Education reform. Everyone’s got an opinion. Tons of disagreement on how to do it. But on the issue that we must evolve our education system, we have unanimity.
The path we are on right now, undeniably, is to test our students even more. Furthermore those test results are to be used to make more and more important decisions (e.g. how teachers are paid, to label “failing” schools and districts, to terminate employees, to make “Top to Bottom” rankings, or for state departments of education to take over local school districts.) This list is growing.
Meanwhile conformity of curriculum is now institutional in the form of common core standards.
This disturbs me, particularly as I’ve invested more time to understand the issues. The more people know more about these issues, the more disturbed they will be about how what is the generally accepted “education reform movement” and its ever-increasing reliance on standardized tests.
I ask that you invest 20 minutes watching the two You Tube clips below. The first from author Daniel Pink is foundational. While not specific to education, the principles absolutely apply. His book, Drive, is a must read.
As you watch the second clip of author Sir Ken Peterson, you’ll see how some of Pink’s themes apply specifically to education in our country. The irony is that we all acknowledge the world has changed, yet the change for which some advocate in the education space is really antiquated thinking.
Carrots and stick are relics of a bygone era. Our students and teachers are not horses.
The change we need will not result from doing the things that we know don’t work even more frequently and with amplified ramifications. All of the energy and zeal we collectively have should be directed towards finding creative solutions to education reform that at least have a chance at working.
To stitch a couple of these topics together, the solutions will vary – which is good and desirable. And this is yet another reason why the centralization of educational policy and practice, whether in Lansing or Washington D.C. is a bad thing. These are community decisions that should be made on the local level. When done so, the mastery and purpose have chance. They have no chance in the shroud of conformity and compliance.