as they were obvious. He stated that we needed to revamp our thinking and give up many of our beliefs about what should be taught in our schools. We needed to come to the realization that it was just as important to teach our children how to learn as it was to teach them specific subject matter. The future, he said, would continue to witness accelerated change and the study of specific subject matter and even study in preparation for a particular career could actually be counterproductive in a world that would be vastly different in the near future and that would change again shortly afterward. He cited sociological and demographic studies indicating that, more and more, we would be leading lives of multiple careers, lives that required skills related to flexibility and a level of learning generalization that would allow change of direction quickly in an information age. The liberal artist and the “Renaissance Man” would be making a big comeback, and Toffler felt that education needed to respond to that reality.

It is now quite obvious that Toffler was very prophetic in what he predicted in Future Shock and in the several other books he wrote expanding and further defining his original theme. We definitely know this now and have felt the impact; but we also knew then that he was simply reading the handwriting on the wall that we all could see. Our thoughts may not have been quite as clear or coherent as his; but virtually everyone who read his work felt the phenomenon of the “oh yeah, of course” light going on in his or her head.

One of the most important of the untold stories of the late twentieth century is the one about how slowly our educational establishment reacted to the reality so clearly explained by Toffler and how resistant it was to seeing the nose sitting squarely on it’s face. The message was and is for schools to teach process in addition to subject matter. Notice, that statement did not imply that subject matter should be ignored; it indicated that mastery of process was necessary if young people were to be properly prepared to react to a rapidly changing environment. You would think that such an implication would be pretty obvious in our society; but it was remarkable to observe how that need was met with intransigence and retrenchment in the latter part of the last century. Once again, the “back to basics” movement seemed to be the culprit. No matter how pressing the need for change, reactionary forces in education argued that a better strategy would be to return to the values of life that were honored when life was more simple. They capitalized on the nostalgic premise of the simpler life in convincing many that change was a bad thing, denying the reality that change was taking place whether we liked it or not. It was difficult to argue against people who operate from such a premise because there is an undeniable charm attached to the kind of existence they remember from their childhood; but the problem is that it promotes an ostrich-like strategy that suggests burying our heads in the sand.

One of the clearest examples I encountered had to do with the most innovative program I worked with in my career. A brilliant young principal came to our school in the late 1980’s. He understood Toffler’s ideas and was also very well versed in the strategies proposed by the best academic thinkers. He immediately formed a steering committee for the school (teachers, parents, community leaders, etc.) and charged them with the task of developing a mission for the school, a mission defined by a set of competencies that we wanted our graduates to have when they left our school.

It was obvious that he was looking at process in these competencies and, almost immediately, his initiative was met with suspicion. What was he doing? Was this some kind of liberal agenda? Was this an attempt to make a name for himself to create a stepping stone for a bigger job? Why did he want to bring change to a school that already had a strong academic reputation?

To his credit, the young principal fought through the early criticism and moved forward on the competencies that were proposed by the steering committee. One of the competencies, life-long learning, was used to form a foundation for a new program referred to as the senior project and that is where I got involved. The senior project sought to have students in their senior year (remember, the year that is quite often a largely wasted year in many high schools) take a year-long course in which they would develop a project in a field of interest, culminating with a major presentation in which they would submit their work to the educational community. He asked me to pilot the program as an elective with a small group of students with the understanding that, if it was successful, we would eventually expand it and make it a senior requirement for graduation and a model for methodologies promoting process, or performance based assessment, in all of our courses.

Well, the pilot was successful and that was when the fun began. The careful planning required by the principal and the human resources he devoted to the idea were largely responsible for its success. The most committed teachers in the school were assigned to the project and they came to believe in it in much the same way as did the principal. Wonderful projects were completed by the students, even by those who first balked at the unique and innovative approach; and there was a clear indication that the methodology was accomplishing exactly what was intended, a vehicle for demonstrating the process mastery students needed to face the real world.

Remarkably we found that an unexpected result was a marked success enjoyed by students who previously had great difficulty in school - particularly special education students. We attributed that result to the fact that their special designations over the years had led to a strategic compensation program that stressed process and better prepared them for the rigors of actually creating something in a real-life situation. Conversely, our most capable students, many of whom were accustomed to using their innate ability to just put assignments together at the last minute, resented the sequential patterns required by process orientation and had some of the greatest difficulty adapting to the requirements. Quite often, in the end, and after a tremendous amount of complaining, they tended to come up with brilliant final projects; but their resentment told a much bigger story about the state of traditional education and its connection (or lack of connection) to real life.

Anyway, our first attempts to make senior project a requirement for graduation met with tremendous resistance. The “college-bound” students described above were the first to lead the charge. Many of them felt that it was an insult to their intelligence to be forced to follow prescribed process. Their parents appeared at Board of Education meetings, claiming that senior project was just not for everyone. Their implication was clear. “Back-to-basic” board members jumped on the band wagon, ignoring the obvious success of the program in its early years, complained that it was just another liberal erosion of the academic rigor that we should be promoting in education.

In the meantime, positive reaction to the program was spreading. Teachers from other schools visited our school to see what was going on. Our own teachers, except for the most entrenched, came around to the methodology for use in their classes one at a time. A foundation was established designed to finance those projects that required materials. A popular national magazine wrote an article in which senior project was cited as one of the country’s most innovative programs.

Yes, the board eventually approved the program as a requirement for graduation, but only after numerous battles and grudging and bitter resistance from members who could not deny its popularity and clear success with the vast majority of students who were willing to demonstrate the effort that was required. The team who was involved in putting the program together was more than proud of what was achieved and the impact on the school; but the key question still remains as to why such an obviously promising idea was so difficult to implement in a community that should have embraced it with open arms. More important, what does this say about our chances for progress in the face of inevitable change in our society? The problems that were inherent and substantial in my situation are a significant part of a much bigger untold story in American education as it exists at this time. Why does a system that is so obviously in need of change so resistant to change? What is wrong with a system that so defiantly resists innovation? These are very fundamental questions and, as of now, they go largely unanswered.

Problems in American Education - Part 17: Middle School vs. Junior High School

2005-08-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

Well, it has been almost two weeks now, and I am ready to go again, refreshed after fulfilling a lifetime desire to vacation in Alaska. The trip was great, including the cruise through the “inside passage,” but now it’s time to get back into harness. Let’s restart with a topic that should not be too long in explanation and get back into the “swing of things.”

Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s a movement started that made great sense. The old concept of the junior high school started to move into a period of decline and it was replaced slowly, but surely and in most school districts, with the middle school. The reason it made great sense was because it was no contest - a “no brainer” as it would be termed today. The old junior high school idea was based on just about nothing at all, no theory, no research. It existed out of confusion early in the twentieth century about what to do with the middle years. Early theorists knew we needed a primary or elementary level to teach basic skills and information. They were also pretty certain about the importance of a school that would finish the job, a high school, the culminating institution for public education, that should be designed graduate a finished product.

They were understandably confused, however, about what to do with the middle level student, the adolescent. The undpredictability of kids at that age and the widely scattered perceptions of achievement at that point made the creation of a viable model for their education next to impossible, or so they thought. They had to provide something, however, for the 13- to 15-year olds; so, lacking a better idea, they decided to take the high school model and scale it down a peg or two. Hence, we had the creation of the junior high school, a school that was neither here nor there and that tried to bridge the gap between childhood and young adulthood.

The problem was that adolescense was exactly the wrong time to artificially place an institution that was not really based on a clear mission. Aside from infancy, it was the time of the fastest and most significant growth of children - physically, emotionally, and intellectually. It was the time when most students were attempting to make that all-important jump from concrete thinking to abstract thinking. In short, it was and is probably the time when children are the most vulnerable and confused, at least as far as creating foundations for their adult lives.

The new middle school movement tried wisely to address this problem by creating schools that were particularly designed to deal with transition. In what is probably the most popular grade configuration for middle schools, the ideal school took students in grades 6 to 9 and gradually sought to bring them through the stages I just mentioned - taking a childlike student entering grade 6 and nurturing that student while moving into a position by the end of grade 8 when the student was ready for the independence and rigors of high school. Unlike the junior high school, this movement and this model were based on sound theory and research about the needs of children at the ages and grades in question. Emphasis was to be put on process education and social interaction skills, seeking to help students to become active learners and encouraging them to prepare to hit the ground running when they moved to the next level and would be faced with more advanced courses and specialization.

Without question, the middle school has been a great success in achieving the goals that were in need of mission change. Ironically, however, the movement to the middle school model was and is seriously challenged in some circles, even today - 30 to 40 years after we saw the change in names. The reluctance to move in this direction comes from several concerns. One relates to confusion about what grade levels should be included. As noted, the most common middle school structure dropped grade levels from the old junior high from 7-9 to 6-8, but politics, financial considerations (probably most common as schools struggled to fit a new concept into existing school buildings with enrollments they could not control), and other factors brought about other configurations. Some middle schools were only 7-8. Others were 5-8. Still others were 6-9. Others called themselves intermediate schools, arguing that an earlier transition needed to take place before middle school, and went with a 5-6 configuration before sending students to a 7-8 building. Later we will consider the almost obsessive reluctance of educators to embrace change, but suffice it to write here that the confusion over configuration was enough in some school districts to stop progress or very considerably slow it down.

There was more behind it though that festered beneath the surface. Keeping the sequence of years in mind is important. The middle school concept was ready to roll over the antiquated junior high school in the early ‘60s, but this was at the same time that the “back to basics” paranoia also came into vogue. There were those, and they still exist, who liked the very basic and very classic structure of the old junior high school because they believed that it put the emphasis in the right place. They liked the idea of their children studying and working like high school students in a mini-high-school clone. The fact that those children were not ready for the high school model made little difference and so did the overwhelming body of research that had been done about the learning process. Opponents of middle schools just liked the way the junior high school looked and felt it would do a better job in getting their children ready for college. It had been good enough for them, or so they thought; so it should be good enough for their children.

This mentality definitely slowed down the change. Thankfully, the battle seems almost over. Some junior highs still exist, but the school districts in which they exist are, by this time, at least offering lip service to the need to move toward the middle school concept. The greater danger in the early 21st century is in finding the energy and financial support to create and maintain “true” middle schools. Without the proper professional development, leadership, and ongoing maintenance, it is extremely easy for the modern middle school to fall into the patterns of the old junior high school - emphasizing things like ability grouping and information acquisition instead of nurturing transition and process education, helping students learn how to learn. The battle to create and maintain middle schools is ongoing and all-too-often subject to budget issues, political pressure, the aforementioned attitudes, and union restrictions, but it is clearly a positive direction that is a key to the ultimate improvement of American education.

Recess

2005-07-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

I will be away for a few days, but I hope to resume this series in early August.

Problems in American Education - Part 16: The Current State of Subject Matter

2005-07-17T03:54:00.000-07:00

There has been an unfortunate blending in education over the last half century between two mutually attracted phenomena whose questionable marriage does not receive nearly enough attention.

