Education Part III or so...

Education – Part III or so…
Sometime after he was elected President of the United States, George W. Bush enacted legislation that I believe constitutes the most overarching incursion into education that the United States has ever seen. NCLB – No Child Left Behind – has since influenced the educational landscape more than any other federal initiative with which I am familiar. So why isn’t George known as the “education President?”
Well, influential isn’t necessarily the same thing as supportive, effective, or energizing. NCLB has been the catalyst for some changes in education that will ultimately prove to be powerfully positive, I hypothesize, but the method and/or manner by which that ‘improvement’ has been coerced is appropriately considered dubious.
Here’s the biggest reason that NCLB and almost all of its subsequent implementations, on the national, state, and local level, reveal the stupidity of even some of the most educated and wise people in the business: when they went looking for a model for school improvement, the powers that be determined to use a business model – quality control – as the paradigm. Their thinking was that setting measurable standards, with reliable assessment mechanisms in place, would enable schools to identify the specific objectives, respond to performance gaps, and thereby prevent any and all children from falling behind as they wend their way through their public school years.
Sounds like a decent idea, right? Well, not really. I will tell why after one other major point. The other notable component of the proposed NCLB process was that systematic – read scientific – evaluations, adjustments, and safety nets would allow schools at the local level to implement correctives that would serve to ‘fix’ learning problems for individual students by resorting to identified ‘best practices,’ methods that have proven to be effective according to statistical analysis.
The problem with these two components is fairly simple: Schools are NOT businesses, and teaching is NOT a science. Having been in the education business for all of my adult life, and having often volunteered to utilize most of the school improvement initiatives that I have learned – at whatever point my district decided to promote them – I have concluded the opening statement to this paragraph in a certifiable truth.
The problem with the school as business model approach is that businesses have great control over the materials, approaches, and processes they use on their way to create whatever widget they are inclined to make. For the teacher, the collection of students assigned to him/her at any given point in time is not clearly controlled. Try this analogy. How effective can a manufacturing plant be if it has been contracted to make steel beams for a high rise without knowing the grade or quality of the raw metal ore that it will be using for the task?
The plant can test or diagnose the quality of the raw materials, and then determine the best process for creating the highest possible grade of steel. After all, the raw materials, once identified, aren’t going to change. Consequently, the most effective method for managing the classified raw material is going to be the same method employed the next time a batch of the same grade of material comes through the plant.
If you have been following the analogy, you already know where I am going with this, but if you know nothing about the role of the teacher, I will try to complete the comparison.
I have had students walk into my classroom with identifiable strengths and weaknesses. In many cases, directed efforts to maximize strengths and improve or eliminate weaknesses have predictable effects. However, the student him/herself is constantly changing. While strengths tend to remain strengths over time, external forces ‘create’ weaknesses that were not diagnosed earlier because they weren’t there!
I will be specific. I had a student once whose most noticeable strength was his ability to retain information. He was highly organized, very focused, and predictably capable of working with a high volume of content (information.) Then he lost his father to a terrible accident, and his change in temperament culminated in his longtime girlfriend’s decision to end their relationship. The boy’s state of mind was enough to disrupt his skill set. For a protracted period of time, he lost his ability to manage information effectively.
I contend that while few students have to manage the death of a parent, the daily trials and tribulations of life for an adolescent or young adult exert similar influences and therefore, similar effects. A good teacher notices a problem, provides emotional support, and may even implement some different methods to address the problem. No best practice will take the place of an alert, compassionate, and resourceful teacher.
The point here is that teaching has never been a scientific enterprise, even though scientific principles are of great value to the classroom teacher. The raw materials are not static, and the most effective processes for dealing with that raw material are therefore not scientifically predictable. Furthermore, no development of a best practices arsenal will guarantee that a teacher will know when, where, or how to select the most effective method of dealing with a student’s individual problem. Quite simply, despite the higher level administration’s desire to make schools function as businesses do, and despite the school innovators’ desire to make teaching function as science does, the two fundamental principles of the NCLB movement are fallacies. It would be nice if the fallacies were viable truths, but they are not.
In case I have been guilty of being obtuser [sic] than I intended, I will try to make this as simple as possible. A student will never be analogous to a shipment of iron ore, the raw material most necessary to the creation of high quality steel. Each year the teachers of the world try to diagnose the relative strengths and weaknesses of the student assigned to them. While the teachers’ diagnoses may be accurate when they are conducted, the student, since he is chronically evolving, can’t possibly follow a predetermined learning curve. Yes, once the number crunchers input volumes of data, trends and predictable patterns become apparent. Despite the fact that students do follow significant growth patterns collectively, the premise of NCLB is that No child, not one, will be left behind. If the reader has noted the analogy drawn through the last few paragraphs, s/he knows that there is going to be some behind leaving.
