When children play “school,” usually one child is the “teacher” and the others are the “students.” The “lesson” in these games is almost always based on low-level recall of facts or mastery of a one-step skill or process. The idea is pervasive in our culture. Many adults conjure up the same images in their minds when they think of schools. This probably has a lot to do with why so many of the career-changers of the 1990s and early 2000s were so unsuccessful in the classroom. It probably also has a lot to do with why many educational policies are doing such a spectacular job of failing to bring about the promised improvements.Two initiatives that are playing out this school year are a new evaluation system for educators and a new Sheltered English Immersion (SEI) class that is required for recertification in Massachusetts.
The SEI class is called “RETELL,” which stands for “Rethinking Equity and Teaching for English Language Learners”. Someone probably thought about that course title for at least five minutes. Much of the course content, including several of the group activities, were probably the result of a similar amount of thought and careful planning. The course is a mile wide and an inch deep, and as with the children playing “school”, the participants dutifully regurgitate the “right” answers in our assignments without having the time or opportunity to actually think about any of it. Because we are able to come up with the “right” answers on command, the people who created the course think this proves that we have learned the content. (This idea has probably done more damage to education than any other.)
Massachusetts, like many other states, is also revamping its teacher evaluation system. The system was presented to us in a three-hour workshop, in which we participated in a bunch of inadequately-planned games and activities in which the presenters gave us prompts and we came up with the “right” answers. At the end of the workshop, we had answered all of the questions “correctly”, though we still understood very little about how the new system actually works and what we actually need to do.
Looking at the larger picture, the problem is not these two instances in isolation, but that they are part of a trend, in which people who claim to know something about education are deciding that something needs to be done immediately, are implementing it hastily with poor content and poor delivery, and without regard to how well or how badly the implementation is actually serving its intended purpose.
The same holds true for high-stakes tests. In practice, they are a quick and dirty one-question-per-standard low-level assessment. Teachers are having to do cartwheels to get students’ scores to continually improve. College professors continue to bemoan the steady decline in college readiness of the students who are earning the improving test scores. Legislators, department of education officials and administrators are pushing for changes in every part of the system except for the broken assessments themselves.
When teachers push back against the insanity, we are often accused of being entrenched in our old-fashioned ideas and too lazy to embrace changes that are sorely needed. However, this does not describe any of the teachers I work with. My colleagues and I see changes that reduce our students’ ability to think critically and make connections between important concepts at a high level. We fight to teach our students as human beings, not numbers on a spreadsheet or outcomes on a probability grid. Policymakers bemoan our students’ inability to do things that our generation was able to do when we were in school. And yet they continue to strip us of more and more of the methods that led to that success, replacing them with new ideas and responsibilities that distract us from the task of helping our students build the critical thinking skills that will help them to be successful in college and in their careers.
“Today we are going to play ‘school’. Everyone please get out a #2 pencil.”