People have correctly believed for many years that teachers are the most frustrated professionals. Intelligent people, almost by definition, many teachers either consciously or subconsciously feel that they are underemployed, that they are capable of more than just explaining watered down versions of their subject matter to children on a level well below their personal understanding of the material. They think back to their days in college or graduate school and harbor dreams about what it would be like to get really immersed in their subjects and become college professors.

Human nature being what it is, this frustration exacts a creeping toll in school programs over the years. On the high school level it means that there is a great temptation for teachers and curriculum designers to bring college level work down to the high school. In the middle school, where teaching is the most difficult of all the grades, many frustrated teachers seek to prove their worthiness to teach high school (the big status issue in American public education) by actually teaching high school level courses in the middle school. Naturally, it also impacts on the elementary level, although less so, with teachers in the higher elementary grades teaching material that used to be thought of as appropriate only for adolescent students.

So this is the first of the two tendencies that has evolved almost unnoticed over many years, and inclination to juice up the curriculum beyond what is traditionally thought of as appropriate for age and maturation levels.

The other has to do with pressure from the outside (particularly from parents) that dovetails very nicely in feeding into the teacher frustration cited above. There is a consistently increasing pressure from parents to intensify the curriculum (as the parents define curriculum) to gain early advantage for their children. The motivation is to get children into college, and, most preferably, into the “best colleges,” whatever that may mean.

These two orientations feed on each other and help to create a reality in our schools that is dangerous because it “seems like” a win/win situation. Actually, it is a win/win situation for the teachers and the parents. The high school teachers get self-fulfillment by feeling like college professors when they are not and middle school teachers feel like high school teachers when they are not, etc. Parents feel satisfied because they enjoy seeing their children “challenged” and advanced to a point where they are certain to get into a top-notch college. The race is on, so to speak, and these two interest groups just keep pushing to pile it on.

The problem here is that there should be a third part in this equation, the children themselves; and it is my feeling and observation over the years that this unholy marriage of motives puts many of them in a “lose” situation. Clearly, the obvious pressure related to these trends tends to promote grouping practices in the lower grades to create classes of brighter(?), mored competitive students who are able to learn on higher levels, a problem I addressed many installments ago. Other students, you may recall, are then forced into lower ability groupings, ostensibly to give them a more individualized opportunity to learn at their own level. The segregation process begins. Of course, the fact that research shows that it is impossible to determine ability levels until grade 9 is totally ignored. That fact does not fit what many teachers and parents want, so it is just not considered. Students are labeled as early as fourth or fifth grade (even earlier in some places) and they are academically entitled or doomed from that point on as natural tracking entrenches itself into place.

My focus here, however, is to look at the effect on subject matter taught. The evolution described above has, over the years, inexorably pushed the teaching of skills and information, most notably in math (but also in other areas), further and further into lower grades. Many children were and are exposed to certain subjects much earlier than they need to be and, in many cases, at a time in their intellectual maturation when it may be counterproductive to their development. Certainly it is counterproductive to the overall development of social and interpersonal skills as it serves to segregate and categorize innocent children who do not know what is happening to them. At a time when middle school adolescents should be working on the natural, age-appropriate process of moving from concrete to abstract thinking, those who are perceived as more capable are directed into pre-algebra, first year algebra, and some pretty sophisticated levels of science and foreign language.

In order to understand the nature of this problem, it is important to stop and think about if for a while. Jimmy Carter called for “zero-based budgeting” when he was president, a procedure that required budget preparers to go back and start from the beginning, justifying the reasons for proposals from scratch. Let’s look at some traditional subject areas while remembering that learning, as it takes place in the brain, is not quite as compartmentalized; but that categorizing helps us to analyze.

Foreign Language

It’s odd to start with an exception, but this one may be an example of one that contradicts my assertion that we are teaching too much too early, that we are not letting our children enjoy a healthy maturing process during childhood. Studies do indicate that there are good reasons to teach foreign language at earlier ages. For some reason, the younger the child, the easier it seems to be to pick up languages. Foreign language study also promotes human understanding and tolerance in its appreciation for other cultures. Early exposure, therefore, seems like a good thing; and it certainly does offer children the bi-lingual opportunities that will be invaluable in later life as we see things developing in the 21st century.

There are some pitfalls, however, that I believe we need to monitor. For one thing, we still have some prejudicial tendencies that need to be examined. Spanish, for instance, should probably have an even greater role in foreign language study than it already does for some pretty obvious reasons. I have never understood why it should need to compete with French for exposure in our modern curriculum. I also do not understand why languages like Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, etc. are not studied more in a world in which far more people speak those languages than speak French.

I am also somewhat concerned about the traditional way foreign languages are taught in some schools in the earlier grades, although I do believe great advances have been made in emphasizing cultural orientation and immersion methods.

English

Schools, by and large, also do a pretty good job with the teaching of English, moving slowly through foundation skills related to grammar, decoding, vocabulary building, reading, and writing as discrete skills in the earlier grades and then on to the more abstract juvenile literature in middle school and even more abstract classic literature and advanced writing skills in high school. Over the years it has been my perception that the English program, at least among the programs considered to be part of the core curriculum, is probably the one that is most fundamentally sound in our schools.

Math

This is the big problem! More of that terrible ability grouping is done in the name of the needs of math than any other subject. I have never understood why. Actually, that is not truthful; I do know why. Just read above.

Math is perceived by both parents and math teachers as the practical subject, the one that can actually make money for students when they enter the world of work. What is not taken into account is that only a very small percentage of all students actually need advanced math in later life; yet that small group of students is used as an excuse to mangle schedules, especially on the middle school level. My argument with math teachers over the years met with a rationale for grouping that cited the fact that some middle school kids were ready for algebra and other advanced math and that they should not be held back. Of course, they would be condescending and say that other subjects could be populated with mixed grouping, but that it was imperative that math students be challenged.

While I cannot deny that some middle school students can handle more advanced math, I have to respond with a very loud, “So what?” Why do we have to disrupt the whole schedule of a middle school in a manner that is counterproductive in so many ways in order to accomodate math preferences? This disruption is especially seen in smaller schools where an ability grouped math program forces other courses to put up with de facto ability grouping in their programs. If all the “higher level” students are grouped together for accelorated math, for instance, it stands to reason that they are not mixed in with other students in what are supposed to be mixed groupings offered during that period. In other words, the laissez-faire beneficence shown by the math department on this subject is clearly a ploy to make room for their priorities.

In addition, of course, the late bloomer is once again ignored. What many educators fail to realize is that slower maturation does not imply less ability; it just implies a slower pace that may or may not reach the same level in the near future. If accomations are to be made, they should be made by math educators in pacing their programs in such a way as to give middle school students an opportunity to catch up, not in employing “nuclear options” that foreclose future options for many, many students.

The counter argument to my position on this subject has to do with math readiness - that when a student can do a certain level of work, he or she should be allowed to do it or you run the risk of boring that student and keeping him or her from moving consistently ahead. The fallacy in that argument is that it fails to recognize a problem and an opportunity in the entire path marked out by the math curriculum. There are many high schools across the country that will tell you that most students cover all the math they will need for later life and to get into college by the time they are juniors. Senior year, it seems, tends to be a wasteland that many schools fear because of the need to find things for students to do. There are a few students who use the opportunity to take very advanced calculus or solid geometry courses; but, again, they are a vast minority, not a group who should dictate an entire curriculum in many subject areas so that they can start their advanced math studies at a very early age. The honest reason for this anamoly in scheduling is that the purpose for advanced math classes in the early years is political pressure from parents, not that there is a serious need. The opportunity is there to allow almost all students to catch up in middle school, but it is not taken.

Now, you may ask me what those students should be studying in middle school math if not advanced material. There is a very good answer to the question that relates to that concept of zero-based budgeting. If you look objectively at what modern students need in grade 6, 7, and 8, you can definitely come up with some very challenging subjects that do not require slower learning math students to deal with levels of abstraction that may be a year or two away. Computer math related to organization, spreadsheets and simple programming comes quickly to mind. Another underexposed area that could benefit all students would be consumer math. In other words, there are very worthwhile and “challenging” things all students could do that would mean progress while not requiring segregation and destruction of a mixed grouping schedule that would be a great advantage for all students during developmental years.

Social Studies

Please note well that I refer to my old discipline as social studies and not history. That is a significant distinction. There are traditionalists and “back-to-basics” conservatives who prefer to say that we should teach history. Some teachers in the discipline, especially those who are the would-be college professors if they had the chance, also like to refer to themselves as history teachers. Sounds a little more elite, if you know what I mean. Hey, actually, I was an American history major myself in graduate school. The problem here though, is that the use of term history is inaccurate and silly in most classes that deal with this discipline. History is one of the social sciences, along with subjects like geography, political science, and economics, to name a few. At the basic level where we find virtually all public school students, it is important for classes in this area to encompass all of these subjects in an attempt to help students understand the complex subject of interpersonal and social human relations. Social studies needs to be taught as social studies. It’s as simple as that. History professors belong in college.

Other than that little dispute in orientation, social studies, like English, is one of our more solid subjects. It is probably the one that is most favorably grouped under a healthy mixed environment unless distorted by the de facto deference shown other disciplines. Actually, I was always proud of the fact that social studies, almost by the nature of the discipline, sought to promote a mixed grouping in its classes in order to represent and promote a microcosm of society in the classroom.

My only complaint about the social sciences is that one of its pieces is not emphasized enough. More geography needs to be taught in our schools. As a matter of fact, I think it belongs right up there with the other core subjects that are thought of as foundations of life. That may seem like an extreme position for a subject not normally put in the pantheon of important studies; but, as with some other points I have made, I think that the importance of the study of geography is something that needs a new, fresh, and logical examination. We live in an ever more complicated world, and young people desperately need to psychologically ground themselves as they mature into adulthood. No one would deny the importance of the “three R’s” in this process, but I think we have neglected the subject that really puts children into context with the rest of the world, a world that is shrinking ever more quickly and becoming more and more accessible to all.

Many thoughtful analysts of the learning process believe strongly that children learn from the inside out, from what is very close to them to a gradual realization and understanding of what is more and more distant. That is exactly what the study of geography serves to do with the young mind. It substantially helps children to come to an understanding of the world around them, first the world that they can perceive with their senses and then the ever expanding surroundings that are more and more distant. It helps children to solidly perceive their world in expanding context, giving them a psychological grounding on which to establish their paths in life. When you pair this theory (actually, I think it is more than just a theory) with the erosion of geography education and knowledge that we have seen over the past half century, you can see how important it is to take a much closer look at our priorities in this area.

Science

I can’t make as big a case with science as I did with math, but science fell into a similar path to math back in the mid-20th century when we were concerned with the space race and keeping up with the rapid growth of technology. As with math, there is no doubt that the study of science is important for all students; but we cannot fall prey to over-emphasis if it means that we sacrifice the education of the whole child and all children in payment for the emphasis. A very small number of students become “rocket scientists,” and we should not distort our programs to focus on the needs of that small group at the expense of the vast majority. There is time enough for moderate specialization in this area in later high school for those with the aptitude and desire. We do not need eighth grade chemists.

