On Tuesday I sat beside my granddaughter while she worked on her night’s homework for the better part of an hour. She is a high-achieving 4th grader attending a public school in a moderately affluent suburban district. She carefully followed the instructions she had copied into her organizer. First she took her math text out of her bulging backpack and proceeded to locate the page from which she was to copy a bar graph and a matching line graph. She filled in the 2 missing numbers in the bar graph by locating them in the line graph. Then she proceeded to answer the 3 questions that required her to repeat the information reported in the graphs.
Next,
she wrote her week’s 20 spelling words 3 times each. One quick glance
was sufficient, she was already in charge of the spelling. When she
finished writing the 60 words she retrieved her reading book, an
anthology of abridged pieces of children’s literature accompanied by the
questions the publisher wanted to ask, and flipped to the glossary. My
granddaughter is an avid reader, I was curious, so I asked. Yes, she
knew the meanings of her list of words. She copied the glossary
definitions into her notebook.
Last
was the reading assignment, a 2 page selection which consisted of a
humorous series of exaggerations similar to those found in tall tales.
The follow-up exercise required that she answer 5 questions under the
heading “Judgements”. She had to judge if the comical sentences taken
from the selection were, in her judgement, real or not real statements.
(Ex. Tom was so tall that when his hat fell from his head it took three
days before it hit the ground.) We shared a moment of confusion. The
answers were so obvious, had we missed something? We both had higher
expectations for the act of making judgements.
On
Wednesday afternoon I had lunch with a former school superintendent,
who in the years following her retirement from that position, had been a
project manager for a private company that did long-term instructional
reform in urban school districts. Here are just 3 of the surprises and
challenges she shared with me in talking about that work: She came
across classrooms in which teachers adhere to text books that, for
example, devote exactly one page to both the American and French
Revolutions; a special needs student that learned to read only after
being removed from his school’s special needs class where he was not
being taught to read; seeing a successful district-wide initiative to
raise student achievement and implement teaching practices that promote
higher- level thinking terminated because the incoming superintendent
wanted to distance himself from the previous administrator.
On
Wednesday night I gave a power point presentation on the topic of women
and poverty in developing countries, based on what I had seen and
learned while attending a microcredit conference in Nairobi. The gender
studies class of 25 undergraduate students was engaged, curious and
thoughtful. However, the paucity of vocabulary and concepts was
painfully evident throughout the classroom when the students were asked
to express themselves verbally and in writing. Drawing conclusions and
applying evidence to their answers was equally challenging.
On
Thursday morning I read the transcript of President Obama’s economics
speech given in Kansas in which he focused on the endangered middle
class of America. He spoke of the “demands of the moment”. This is what
he said: .
The
world is shifting to an innovation economy and nobody does innovation
better than America. Nobody has a greater diversity of talent and
ingenuity. No one’s workers or entrepreneurs are more driven or more
daring. The things that have always been our strengths match up
perfectly with the demands of the moment.
But
we need to meet the moment. We’ve got to up our game. We need to
remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making
education a national mission -- a national mission. Government and
businesses, parents and citizens. In this economy, a higher education is
the surest route to the middle class.
What
do these things have in common? I think they all point to the need for
many of our schools to adjust course and get real about what their
mission is. The time has passed for “playing” school and requiring
students to do the shallow, school-like work of copying exercises and
completing mindless worksheets. We know better. We can’t afford to have
schools that continue to paint by the numbers instead of doing the much
more challenging work of envisioning, designing, observing, reflecting,
and refining instruction with the integrity and the inherent value of
their students in mind. Most schools are so caught up in what ever race
it is they are trying to win that they are rushing past the content of
their students’ education and leaving their students bereft of
understanding, perspective, and the habits of mind necessary for real
world work. It takes very artful prioritizing to get out of that bind.
We need school leaders whose first allegiance is to the students that
have been entrusted to them not to self-promotion and politically
expedient choices. We need school board members who remember why they
are giving up their evenings several nights a month.
What
does it take to meet the demands of the moment? Well there are many
ways to get there from here but there is one non-negotiable reality.
Schools have to be held accountable to their communities, not just for
the bottom-line, high-stakes test scores but for the challenging work of
cultivating self-efficacy, essential life-long learning strategies,
critical analysis, self-direction, collaboration skills and problem
solving ability. Without that kind of education we will never have the
human capital that is capable of delivering in an innovation economy.