If the preceding paragraph didn’t make sense to you, I will try one other approach. If my class of thirty shows a predictable improvement in skill development or knowledge acquisition during the course of a year, that trend or general truth does not guarantee that one or two of the students will be on the same pace. In short, good scores by the mass of students will disguise the reported difficulties of the few who are not making gains. Therefore, so long as the testing mechanism or the benchmark for efficacy of various methods of instruction is determined by global statistical analysis, the process of “sciencizing” teaching is destined to fail.
Now, the gurus will tell the unsuspecting school administrators that ‘their’ program will create a series of safety nets, all scientifically tested and proven, that will ‘guarantee’ that a student who doesn’t benefit from intervention one will undoubtedly be corrected by intervention two, or by intervention three. The gurus are lying, and they know it. They are in the business of selling their programs. The districts who buy it are then trained in how to sell the same program, using the same fallacious reasoning employed by the consultants and gurus, with the promise that this program will help the administrators to create or develop ‘high performing’ or cutting edge schools.
The really insidious thing about the gurus’ collective programs is that they really are generally good ideas. The problem is rarely with the program itself. These guys have done their doctorates, and engaged in educational testing, and they are correct – usually – in selecting ideas that are viable and noteworthy. What the gurus and the district personnel never seem to consider is that EDUCATION CAN’T FUNCTION LIKE A BUSINESS, and TEACHING IS NOT A SCIENCE.
I taught high school English for more than twenty years, and I would like to think that I was an effective teacher. However, by the time I hit my tenth year or so, I happened upon a realization: For three or so of the twenty-some students enrolled in each section of my classes, I was an ideal teacher. No matter what I did, we clicked, the students learned, and I learned to love those students who validated my efforts. I also realized that for three or four of the students in each section, I was the least likely to be effective teacher. Nothing I could do, no best practice, was going to circumvent the fact that my technique, my personality, my approach, my person - all of these things - were barriers to the education of those three students. Therefore, I had little control over the success of six out of twenty-four or more students. The remaining eighteen were neither resistant to my efforts, nor inclined to benefit. In their cases, my effective deployment of best practices was the difference between educational success and failure. So the current trend is statistically defensible. Teachers should do the things that statistically stand to be effective for the majority of the students.
But I spent my last five years in the classroom experimenting with adjustments that might help me to reach the students who were disinclined to benefit from a year of instruction with me. I think I made some headway, but none of the practices that I adopted are significant components of any of the materials I have read. The reason is that my adjustments were all designed to deal with the identified personality conflict, the most consistently detrimental aspect to the education of those three or four students in each class.
For instance, adjustment number one was to interact in a positive way with any student I could identify as resistant to my natural approach. For some students, it was as simple of a gesture as saying ‘hello’ each day when they walked in the classroom. For those students who seemed to be put off by these exchanges of pleasantries, I would try to refer, without mentioning the name of the student, to a valuable idea, contribution, or response that the student had provided in recent classes. If neither of these approaches seemed to be productive, I might provide a positive evaluative comment for a parent on the interactive grade book on the website created to enhance parental communication. Finally, in some cases, I might add an encouraging comment on a graded assignment. In short, all of these efforts were designed to circumvent that my teaching persona never really came off as warm and fuzzy, and my lack of warm and fuzzy was a critical detriment to some of my students.
To be entirely truthful, I don’t know that any of these practices paid off. What I do know is that I was usually able to reduce the perceived animosity that the student felt toward me. If my teacher’s intuition was accurate, the student then had some energy left to direct toward English class. I should note here that those efforts mentioned immediately above are not innovative, and they are included as ‘best practices’ for teachers in general. The part that I like to think was different is that I particularly dedicated those efforts to the students I thought were reluctant to benefit from having me as an English teacher.
I should also add that in some cases, any effort I made seemed to antagonize the student, and I usually resigned myself to using one of the conventional interventions suggested by the gurus. I am happy to say that they were often effective.
So what’s the real lesson to be learned from my experiences? I think teachers, if the goal is to reform schools and learning, need to focus on the human side of the teaching/learning mechanism. The teacher can have an arsenal of best practices, and really truly know how to use them, but if s/he ignores the personal dimension, students will be left behind. It won’t really be the teacher’s fault, since the source of the barrier to education has little to do with methodology, curriculum, experience, expertise, or anything other than a globally human condition. Sometimes people don’t like other people, and sometimes those unlikeable people are charged with teaching the other person. There is a truth that will stick around and which will be true no matter which program your school district buys.
So ‘best practices’ are significant, but they DO NOT answer all questions, or even pretend to.