Other Subjects

All subjects, including those that we consider as subjects in non-core areas (whatever that means), need to be examined closely for how they fit into the needs of children in an ever-changing society. My perception is that we have made great strides over the past few years in areas like physical education, health education, art education and certainly in computer education, while we have fallen behind, to some extent, in what used to be called home economics, consumer education, industrial arts and in a few other areas.

My overall suggestion is that we keep comprehensive education in mind for the public schools. K-12 education should not be designed to promote premature specialization. To do so is to forget that children mature slowly and that they need to taste the fruits of liberal arts early in life so that they can make sound decisions later once they are in a position to make good choices. We will examine more about curriculum design in future essays; but suffice it to say in summary of positions stated here that future success in educational programming will depend on flexible curriculum that allows children to be children and to taste numerous offerings while building strong foundation skills.

Problems in American Education - Part 15: Education: Art or Science?

2005-07-15T02:03:00.000-07:00

I think that I once lost out on an assistant principalship because of this question. The superintendent was on the interviewing panel and he asked me whether I thought administration was an art or a science. I could tell that he had an orientation in mind, but he disguised his preference well in asking the question. That didn’t matter anyway, if I could boast a little here, because I never was the kind of interviewee who tried to shape answers to fit what I thought the panel wanted to hear. I’m kind of big on being yourself and letting the chips fall where they may. That way you don’t have to live up to a false image later on.

The one thing you always wanted to do though in an interview was to at least sound decisive in your answers. It was a tough question and I knew that my answer was going to sound “wishy-washy” if I went with my instincts in responding to the question. Well, I was right. I told them what I thought and it did sound “wishy-washy.” Needless to say, I did not get the job; and, for some reason, that question stood out in my mind as a turning point in the decision-making process.

As you may have guessed by now, the truth, in my opinion, for both teachers and administrators, is somewhere in the middle. That is obviously not a bold statement to make, but it seems pretty clear to me that you need both the left brain and the right brain to work well with children in today’s schools. I list this as one of my “problems in American education” because I think that we sometimes forget how clear it is and because we can also let loose of the need to balance the two sides of the equation if we are not careful in the sometimes overwhelming environment in education today.

Edgar Allen Poe had much to say on this subject - not directly of course - but as a recurring theme in his writing. Poe’s characters in his poetry, his horror stories, and also in his ratiocinative mystery stories often found themselves in trouble when they moved away from that balance between heart and head. In the case of Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” insanity was the ultimate result. In “The Purloined Letter,” Poe’s wondertully spun mystery tale about the location of a hidden letter, the mastermind detective who solved the case was able to do so by understanding both the logic and emotion of his adversary. His balanced approach provided the insight necessary to move to the core of what was reality.

It’s the “ying” and “yang” of human life; so, quite naturally, it is also a key understanding that needs to be applied when working with the youngest of all humans, our children.

When I think of science in our endeavors in education, I think of logic and, most of all, organization. As I believe I have established in my earlier essays, working as a teacher or administrator today is no simple task. You need to answer to many masters and numerous skills, from interpersonal to record keeping to grade computation to scheduling to computer, are required. If that superintendent who interviewed me was thinking that administration was more of an art, I think he was missing something. You can’t survive today in this field if you are disorganized.

Later in this series I will address computer assisted instruction, but here I will only indicate that computer literacy is also very important, actually essential, for educators today. I would no sooner hire a computer illiterate educator than I would hire an educator who had reading, writing, or computation problems. We are well past the day when computer literacy was an option or a decision based on the personal style of the educator. As a minimum, today’s educator must show a mastery of word processing, spreadsheets, some computer graphics, and definitely the Internet. Database, presentation software like Powerpoint, and publishing software use are also somewhat important and helpful. In other words, today’s educator needs to be able to manipulate, process, and produce data quickly and efficiently, and the computer is the only way to do it in an environment that is becoming more and more competitive. You just can’t keep up with all you need to do and all you need to know to be a good teacher or administrator if you do not have these skills.

Having said that, I also believe that the right brain is at least as important in balancing the equation in today’s schools. This gets back to what I wrote in an earlier essay about teacher evaluation. When the “back to basics” movement started those many decades ago, it was part of response to the Sputnik generation, an attempt to simplify what we were doing under a “less is better” mentality that implied that we could do better promoting the American cause by teaching children foundation skills and teaching those skills with great intensity and repetition. The softer disciplines (social studies, literature, the arts, etc.) were thought to be overdone at the time and more conservative elements wanted to see more rigor and challenge with an emphasis on math, science, and the “three R’s.”

Underlying this argument were some hidden prejudices against the teachers who were believed to be promoting the soft and less challenging curriculum. Not coincidentally, this was about the same time that teachers were just starting to make more money and putting more pressure on the tax base in doing so. Some resentment among the taxpayers was bubbling up in response to that change, and there were those who wanted to find a way to make the teachers pay a price for their increased benefits and salaries.

Taxpayers, and, particularly, parents wanted accountability from educators in return for their tax dollars and they started to attack the perceived suspicious and abstract processes that they did not understand. This created a new plan to prepare teachers and keep them under control. So called “teacher proof” materials and methods were promoted, a movement that insulted teachers by implying that they needed recipes to do what society wanted them to do and what society wanted to require if they were to make the kind of money professionals were supposed to make. Artistic interpretation, creation, and application were frowned upon and many teachers came to feel that, while they were now paid like professionals, they were not trusted to make professional decisions on their own.

The major mistake in all of this is that it unknowingly attempted to take the art out of the equation. Again, as noted earlier, I have found that some of the best teachers I have ever observed and evaluated fell far short when measured against some kind of prescribed textbook recipe for what a teacher was supposed to do. What separated them, however, was that they had the ability to inspire children to learn. You can call it charisma or you can say that it had to do with some kind of “Gestalt” that they were able to create in their classroom; but it was as real as could be when you watched the effect on the children. Some people just seem to have that knack of working with children. About the only way I can explain it in terms of a common denominator is to observe that all those I saw who had it, in its many forms, seemed to have a deep and abiding affection for children. Somehow this affection was perceived as sincere by the children and their appreciation for it normally translated into attention and hard work. Read those two words as definitive prerequisites for learning.

That is why art is so important in education. Yes, you can teach an educator valuable skills, but something also needs to exist in the heart if you are to approach excellence in instruction. This is not something that is discussed enough in educational circles. I think that is because most of us are naturally somewhat envious about the kind of raw talent we see in those very special educators. I know that I was. I had some of that spark, especially as a young teacher; but it was somewhat fleeting, and I have to admit that most of my career I met with success through old fashioned hard work more than through charismatic artistry.

I particularly remember one man I worked with for a good number of years. If you matched him against the teacher methodology textbook, he was terrible. He did most things “the wrong way;” but that man could teach. The kids loved him and chose to ignore his idiosyncrasies because they knew that, despite some of his odd approaches, he had their best interests at heart and that reality came through. Other teachers were envious of him and critical of his methods; but I think they knew in their hearts that he was reaching children who they were unable to reach.

It may have been an extreme position, but one department head once told me when I was a young teacher that she did not care what I was teaching as long as I was teaching. The idiosyncratic teacher mentioned above was always teaching and the medium became the message. It made him special, and, quite frankly, kids related to that more than they related to mechanical or pedantic process.

So, what’s the moral of this story? I think it is that Poe was absolutely right. A good educator, whether he or she be a teacher or an administrator, needs to be a balanced person. Organization and skills are key elements, but so are heart and emotions. Educators must always remember to put themselves in the children’s seats and imagine what those children are perceiving. Subject matter is important, but I believe that children learn more from their teachers as they perceive them as role models. Subject matter tends to be digested and internalized, but children more directly remember who taught them and whether or not that person was a complete human being. To whatever extent we can, educators need to consciously remember that when they plan for their presentations to those children. It does not go unnoticed.

Problems in American Education - Part 14: Teacher Evaluation

2005-07-06T04:19:00.000-07:00

One of the things we try to do as human beings is to simplify problems in order to make them more manageable. This has definitely been the case with our efforts to improve the process of teacher evaluation, and that idea does have some merit; but, when coupled with pressures brought to bear by the teacher unions, the combination has created some very counterproductive results.

Evaluating teachers is, at best, a very complicated process, especially when considered in light of the tenure laws that protect teachers after their first few years on the job. For some reason, and I think it has something to do with that pressure from the unions, the tradition in most school settings is to evaluate teachers largely on the basis of what is observed by an administrator in the classroom several times a year while classes are being taught. While that may seem like a common sense approach and one that satisfies those who would reduce teaching to a very mechanical and measureable practice, it is my contention that such a practice falls far short of being effective in determining whether or not a person should be a teacher.

Further complicating the question is the legitimate question of why you evaluate teachers. Is it simply a hire/fire process or does it have something to do with improvement of instruction? I like to think that it is the latter that we should emphasize; but I cannot deny that there is also an underlying question about the suitability of the teacher in question to pursue his or her career. My feeling is that the unions, in protecting teachers from the vagueries of more abstract criteria, have sought to keep the criteria simple and almost strictly confined to classroom performance. The states, ironically, have also sought to simplify the process in order to apply clear minimum standards during the early years of a teacher’s career. The Beginning Educator Support Training (BEST) program in Connecticut is a very good example of this. It is a very good program in that it puts a strong working emphasis on young teacher preparation during their first few years and it insures that certain mechanical standards and supports are maintained.

Such programs, however, do have serious drawbacks associated with their application. The BEST program, for instance, takes the concept of accountability and stretches it to a rather demanding level when it expects so much from young teachers in their first couple of years on the job. While most of these young people are just trying to get their feet on the ground as rookies and second-year professionals, they are faced with very demanding bureaucratic hoops they must navigate through in order to maintain their certification. I had to wonder on some occasions whether this process was as much professional at it was political under the umbrella of the level of accountability for teachers demanded by society.

My much bigger question, however, has to do with whether or not we are measuring the right things when we evaluate teachers. When an administrator visits a classroom to observe a teacher, he normally is confronted by a plethora of distorted situations. The teacher (especially if he or she is very young), of course, is very nervous. Not a good thing for determining the competency of that teacher in a normal situation. The teacher normally knows the administrator is coming (sometimes there is a contractual requirement that the teacher be told the administrator is coming) and, therefore, prepares a “very special” lesson designed to impress. Human nature, but not in the best interests of objective evaluations.

The kids in the class also tend to act differently when the principal or other administrator is there, further slanting what is being observed. Sometimes the kids rally to support a teacher they like, realizing that the teacher is being evaluated. Other times, kids will actually try to undermine the plans of a teacher they do not like. This may say something in itself, but it does not help the administrator in getting a clear perception.

The point, of course, is that a truly objective, and, very importantly, a truly comprehensive evaluation of a teacher through classroom observations is practically impossible no matter how much pre-planning and post-conferencing go into those observations.

Actually, I will go one step further. I even question whether such a process even attempts to emphasize the right things in really determining the value of a teacher. I first became suspicious about the credibility of the traditional teacher evaluation process when I noticed that there were numerous occasions when teachers who I knew were great teachers, who really reached the kids in many different ways, did not really measure up when it came to “good mechanics.” Conversely, I saw teachers whose mechanics were outstanding, but who were not very effective. Admittedly, this perception is somewhat subjective; but that is my point, you sometimes need to use more subjective criteria to understand what makes a good teacher. As an administrator, my feeling was that part of my job was to make a reasoned number of subjective judgements about such things; but, when an administrator followed that philosophy, he or she would often be confronted with problems from the teacher unions.

One example of what I mean by all of this kind of evaluation. I had a student teacher a number of years ago before I went into administration. He was terrific. He was a friendly, “big-bear” of a young man who had a sincere affection for children and who could relate to them. He loved them and they loved him. As a result, he was effective and got the most that was possible out of his students. In addition, it was clear that he was very commited to teaching and he always showed it in the very professional manner he conducted himself.

One day, a woman who worked in our district, and who was a BEST coordinator, offered to do me a favor. She offered to observe John (not his real name) and give him some pointers about what he would need to do in order to do well in the BEST program once he started to work as a hired teacher. I agreed, and she went about her business, observing John in a couple of his classes. I was shocked by what she said after the observations. She came to me and said that John had serious problems, that he was not following the prescribed methods required by BEST and that he would definitely run into trouble during his first and second years of teaching.

I debated the issue with her, explaining that he was one of the best young teachers I had seen; but she insisted that he had to realize that major changes were needed. I felt I had a responsibility to go over the results with him, but I assured him that I did not agree with them and that I thought he would be a fine teacher. To make a long story short, I ran into John about three years later at a conference. He was proud to tell me that he had just been named as his district’s “Teacher of the Year.” I do not believe that he had changed his approach measureably as a result of the criticisms, but I was not at all surprised that he had met with such great success.

The lesson in all of this actually has three conclusions associated with it. One is that you cannot replace administrative judgement and experience with any foolproof mechanical system when evaluating teachers. The second is that there is much more to look at in what makes a good teacher than you can observe in a limited number of classroom observations. The third is that a good administrator needs to look beyond the classroom in determining what makes a good teacher. You cannot tell much about a person’s heart by watching them perform before kids in a very artificial environment. Actually, you can probably tell much more by watching the same teacher as he interacts with kids in the hallway and with colleagues on an ongoing basis during the school day and after school. You can tell more about a teacher by observing his or her obvious commitment to education than you can by simply looking at cold, hard data.

Over a very long career in education, I interviewed hundreds potential teachers. This process, in itself, is closely related to projecting whether or not you believe an individual will be a good teacher in your school. There are many different theories about what you should look for and consider when hiring. My ultimate conclusion, and the thing I would emphasize whenever I hired a teacher, was to look for evidence of character. As one central office administrator once told my wife, who is an elementary school principal, he would only look for one thing. Did he think the person being interviewed was a nice person? “You can teach the rest,” he concluded.

Problems in American Education - Part 13: Teachers and Unions

2005-07-04T10:20:00.000-07:00

I always enjoyed teaching the American system of checks and balances in my social studies classes. I find the topic facinating and I am awed by how effective that system has been over these two plus centuries. Kids, however, have some difficulty understanding just how widespread checks and balances are used in the social fabric of our country. They get the part about the legislative, executive, and judicial, and they even appreciate how the concept is extended to federal, state, and local. They begin to scratch their heads, however, when we begin to look at some of the ways the concept is spread in ways that could be considered as extra-governmental or not governmental at all. The merit of checks and balances is held highly by most Americans, so it is only logical that something that works so effectively would find its way into many areas of American life. It is one of those extensions that I will consider here in an effort to explain the mixed results it has achieved in our schools.

As representing the second generation American in a Portuguese immigrant family, I learned very early in life that there were several things you did not challenge - the Catholic Church, F.D.R’s Democratic Party that got us out of the Depression, and the unions that had protected my parents and grandparents against the excesses of the “rich people” in the factory system that put bread on our table. When I started courting my wife, also second generation, but from an Italian immigrant family, the same values were pushed, but even harder. No members of either or our families would consider anything other than Catholicism, voting for only Democrats, and they would never, never cross a picket line, especially my father-in-law. These were the values handed to me and there were to be no variations allowed from this path.

Happily, when I went to college and then graduate school to study American history, I came to the same conclusions on my own - especially about the Democratic Party and unions. My study of history told me that the liberal orientation of those two institutions were necessary to support the downtrodden, the lower class with whom I identified and who needed whatever help they could get in fighting their way up the American ladder of success.

When I started my career in education, the importance of the union movement came particularly into focus. Education was one area in which the pendulum had not swung adequately far enough in favor of teachers. When I started in the late ‘60s, teachers were paid very poorly and their contracts were weighted heavily in favor of the school districts. I saw the need to get involved and did so in my local “education association” as a building representative, vice president, and then on to president of the association.

Perhaps it was my close proximity to the decision-making process during negotiations, or the continuing process or maturity, or maybe even a bad taste in my mouth that developed as I saw events unfold; but it was at about that time that my feelings about unions began to change and I began to feel that the word “association” was simply a euphemism. Let me explain.

I have a big personal “thing” about educators being considered as professionals and thinking of themselves as professionals. I started to notice that, as the years rolled by, teachers were thinking less and less that they were professionals and more and more that, to be successful in balancing the onslaught from the community, they had to think of themselves as workers, just as Gompers had insisted in his philosophical orientation for the American Federation of Labor. Now keep in mind here, I am not suggesting that teachers should have maintained an elitist position. As mentioned earlier, I proudly came from a family of factory workers who worked very hard to achieve whatever they could for their immigrant families. I also did believe, and still believe, that, at the time, the pendulum needed to be swung a good deal more in the direction of the teachers. That point of view has made great gains last couple of decades, and that is a very important advance.

What I am suggesting is this - teaching is a profession, and, as a history and social studies teacher, I love to hold the old definition of the word in high esteem. I also believe that the word itself holds great power over the success or failure of the endeavor. A professional professes himself or herself to a commitment to children. If that is lost in the struggle to gain equity, the baby goes out with the bath water. One of the turning points for me occurred when I started to see teachers look disdainfully at the word “professional.” In the bitterness of the fight they would contend that, if they were really professionals, they would be treated as professionals. This, of course, gave them an excuse to stop acting like professionals, and, from what I could see, childishly begin to withhold some level of professional service when they did not get what they wanted or to seek unfair advantage under strict interpretation of contracts that more and more became instruments of less than professional performance. To me, at the time, this meant the beginning of the end in regard to professionalism in teaching. Unfortunately, I believe that I was right. There are still many teachers, maybe most, who treat their calling as a profession and consider themselves to be on-call 24 hours a day, but there could be just as many who now will not lift a finger unless they are contractually obliged to do so. I always argued that, no matter what my personal views of the Boards of Education, I did not work for the Boards of Education. I worked for children. That was all that made my labors worthwhile. I did not make friends in making that assertion.

Many teachers find very convenient reasons to disagree with what I just wrote and find themselves in an evolving position in which they become more and more bitter and confrontational about what they are doing. This cannot support a healthy learning environment, and it most assuredly has not.

I spent most of the last five years of my career as an administrator, but don’t make the mistake of believing that reality colored my opinions. They certainly reinforced them, but the opinions already existed before I went into administration. The current situation in education is one in which teachers are protected by non-sensical tenure laws that allow them to pretty much do as they wish after the first three or four years in a teaching position. Administrators are caught in a “Catch-22” in which they do not want to eliminate young teachers because they are obviously still in the growth phase of their profession. When it becomes obvious, however, that they have plateaued at less than an acceptbable level of proficiency, the same administrators still can’t touch them because of the fact that it is virtually impossible to eliminate a tenured teacher. There are terrible teachers teaching in our schools because of this and there is virtually nothing that can be done about it.

In addition, as the pendulum has now swung fully in the other direction, there are teachers who have taken on an attitude that they will just get away with what they can, resting assured that not much can be done if they make the minimal effort to cover their tracks. I always believed that reciprocity should be one of the essential ingredients in a healthy organization. In education, however, courtesies have become mostly a one-way street. I remember one conversation I had in which teachers asked for a small favor that was normally extended. I made the point that I certainly did not mind extending that small favor as long as teachers realized that it would nice for them to extend small favors in return. The words were no sooner out of my mouth than another word surfaced - the word was “contract.”

This is where, in my opinion, we have gone wrong. Children need to know that they are being led and instructed by a committed group of professionals who put the needs of the children even ahead of their own. Thankfully, there are many of those who are still around; but there are also many others who come out of a new tradition for teaching, that of the teacher as a private agent who negotiates each and every move he or she makes. What was once a sense of learning community is now quite often compromised by this phenomenon.

Problems in American Education - Part 12: What is Curriculum?

2005-07-04T05:17:00.000-07:00

I have a feeling I am going to get some disagreement on this one, especially since my position is going to sound very liberal; but I have gotten at least one question about it in the comments sections, so I think it is time to address the subject.

The word, “Curriculum,” refers to what is taught in schools. I don’t think too many will argue with that. It’s when you go beyond that simple definition that you get into trouble with people, especially at a time when liberal interpretations are considered part of the problem rather than accurate definitions. When the “back-to-basics” movement started nearly half-a-century ago, the idea was to strip down what schools offered to children in order to get at the core essentials. A closer look at what happened showed that there was also a basic distrust implied in regard to what schools could and should be expected to do - what parents and others wanted them to do.

The conservative base that subscribed to “back-to-basics” indicated that they did not want teachers messing with the values of their children and that the way to insure the kind of teaching they wanted was to strip away the opportunities for that to happen. It was a freedom-of-choice argument once again that suggested a subtle but strong desire of proponents to keep the “softer” disciplines more in the hands of parents and less in the hands of teachers and educators in general. Reading, writing, and arithmetic, in the opinion of these people, were the only legitimate courses of study and they asserted that the others, with the possible exception of science, should be soft-pedaled if not eliminated altogether. As a self-proclaimed social studies (as opposed to history) teacher, people like me were particularly seen as targets representing what was wrong with education. These people defined “curriculum” as simply a course of studies and they wanted to severely limit the number of those core offerings, especially when the list went beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic.

We used to debate this issue endlessly when I was in graduate school studying curriculum design, my major course of study. I argued then and still do now that the definition implied above is terribly shortsighted and that it does more harm than good in stabilizing school program offerings. It’s a cliche, I know, but children are like sponges. They soak up everything that comes into contact with all of their senses when they go through the learning process. So much of that process, of course, takes place outside of school, but to say that we should ignore the comprehensive nature of the learning process while they are subject to the schoo environment is, to me, irresponsible.

My definition of curriculum is not just the published program of studies. It is all learning experiences that take place under the umbrella of the school environment, from the time kids get on the buses in the morning until the time they get off in the afternoon, and sometimes more. While schools can control the various parts of this field in only varying degrees, I believe that we are still responsible for everything that happens to children while they are under our care. What happens on the bus, in the hallways, in the cafeteria, and even in the lavs is part of my definition of curriculum. Why? Because children are constantly learning while in those places. We must pay close attention to them and see to it that they are the healthiest possible learning environments they can be.

This is clearly a whole-child interpretation of the purpose of education and I don’ t shrink from that label. We are accused of trying to be all things to all people, and that criticism is somewhat accurate; but it is hard for anyone to deny that such focus in the support of our children is necessary in the complex society in which we live. If not the school, who else will attempt to deal with the whole child. Absentee parents and single parents are sometimes not in a position to do so. Social agencies are overwhelmed and underfunded. Churches seem to reach a smaller and smaller percentage of the population. You can say that these situations should not exist, but that simply avoids the question. They do.

Before I am accused of writing something I did not write, I want to explain that I am not pushing for a particular slant on what is taught. Quite to the contrary, I steadfastly believe the the school has no right to propagandize a particular moral, ethical, or social position in its curriculum offerings. I do have strong personal opinions, but I take great personal pride in the fact that I do not believe students ever really knew what they were. Instead, they were given the tools to think for themselves and come to their own conclusions with ever greater maturity of approach as time passed. Sure, they made mistakes in logic and, in some cases, even in common sense, but those tools they were offered helped them to do a better and better job as they learned how to think.

That process of thinking cannot be taught simply by emphasizing the basics. One of the key goals in middle level education, for instance, is to challenge students to move from the concrete thinking of a child to the abstract thinking of an adult. Yes, this can sometimes be aided by the teaching of good literature, but there is much more to it than that - and sometimes an effective process aimed at that goal takes place in the cafeteria, the hallways, the social studies classroom, or even as part of a disciplinary action in the office of the principal or assistant principal.

Problems in American Education - Part 11: Mission

2005-07-02T11:21:00.000-07:00

There is a continuous battle waged in education, though quietly and unnoticed by most observers, between pragmatists and philosophers. This essay will be written from the philosophers’ point of view because I believe that they are somewhat ignored in the overall scheme of how most schools are run. You can make a pretty educated guess as to where I place myself on the spectrum between the two extremes.

Working in the field of education is hard work. Many people not in the field don’t realize how difficult it is to work with kids all day and hope that, by the time you reach dismissal, you have accomplished something. Constant pressure from the outside in the form of parents, higher administrators, Boards of Education, state requirements, etc. compound that difficulty, making the profession very complicated and draining. It takes vast amounts of energy, both intellectually and emotionally, to be an effective educator. Many taxpayers don’t believe it, but when an educator gets to June, he or she really does need a summer off. I don’t know of any other line of work, with the possible exception of air traffic controller, that requires such consisten intensity of focus and precise planning for such a prolonged period of time and under such large doses of pressure. That is just the way it is at this time in the history of the profession.

This means that each and every day is a struggle in our schools. Both teachers and administrators immerse themselves in daily schedules, hour after hour, and period after period, in which they must concentrate on getting through the day safely and productively. This is why pragmatism is so prevalent in the way educators think and act. Particularly in administration, there is little time to step back and take a look at the big picture. Many administrators habitually and inevitably are forced to fall into the habit of emphasizing short term management over creative long term leadership because they evolve into the belief that such a posture is a necessary survival skill. The seasoned veteran administrator often becomes cynical and gets to the point where he or she starts to look at philosophical educational issues as idealistic, ivory tower wastes of time. The here and now take control, and that is very understandable when an overwhelmed administrator is repeatedly besieged with questions and issues related to budget preparation, budget defense, school maintenance, staff development, parent pressure, bus schedules, class schedules, ancillary duty schedules, lunch supervision, endless administrative meetings, night work, and, of course, discipline. Pragmatic positioning in the face of all that is certainly understandable. The problem is, however, that it is not acceptable.

Any institution, if it is to be effective, needs to have a clear mission - a set of principles that guide the institution and that are referred to often as the institution progresses through time. The medium of the mission becomes the message of the institution and gives life and purpose to that institution. An institution cannot be effective in what it is doing unless it knows what it is doing and why it is doing it.

I once argued with a someone about this point. The person contended that having a mission is like putting on your clothing. It becomes habit, a standard operating procedure. With all due respect, my feeling was that the person's position was like those that say you write your mission statement and then put it away somewhere in a drawer, secure in the understanding that you gained by simply going through the process of creation. What this fails to recognize is that such practice does not insure adherence to any kind of positive direction on a daily, weekly, monthly, etc. basis. You are driving a car without any idea about where you are going.

The school’s mission, in my opinion, needs to be a intensively researched, developed, and communicated; and then it needs to be used as a living document that is consciously on the minds of all who apply it on a daily basis. Leadership is the key in getting that done. Every school needs a resident philosopher, usually the principal, who insures that constant application of mission is something on the minds of all members of the staff at all times. Absence of such leadership almost certainly insures a much more chaotic school subject to frequent changes of direction, inefficiency, and confusion over what is being done and why it is being done.

The obvious implication is that the person who leads a school needs to not only promote its mission, but he or she also needs to be a thinking person with ideas and passions that override the clatter of daily survival. This person will be effective because he or she, through the passion for thinking, serves as a focal point for others. Efficiency and economy of effort become positive by-products in such a school, but the real benefit is that the school has confidence and direction. Despite the abstractions involved in this position, It is a common sensical approach to what ails education today; but it is amazing how infrequently this notion is promoted or even explored.

Problems in American Education - Part 10: The Problems Related to Leadership and the Career Path for Educators

2005-07-01T09:37:00.000-07:00

I feel very shakey on this one, so please bear with me and accept what I have to write here as an observation rather than a solid opinion based on clear evidence. I also want to warn you that there is some self-service in what I am about to write, so I run the risk of having my observation colored by the way I would like to see things in reference to my own career.

Leadership is important in any human endeavor, and education does not even approach being an exception. Someone once said that change is the only reality that we can count on being true in everything that happens under the auspices of the human condition. If change is to be in a positive direction, I think it follows that creative and imaginative leadership is important. My observation in this blog is that I have seen precious little creativity and imagination in education over the years, and I have a thought as to why that might be the case. Please keep in mind that I have also seen some very notable exceptions to what I just asserted, men and women who see both the forest and the trees, but my general impression has been that personality types other than creative thinkers tend to rise to the top of the educational hierarchy and that they have a natural tendency to be more interested in maintaining the status quo.

The career path in education, I think, offers precious little opportunity for creative thinkers to rise to positions of authority as change agents. I know I may make some enemies by writing this, but it has been my observation that most teachers are not risk takers and that they like to play their cards close to the vest, maintaining what they feel has kept them afloat during the earlier years of their careers. Teachers have been subjected to attacks from parents and the public at large for so long now that it is no wonder that they tend not to be aggressive in pushing new and different ideas. In a future post, I will also argue that it has been drummed into them by various agents that they are no longer thought of as professionals - another factor that keeps them from thinking of themselves as capable of creative change and innovative thinking.

What this means is that our pool for leadership tends to be filled by many people who are afraid to lead. Yes, some are lured or cajoled to apply for higher positions, but the qualifications perceived to be the ones necessary for those positions are not what you think of as oriented toward creativity and innovation. Whether it is right or wrong, every young teacher walking into his or her first classroom either consciously or sub-consciously does so with the idea that their success will be perceived in relationship to the ability to control that classroom. Ironically, the public thinks that discipline is a major problem in our schools (and it is in many places); but the perception of teachers is that maintaining that discipline is priority #1 in his or her attempt to be perceived as a good teacher. Sure, there are many other things that are perceived as criteria, but every young teacher knows that none of them mean very much if administration sees said teacher as unable to maintain a quiet classroom. Young teachers believe, with some degree of accuracy, that discipline is the key political reality for most administrators and that they need to show that they can handle kids before attempting to suggest innovation in the classroom.

As time goes on, this culture of control grows in the eyes of young teachers and in the culture of the teaching community, including the thinking process among decision makers. As vacancies arise, especially in school administration, the key career area required for advancement to all other areas in education, a tremendous amount of weight is put on the abilities of individuals to maintain discipline. It is seen as the one prerequisite that cannot be ignored. If you want to aspire to a higher position in education, you almost always have to serve an apprenticeship as an assistant principal because that is where you can prove that you have the strength to control a school. When I was in the role of assistant principal, I would even argue with people who wanted to call me “vice principal” because I believed that the second title, at least under the old junior high school model, had an even greater orientation toward being “the enforcer” in the school. I hated being thought of only in that context; but that was what the school community wanted to exist in that office.

You may have guessed by now that I did not like the idea of being the big disciplinarian in the school, not because of any disregard for the importance of discipline; but because I believed that I had more to offer than just chasing students down hallways. Nevertheless, that role and its place in the steps thought necessary to rise is widespread in education. Creative thinking and imagination may be nice at meetings or in the faculty lounge, but most educators are so concerned with discipline that they feel that it is the only thing that is really essential. Everything else is in the “nice to have” category. I may be overstating the case to some degree; but again, this has been my observation.

What this means in educational leadership is that those who rise to positions where decisions are made tend to be strong disciplinarians, but they also tend to be efficient, organized, and pragmatic in their approach to problem solving and school change. Philosophers need not apply, or at least I haven’t seen many who get to the point where they can offer signficant and substantial ideas to the process. School administrators put great emphasis on practical matters and quite often get caught up with daily issues. There just isn’t all that much time to lean back and reflect about the direction of education in America. I guess that’s why I waited to retire before I could start writing these essays.

I sincerely believe that a reflective and philosophical mind is important in fostering progress in education, but you seldom see those kinds of minds get a chance to impact the process. Many never get far enough into the hierarchy to effect change or even offer their ideas. It’s hard to formulate and pass a budget when someone wants to talk about whether the school’s mission is appropriate for students in this particular decade. I have never known pragmatism to offer a primary drive for philosophical inquisition, and my observation is that pragmatism, not new ideas, is the major motivation in American schools today as they defend against the many attacks they see against the institution. That does not promote growth and that is worrisome to me in an age when our schools are so much in need of enlightened leadership. I will write more about this when I get to the role of mission in schools.

Problems in American Education - Part 9: Boards of Education and the Question of Local Autonomy

2005-06-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

I have worked under the Boards of Education system for well over 30 years and I think that the system stinks. Let’s start with a little background and then examine how things have evolved over the years.

If you were to ask most people why Boards of Education (called School Committees and other names in difference places) exist, I think that most would tell you that they are part of the American system of checks and balances under the Constitution. Wrong. Boards of Education were not envisioned by the founding fathers. Actually, the Constitution indicates that responsibility for education should fall under the auspices of state governments. Why then, you may ask, does every state in the union save one (Hawaii) delegate that Constitutional responsibility to local towns, cities, and regions and keep for themselves only the role of monitoring what the localities do and administering guideline regulations for education in their states? In the interest of accuracy, it should be indicated that some of these regulations are quite stringent and that they force localities to follow paths prescribed by the states; but the actual day-to-day, year-to-year, exercise of administrative authority over most schools is done by the Boards of Education and falls under the resources provided by budgets supported by local property taxes.

I think that there are two reasons that American education has evolved in this direction and away from state control over the years. One of them is that there is a basic American distrust of bureaucracy and Americans perceive state departments of education as classic examples of bureaucracies, subject to the excesses and inefficiencies of bureacracies. Secondly, and, I am afraid, more insidiously, local control is a way for people to geographically segregate where the money goes and allows them to channel that money to where it will help their own children. It takes the reasoned premise that all children should be given an equal opportunity to resources and replaces it with the premise posed earlier that some parents feel that their accomplishments, power, and money should be transmitted on the local level to the reality that their children (who, in most cases, have never earned a nickel of money that supports education) should enjoy the benefits of their parents’ success in life. Granted, laws have been passed in an attempt to mitigate the effects of this practice; but, to this day, the phrase “ability to pay” is still a key phrase in understanding American education localities, especially in the dichotomy of offerings between urban and suburban education.

In breaking it down further, even if you accept that this is the way things should be, what is the report card for Boards of Education in their attempts to exercise local autonomy. After working over these many years with many, many different Boards, here is what I have seen and experienced. When the mode of approach has been to push money at educational issues, I have observed some successes, especially in communities where money is available and where the citizenry has enough children in their population to want the best. Other times, however, what I have seen are:

- highly questionable approaches to problem solution;

- attempts by Boards to forget their roles as child advocates and fall prey to the political pressure to act more like Boards of Finance;

- successful candidacies for membership on the Boards by people who have personal vendettas and become one-issue members;

- a failure by many Boards to treat their professional educators as respected professional advisers and, instead, a tendency to allow their personal biases to play a greater role in decision-making than research and the opinions of people who have been trained to understand educational issues;

- a susceptiblity of some members on Boards of Education to relate more to cronyism than the best interests of children, leading to problems related to nepotism and issuance of “favors,” especially in hiring practices; and,

- a tendency to be swayed by local political interest groups, many of whom provide candidates for future elections.

While I understand the concern about state bureaucratic influence, the question has to be whether the state could do much worse than what I have outlined above. We question and complain about where American education is going, yet we fail to recognize that it is on the local levels where most significant decisions about education are being made, at least as they effect individual schools. Why do we fail to understand the answer to that question? Go back to my second reason for the maintainance of local autonomy, the one I called “insidious,” and you will see the reason we turn our heads while vociferously complaining. Other than that judge in Boston a number of years ago and a few other limited measures that have been attempted in several staes, we fail to act because too many people believe that it is not in their self-interest to act. The solution, they believe, creates a bigger problem, even if it is a just solution. Rather, they pinch their noses and tolerate the smell.

Problems in American Education - Part 8: Financial Support for Public Education

2005-06-29T00:47:00.000-07:00

It would be foolish to argue that throwing money at problems is the way to solve all of those problems; but it would be equally foolish to state that funding for public education is unimportant. The way our economic system works, an institution that struggles to obtain a working budget is an institution that spends its time managing struggles. My experience tells me that way too much time in public education is taken up managing matters related to passing school budgets; and, let there be no doubt, this is time that is taken away from programs related to education. Indirectly, therefore, it means time taken away from those innocent and vulnerable children that keep getting mentioned in these essays and who unknowingly and repeatedly find themselves at the end of the food chain.

In a free society, of course, everyone has the right (and duty) to vote according to the dictates of his or her conscience. Like most of us, I would fight to the death to protect that right. It bothers me, however, to see communities in a wealthy country defeat school budgets time after time, year after year, until those budgets are whittled down to bare minimums (and sometimes below bare minimums). Granted, it could be asserted that these budgets are defeated for good reason. That voters do not agree with the programs promoted by their school districts. I have seen evidence, however, that many times the reasons relate more to tax levels than program agreement.

The Puritans in colonial New England tended to be a bit extreme for my tastes, but I do think they had a few good ideas. One that I particularly admire is the one that says a community is a community because of a covenant of interconnectedness that its people enjoy with one another. In my opinion, whether we are young or old, whether we have children of our own or not, we all have the responsibility, as members of the community, to support the children of the community. I look at that tenet of responsibility to one another as one of those cornerstones of civilization that makes us civilized. The Puritans gave this notion very religious overtones; but I don’t think we need to go that far to see its merit.

I have heard many stories, usually accompanied by jokes, from educators who complain about how you can see all the old and retired people come out in all kinds of weather to vote against school budgets. They don’t have children in school now, the reasoning goes, and they are out there to keep their taxes down. They don’t care, so the story goes, about rationales and programs. All they care about is the tax rate.

I personally have seen members of Boards of Education defend this position on behalf of senior citizens and others. The argument normally bases it’s logic on the difficulty fixed income people have in dealing with ever-rising taxes. My position is that, while I feel badly about that reality, people choose in a free society to live wherever they believe they can afford to live. I am not certain that affordability is a fair concept when it comes to support for education, and I will deal with that matter in a future post; but it is a reality. To put it another way, children should not suffer because people make mistakes about where they can afford to live, now or in the future.

Problems in American Education - Part 7: Misconceptions about Grades and a Few Other Matters

2005-06-28T06:09:00.000-07:00

I almost quit writing this series last night because I am feeling a bit uneasy about a few things. Very few people are reading it, and that’s one reservation; but it’s not really a big deal to me. Part of me just wants to get this stuff out there; and, if few read it, so be it. My soul is mixed in with the words, so the activity in itself does offer some satisfaction.

The biggest reservation, the one that gives me caution, is that I don’t feel too comfortable biting the hand that fed me and my family for so many years. I was part of the system and, as an American, I loved most of it and was proud of most of it during all the years of my career. The issues you see here are more a matter of a spat between lovers than they are an attack on the core of what still is an American system. I love my country and what it respresents and hope that no one interprets my words in any other way. I am still writing today because I do love what we are trying to do and feel that I have a responsibility to explain the serious reservations I have about what I saw over those many years. If I am nothing else, I like to see myself as an advocate for children, the most innocent and most vulnerable people in our civilization. Whether I am accurate in my admonitions or misguided, I believe advocacy is my motivation. I want to see change, and my options for promoting that change are now very limited.

The topic for this morning is our systems of grading or evaluating student performance. Maybe it’s because I taught social studies and English, subjects that dealt with more conceptual content, but I never understood how we can so emphatically evaluate student performance numerically. The amazing thing to me is to observe how seriously people accept those numerical results and look at them as a way to make schools accountable. It’s like we try to measure human beings like you would measure the distance between New York and Chicago - like human intelligence can be represented by discrete sequential numbers. To put it another way, it’s like trying to measure the effect of an explosion with a yardstick.

At least when we use letter grades there is some recognition of the fact that we are simply incapable of measuring the complexity of human progess to any precise degree, but I have always been amazed at the pressure educators feel to produce exact number grades. I see this as a problem in national standardized testing, state standardized testing and even with individual class evaluations and I suspect that the problem is more political than it is a question of accurate evaluation.

Who among us feels qualified to say, for instance, that 70% or 60% mastery of any subject is connected in some way to success in life. As a friend of mine once said when I was in high school, if you had a kidney problem, would you want to go to a doctor who had a great reputation, a great percentage of success, but who flunked kidneys when he was in medical school. I suppose that doesn’t quite match up with my issue here, but it does call attention to what a misconception it is to believe that grades mean a great deal.

To my way of thinking, the problem is compounded even more in its imprecision the further down you go in grade level and age. The younger the child, the more unpredicatable they are and the more difficult it is to evaluate their progress at any particular point. Granted, you can calculate the percentage of material they have mastered. But what does that mean? What if their mental capacities and developmental maturity are about to take a quantum leap next month and they are not scheduled for testing again in a certain area for another year? Does that mean that we should make important decisions about their programs based on what we see today? These things do happen. My hypothetical example is not far fetched. Actually, it happens quite often.

Another reason why I have been feeling uncomfortable about my writing over the past couple of days is that I feel I am running the risk of a “glass half-empty” approach that indicates there are problems; but an approach that offers precious few solutions. My solution for this problem is to ask educators and parents to not take themselves and their tools so seriously. Why attempt to precisely measure what is unmeasurebable? Why do we need to place kids, especially little kids, into categories with fences they can never climb over once they are perceived to be certain “kinds” of students? Once again I am calling for flexibility and inclusion for all children. Understanding learning disabilities is important reasons to study student progress, but most of those disabilities, if serious, are profound and easily recognizable. We need to address them, but we cannot and should not try to make a science out of what is an art.

Problems in American Education - Part 6: The Vicarious Problems Related to Pushing Children

2005-06-27T15:02:00.000-07:00

This next concern covers a cultural phenomenon so widespread that it touches virtually all pursuits in education. It is undeniable that our society puts a very high premium on success. That may seem so obvious that it does not warrant a mention; but what is important is the extreme to which we honor the concept in this country. We are a competitive people who are not satisfied with second place. While other citizens of the world also love to compete, my position here is that we tend to be obsessed with it as part of our culture and our value system.

When you couple that obsession with the connection we feel to our children that I described in my previously developed issue, the possibilities for an unhealthy intensity naturally follow. The phenomenon has taken many, many evolutionary years to develop; but the result is tremendous pressure to succeed put on children by many parents - a pressure that fulfills a vicarious desire on the part of those parents to live a better life through their children’s accomplishments. It is seen time and again in the classrooms, at policy meetings of Boards of Education, and even on the school athletic fields. Unfortunately, at least from the school’s point of view, the phenomenon often makes it very difficult for schools to effectively communicate and work with parents. The school is responsible for working in the best interests of all the children, but a minority of parents often fail to even take that mission into consideration when they prepare to fight for what they want for their children.

I cannot contend, therefore, that most parents are like this. Most are reasonable and sincerely want to work with the school to advance the interests of their children and to cooperate in the education of all children. The problem addressed here relates to the small minority of aggressive parents whose aggressively adversarial promotions for their children consume a psychic energy in the school that is markedly disproportionate to their numbers - causing a significant disruption and distraction from what the school is supposed to be doing.

As an administrator, the object I hated the most was the telephone. So much of my time was taken up by parents who, even when operating under what they felt were the best of intentions, would argue and debate endlessly to gain some advantage for their children. Often they did not even recognize that their argument was severely colored by self-interest. They would contend that compliance with their position was in the best interests of the school as a whole. In truth, these were the parents who believed that it was their duty to advocate in an adversarial manner in order to get the best possible education for their children. All they unwittingly achieved was the building of fences, the breakdown of communication, and the creation of distrust between the school and the home.

Often, these were the same parents who would apply the same kind of pressure directly on their children - pushing them to strive for excellence in all things. What’s difficult in all of this is the realization that these parents are not far from where they should be in monitoring their children’s progress; but that small distance makes all the difference in the world. Good parents should be challenging their children to strive for excellence. Good parents should advocate for their children in the schools; but we need to ask the question about how far they should go. My experience tells me that more and more go too far. No one wants to really challenge them because to do so leads to charges of failing to communicate.

Our society at the turn of the century is confronted often by a massive lack of trust in what used to be our most trusted and most wholesome institutions - and schools are definitely among those institutions. The constant questioning by parents moves beyond healthy advocacy when it becomes obsessive and automatic. Seeking ways to motivate our children becomes unhealthy when children are subjected to parental pressure in ways they are not equipped to handle. We now have growing problems with holding our families and social institutions together and I submit that part of the reason is that we have lost our ability to nurture with healthy perspectives. There is no sense of community and trust, and our schools are some of the first places to consider as places where that sorry situation is evident.

Problems in American Education - Part 5: Elitism and Hypocrisy

2005-06-27T01:48:00.000-07:00

You know, for a country that claims to be the center of democracy in the world, we seem to have way too much social stratification in our schools. I will try to make this entry a little shorter, especially since I touched on the subject a little in my last essay on ability grouping; but I do believe that elitism, though sometimes subtle, is a very large and very hypocritical erosive element plaguing American education. Let’s just stop and think about it for a while and describe it for what it is.

Once again, in considering the logic and consistency behind our programs in education, it may be wise to go back to Jefferson’s thoughts on equal opportunity for all. We do present such ideas to the world as cornerstones on which our society is built. At the same time, however, we also support the notion that people should be free to send their children to elite private schools, parochial and other private church-related institutions, and to programs in which certain students are given an advantage over others.

Again, consider the logic. If we are truly a democratic society with equal opportunity for all, why are some children given advantage over others? I am guessing that the first line of argument in favor of such discrimination will be related to freedom of choice - the idea that parents who have earned the financial and/or social power to make decisions about how their children will be educated should have the freedom to do so. My essential question is this: Even if the parents, through hard work, good decisions, effort, and good fortune in a free society, have earned the freedom they wish to exercise, what have their children done to equally earn such privilege? Unless I am missing something, it seems to me that all they did was find themselves born into power. Why is it that the poor child, born into an inner city family, does not get similar advantage in a society that is supposed to be based on equality of opportunity. This is more than just a disconnect - it is hypocrisy.

I want to make it clear that I am not opposed to private schools. They have a place and a role to perform in a democratic society. I believe that private schools should exist to work with children who have special needs that mainstream public schools cannot service. I have worked in the past decade as an administrator and teacher in two schools designed to work with at-risk youth. There is no greater calling. These schools were set up to help troubled kids who needed a helping hand to climb back into the main currents of life. That is just one example of a proper role for private education. There are others.

What I cannot defend are private schools and privileged circumstances in public schools that seek to hand advantage to children just because their parents or some perceived notions about their state of childhood competence dictate that they should be segregated. Such practices are not democratic and run counter to the concept and development of equal opportunity. Let us not fool ourselves; these practices are widespread and largely accepted as normal patterns in American education. I contend that they undermine the culture of education and send subtle but strong messages about what our society is supposed to represent.

Supporting all of this is the unstated notion that parents own their children - that children are extensions of themselves and are thereby entitled (that’s the word!) to special consideration. I know that there was a judge in Boston a number of years ago who got into a great deal of trouble trying to use buses to attack this problem; but he was right. There was and is a basic inequality of opportunity in our country and the situation not getting any better. In his case, he was trying to battle that inequality as it related to the disparities between urban and suburban schools; but that is only one corner of the problem. The bigger picture has to do with innate prejudice subtly harbored in the heart of the way our portion of civilization thinks. As one sage recently noted in something I read somewhere, we like democracy when it makes us feel free, but we don’t like it when it gives freedom for others to become unwanted competition. Makes you think a little bit about ancient Rome, doesn’t it?

Problems in American Education - Part 4: Myths Related to Ability Grouping

2005-06-26T04:14:00.000-07:00

I wanted to start my chronicle of problems with one that is particularly important to me - an issue in which I could really sink my teeth and release some passion. Any of you who have worked with me know that the question of ability grouping (sometimes called “homogeneous grouping”) is just such an issue.

Ability grouping before high school is a bad thing. I used to say that it was evil, but people would look at me in a funny way when I said that, so I thought I would try to avoid scaring you away by restraining myself a bit in this blog. You probably already think I am using extreme rhetoric on what seems to be a pretty mundane subject; but I would like to ask you to bear with me a little while I make my case. I hate ability grouping before high school; and, to tell the truth, I’m not really all that excited about it in high school. At least in high school, however, there are some solid reasons to allow prerequisite course requirements that dictate the sorting of some students into certain classes with other students who have completed similar course requirements. I do not see that as the same issue as ability grouping in the lower grades.

Thankfully, pre-high school ability grouping has been fading away (although very slowly) over the past couple of decades in many American schools. My contention is that the speed of change is not nearly fast enough when you consider the harm that the practice has done to millions of children over the years. Ability grouping still has its proponents and these are the people I want to take on in this blog. Understand, I do believe that most of them are well-intentioned; but I believe they are dead wrong about this practice and that children continue to suffer because of the practice. We need to trace back a bit to put all of this into context.

Let’s start with Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson and the other founding fathers (but especially Jefferson) developed the foundations of our egalitarian society, they spoke about all men being created equal. Granted, they were particularly focusing on white males, but it was the late 1700’s and that limitation in their thinking was somewhat understandable at the stage of evolution in which they found themselves. In the context of my case development today, the important thing is to understand Jefferson’s working definition of equality. He is often misunderstood. By that I mean that he was not contending that all people are born with the same talents or equal proportions of the same abilities. Jefferson was a brilliant man with a very logical, though sensitive, mind. He was not naive. What he meant by the equality he espoused in the Declaration of Independence was that a democratic government had the reponsibility of promoting equality of opportunity. We have clung to this democratic principle ever since, proudly claiming that to be born American means that we should all have the same opportunity to develop in positive directions and stake out our claims to a happy, fulfilling, and successful life. We say that it is true; but, as we all know, saying something does not always mean that it is true. Much blood has been shed on this issue in American history and, believe it or not, I am about to be so bold as to contend that this question of ability grouping has and is quietly part of that battle for attempting to live what we have preached for well over 200 years.

Why did we ever group students according to their perceived ability levels? The simple answer to that question that is always offered is that it allows teachers to approach students who have similar understanding of the subject matter in an efficient manner. Proponents believe that it is efficient because students who are not ready for the level of delivery do not slow down those who can take on the challenge. The need for individualization, therefore, is not there and the teacher can concentrate on pure instruction and progress. Subjects are covered more quickly and progress takes place with few obstacles. Students who are not ready for higher levels of study, they contend, also benefit because classes for them are formed at a lower level of challenge, allowing them to work at their own pace and make progress at a slower pace. It sounds neat and analytical and it appeals to those who argue that we pay too little attention to common sense solutions in education.

The problem is that it doesn’t make common sense when you really take a look at it and, as noted, it does great harm to children and to our educational delivery systems.
But wait, I must remember to follow my own admonition about moving slowly on this subject and in developing the thought process. In order to lay out the framework and to provide some context, here is a list of what my experience tells me are the real reasons why some schools still group according to perceived ability levels:

1. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

2. There are serious misunderstandings about the ability levels of young human beings.

3. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

4. Parents of students who are perceived to be in the higher ability groups think that their children can benefit from the accelerated opportunities found in schools where ability grouping segregates their children from slower learners.

5. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

6. Certain skills-oriented subject teachers (particularly in math) feel that some of their students can advance much more quickly if not slowed down by less capable students who cannot deal conceptually with the higher level thinking skills required in some of the course work.

7. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

8. Special education teachers (some of them) believe that their students hit a wall at about middle school age and that they cannot do the work done by mainstream students.

9. It is easier for teachers to teach classes that are ability grouped.

Do you get the picture? My contention, of course, is that all of the above thinking is erroneous and that it does not take crucial factors and research into account. Analytically, it does not take into account research findings that the whole line of thinking is faulty in the first place. Quite frankly and very directly, there is no research that I have ever seen to suggest that we can reliably determine ability levels of children before grade 9. The development of the maturation process is such that children grow at different rates. Aside from infancy, the fastest and most volatile rate of growth takes place during adolescence, the middle school years. To rate students on ability levels before high school is unfair and far from democratic. To do so is to falsely label them and doom them to a track that ultimately makes it impossible for the late bloomer to bloom.

Now, to get away from data-driven analysis, my more serious point is that the actual result of ability grouping is that kids are either emotionally and motivationally crushed by seat-of-the-pants evaluations that many adults accept as accurate, or they are placed in an entitled group of elite that would reflect proudly on medieval European class systems. All this in a democratic society!

Why do some school systems still believe that it is necessary to maintain such an archaic system? Is it that the tail of the math curriculum wags the dog, especially in smaller schools where math grouping creates scheduling impediments that maintain de facto grouping in all subjects? If so, I don’t understand why that should be the case. The argument is always that early grouping in math allows students to advance to the point where they can take calculus and other advanced math offerings in high school, preparing them for college work. But I have to ask how many students, what percentage, are serviced by such a philosophy. The truth is that the percentage is tiny; and even if you accepted the needs of those students as a reason to shape an entire school system, you would find that there is usually plenty of time in the senior year in most high school for most students to take whatever they want. In fact, most of our high schools have difficulty finding challenging and motivating offerings for most seniors to keep them busy during that terminal year. Why then do we need to push higher levels of math to students in grades 6 and 7? Why can’t they take basic and needed courses in areas like computer math and consumer math, for example, subjects that do not require advanced skills and that can bring beneficial skills to all students? I think the answer has something to do with social political correctness, teacher preferences, and political pressure from parents and others. I also believe it is part of a half-century tradition that has not been put under the scrutiny of what I call “zero-based” curriculum planning. In other words, we just don’t seem to go back to the basic mission to determine what is right for all students in regard to what they need for the future and what research tells us about what they can do and what they will be able to do. Rather, we indulge ourselves with positions that indicate that we should pursue the values we have pursued in the past.

This whole debate begs the question as to what intelligence really is. My experience in dealing with both teachers and parents is that most still believe that the measure of intelligence is a straight line projection - a single number (or IQ) that rates people from unintelligent to intelligent. Most theorists, however, tell us that intelligence (or ability if you prefer) is multi-faceted and that virtually all human beings are “intelligent” in some way. To me, it is the ultimate arbitrary, capricious and presumptuous act to believe that we have the resources to believe we can sort out kids and, in effect, determine their futures when they are at the tender ages of ten or eleven years old.

I have seen how the cruelty of this act reflects from the eyes of our children when they realize that they have been placed in lower groups or that their special education designation resulting from a legitimate disability has seriously compromised their opportunity to be in the mainstream that leads to success in life. The actual words are not spoken, but the message they receive is that they need to compensate so that they can lower their sights in the game of life. Please understand, I don’t think there is anything wrong with compensating. In fact, I admire it. What I do resent and attack, is the implied notion that these children cannot do what others do. It may take a little longer in some cases, but everything I know and have seen tells me they can catch up if we do not institutionally trample on their confidence to do so.

I know, the educational community continues to slowly come around to my way of thinking on this; but why should we wait forever for the dawn to break on this? In the meantime, how many more children are hurt by the dictates of educational pragmatism? I don’t think it is right to allow this to happen. In fact, it is simply wrong.

Problems in American Education - Part 3: A Preview Outline

2005-06-25T05:46:00.000-07:00

I hope some of these topics whet your appetite. They are some of the issues I would like to address with my unvarnished, seat-of-the-pants opinions. Take a look. Maybe you can figure out where I am likely to go with some of them and you can start sharpening your own opinions to take me on.

- The myths related to ability grouping

- Elitism in education
Public vs. Private
Parents owning children - the sense of entitlement
Inequality in a democratic country

- Pushing kids too early - vicarious and counterproductive

- Grades - an imprecise science at best

- Boards of Education and the Constitutional responsibility for education

- Public support for education - What happened to the covenant?

- Parents may be the biggest problem

- The problems related to the career path for educators and leadership

- What is curriculum? Is there really a definition?

- Every place needs a mission

- Teachers’ unions / associations and the concept of professionalism

- Nutrition and the lunch program. Does curriculum stop in the classroom?

- Role of sports and school spirit

- Middle school vs. Junior High School

- Providing a real-life education
Student Team Learning
Performance based assessment
Structure
Differentiated instruction

- Progressive vs. Permissive

- Passive individualization - Why not?

- Computer assisted instruction

Problems in American Education - Part 2: More about where I am coming from

2005-06-24T05:50:00.000-07:00

Credibility in this exchange needs to be based on trust in the author as a person and as an educator. I wrote the following statement of philosophy a few years ago when I was still hoping to extend my career in application for various administrative posts. It should tell you a bit more about my perspective and beliefs.

Most of my friends know that I just love to talk philosophy of education. My experience has been that educators either relish the opportunity to look at that philosophical forest or look at it with disdain, preferring to study the individual trees and emphasize the practical side of working with kids. One of my cornerstone beliefs is that a successful educational program needs a philosophical vision and a mission statement that is constantly in the focus of that vision.

This in no way implies any personal desire to chase windmills while practical realities are ignored. I feel strongly that any comprehensive educational institution must pay close attention to day-to-day needs and always put great value on a rigorous, practical, challenging, and individualized program for all of its students. One of my great fears in education, however, is that we too often get caught up in the necessities of every day survival. If we are not careful, that can lead to a very pragmatic approach to teaching in which vision, or a sense of direction, is lost to legitimately practical concerns that serve the moment, but not future. By working to build trust (and that can only be done by demonstrating that you are true to yourself), an educator provides the opportunity for growth and collective achievement, thereby providing the foundation for adherence to an educational vision.

When I look back at my career as an educator, I think of three areas of accomplishment that make me feel proud and reflect my most basic philosophical tenets and vision. In no particular order, the three areas of accomplishment are: (1) my advocacy for and active promotion of a middle school philosophy for twenty-one years in the school where I spent most of my career while teaching and leading on both the middle and high school levels, (2) my involvement in the same school district’s Senior Project movement and program during the 1990’s, and (3) my efforts in starting a charter school for at-risk, inner-city students in Hartford.

Plain and simple hard work was very much a part of those accomplishments, and it is not too old fashioned or trite to claim that leading by that example was important. I am passionate and committed in the way I approach my work, and everyone around me knows it. Healthy disagreement and different points of view are always accepted in that environment; but I have found that students tend to trust and follow those they admire for their commitment. The balance of tolerance for differences is implied in the atmosphere I am promoting; but so is the tendency to rally behind the leader who shows commitment to an ideal.

As noted, one of the highlights of my career was the development of a Senior Project program on the high school level during the early to mid-90s. A performance based assessment program that received national recognition, the Senior Project program was a celebration of the human spirit and gave students the opportunity to demonstrate that they had mastered the requisite skills, in a real-life situation, to take their place as effective and skilled adults in the community. It was controversial, but Senior Project was a great achievement for our high school, and it provided a direction for that school’s future and, I hope, for other schools of the future.

The Senior Project movement was the direct result of the school's commitment to the published competencies it developed for graduation and the strenuous requirements of performance based assessment. By definition, it was a reform for grade 12, but its impact traveled all through the high school and the middle school. One of our original goals for Senior Project as a grade 12 program was to create an exit image that could become a model for performance assessment throughout our program, grades 6 through 12. In many ways, Senior Project borrowed from the middle school model in the manner in which it valued process without diminishing the importance of content. In retrospect, it fit everything I came to believe when I broadened my approach to teaching in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, while translating those beliefs to an end product developed in the year of high school graduation. The history of the successful struggle to make Senior Project a requirement for graduation gave great romance to the mission, and the tremendous bond among the team of teachers and administrators who fought for the program added yet another level of satisfaction in what was accomplished.

My struggle to establish a charter middle school for disadvantaged children in Hartford tends to speak for itself. I am very proud of our attempt to overcome great odds to provide something special for those children. When I think of the middle school notion of providing a nurturing, caring environment where self-esteem is a crucially important ingredient, I think of that initiative, and the attempts to help those children, the neediest I have ever known.

Quite honestly, there were not many visible and obvious successes in the program; but I do believe there are times when success has to be defined in different ways. That thought is very much a part of what I believe comprehensive educational philosophy to be. The accomplishments described here all played key roles in helping me to understand the nature of successful education.

Problems in American Education - Part 1: The Good Side

2005-06-23T01:08:00.000-07:00

I have to admit that I come from a family of whiners. They were always the kind who saw the glass half empty. It's far fetched, but I used to think of it as an ethnic thing. I grew up in eastern Rhode Island among first and second generation Portuguese immigrants. Although Latins, my perception is that the Portuguese are far from volatile and intense. Rather, they lived the quiet lives of immigrants trying to find a level of success for their families in America through hard work and conservative habits. My upbringing was one in which great value was put on conserving what we had for a better day and taking little risk in regard to taking any kind of bold position. Life was tough and it was always better to be careful.

As an adult and as a professional educator, I have always kept this in mind. Usually what I had to do was fight off that tendency to keep everything too close to my vest and to expect Murphy's law to come into play after every turn in the road. I was conditioned to think that way, and I soon realized that creativity would be stifled if I let that somewhat negative position dictate my approach to my work.

That's why I need to write here that everyone should consider the good things in American education before examining all the flaws that I will pursue in upcoming blogs. My upcoming critiques are labors of love for a system I think is based on great merit; but which has lost its way in maintaining some very precious American ideals. The ideals are still there, however, and I feel very motivated in my attempts to push for their return. Here are some of the things that I really admire in American education and that I believe are still existing somewhere in the confusion:

- the perception that education in a democratic society is based on egalitarian and humane principles dedicated to the proposition that every child deserves an opportunity to succeed in life.

- the understanding that progress in the art and science of educating children is based on the development of new theories, ideas, and practices that incorporate the most recent understanding of the learning process and the belief that change requires constant reevaluation.

- the realization that we are a wealthy country and that we need to share our wealth with our children and all children as part of a covenant of reciprocity we have with the ideals that made us wealthy and successful in the first place.

Those perceptions, understandings, and realizations are, I think, starting points for discussion and represent foundation principles. As you will soon see if you continue to read my series, I feel that we have lost our way on these principles to some degree; but that does not mean that they are gone. Rather, it means that we need to review them and, in some cases, resurrect them. They are my "back to basics" list. I have come to dislike that term in the way it is used in education today and in the recent past, but it does apply in this context.

One of my complaints about life in general is that we sometimes forget to go back to our most basic roots, our common denominators, to determine if we are still in touch with the mission. I think that is what has happened in American education and it is my intention to examine what has happened in this series. Educators and theoreticians, as a whole, sometimes get too close to the situation and miss the forest for the trees. I will make a concerted attempt here to back up and look at the forest. I believe in philosophical application and mission review when attempting to solve institutional problems, and I will apply that belief to what I write here.

I hope you will join me in analyzing the problems.

A couple of words about my credentials

2005-06-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

I don't consider myself to be the world's "foremost authority" - on anything!
On the other hand, however, I'm not just the guy on the street claiming to offer a common sense solution to the country's problems in education. There have already been too many of those guys shouting things like, "Back to basics," over the last 20 years or so. I am just a guy who is finishing a 38-year career in the field doing the following things at one time or another:

Teacher: Both in public and private schools - mostly social studies, but some English - mostly middle school, but some high school and some short stays in elementary education and college teaching.

Administrator: Social Studies Department Chairman for high school and middle school (1972-early '90s); Chairman of Steering Committee for school evaluation on high school and middle school level; Activities Director; District Director of Public Relations for a couple of years; Coordinator of special performance based assessment program in high school; assistant principal of a middle school for a year; Founding Director and Principal of a charter school for children-at-risk (middle school level) in Hartford, Ct; assistant principal in a junior high school for 3 1/2 years; Interim Principal for a middle school in Fairfield County, Ct. for six months

Coach: Girls middle school softball; Boys high school basketball

Army: Instructor of Effective Communication for Officer Candidates

That just names a few of my jobs. In American education, you get to do quite a few things in 38 years. In some ways, that's part of the problem; but, in other ways, it certainly does make for great variety. As noted, you don't get to be an expert, but you do get to measure the length and width of the path along the terrain. My one contention here is that it allows me to give you a long and experienced look from the inside. I want to start to look at specific issues, reflecting both the good and bad in American education, in the next few blogs. I hope that I can get some return opinions.

Major series coming on problems of American education - I hope

2005-06-19T05:15:00.000-07:00

It's Father's Day and this is the week that I plan to retire from the field of education after a tumultuous, and, I think, successful 38 year career in public and private education. Four more days in my current job and that's it.

Right now I am trying to muster the energy and motivation to do something I have wanted to do for years and this blog thing might be just the right vehicle if I can get anyone to read the darn things.
You can't work in education for as long as I have without nurturing some opinions and ideas about the line of work you are immersed in. That is certainly how I feel about American education at this point. I have lots of opinions about what is right and what is wrong with American education as I remember my years, "on the inside" as both a teacher and an administrator.

What I would like to do is to write installments here about the various topics that have been circling in my mind over the many years. Don't misunderstand. I believe that there is much that is right about American education; but I also believe that the public at-large understands very little about what is wrong. As everyone knows, the public does know that something is wrong; but it is my contention that they bark up many of the wrong trees. I hope to address topics that really count - the ones that I have seen as really hurting kids in our country over the last 38 years and especially the ones that still haunt us today.

If you are reading this, my first hope has been realized. There really are people out there who care. That would give me a big leg up on the motivation piece. Please let me know if I can assume that to be true by replying here or contacting me at Friar4@aol.com. More should appear soon as I jump that last hurdle this week and break away from the field (so to speak).