Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Here’s a poser for you. If your car kept dying on your way to work, would you consult an automotive marketing expert, an oil industry lobbyist or a mechanic? Unless you plan on having your mail forwarded to the shoulder of the road for the foreseeable future, you’d probably find calling a mechanic the only reasonable choice. That’s because he’s the one most likely to know what’s really wrong with your car and how to fix it.
Calling a mechanic, the guy who actually works with cars, is also the choice most congressmen and education officials would make, when it comes to car problems, that is. However, when it comes to education problems – you can probably see where I’m going here – teachers are the last people anybody asks.
Take this typical advertisement for an education policy “manager” posted by a self-described “national nonprofit organization.” The successful candidate will play “an integral role” in efforts to “transform public schools” and “fundamentally rethink the traditional approach to K-12 education.” Requirements include “2+ years of work experience” in a “related field,” specifically “an education policy environment” like another “advocacy organization” or “a legislature, executive branch, or city government.”
Not once in two pages of specifications are the words “teacher” or “teaching experience” ever uttered.
In our schools this reliance on education non-experts is an everyday occurrence. It’s been an everyday occurrence since the 1970s, which not coincidentally is when we began to notice that academic achievement was declining.
How’s the shoulder of the road looking to you?
How are our schools looking to you?
NEAToday recently spotlighted the current expert-mounted campaign to eliminate letter grades, which similarly dates back to those less than halcyon 1970s. “A Nation at Risk” condemned that era’s subjective, pass/fail grading fashions in its 1981 critique of the nation’s “rising tide” of achievement “mediocrity.”
Also back from the 1970s is NEA-anointed “education expert” Alfie Kohn. Mr. Kohn’s alleged expertise rests on teaching a summer course in existentialism at Phillips Andover Academy between 1979 and 1985. He’s drawn on these off-season weeks at an elite prep school and his nonexistent public school experience to author many speculative books about education reform.
These works include “The Homework Myth,” in which he advances his theory that teachers assign homework to promote “competitiveness” and because of their “distrust for children and how they would fill their time otherwise if not doing work.”
Student achievement isn’t declining because parents lack that species of “detail.” It’s declining because too many students can’t or don’t do math.
He denies that homework fosters “self-discipline and responsibility,” contending instead that it generates only “a burden on parents,” “stress for children,” “family conflict,” and “less interest in learning.” This assault on homework is all part of his overarching demand that schools “move beyond traditional classrooms,” “mind-numbing strategies,” and the “facts model of teaching” so students can become “critical creative thinkers,” a reform manifesto that I first heard in my 1970s college teacher classes and that’s proven consistently bankrupt in every decade since then.
Now Mr. Kohn has focused his attention and expertise on grades, which he regards as “relics from a less enlightened age.” He maintains that “the problem isn’t with how we grade” but “inherent to grading itself,” and that like doing homework, getting any kind of grade makes students “lose interest in learning” and “think less deeply.” As far as he’s concerned, schools need to entirely “replace grades and (grade-like reports) with narrative reports” or “better yet, conferences with students and parents.”
Never mind that teachers are already available for conferences that many parents choose not to attend. Never mind that traditional report cards include teacher comments, or that teachers also write notes on students’ work. Never mind the impracticality of writing periodic lengthy narratives for over a hundred students, something Mr. Kohn has never had to contemplate undertaking himself in his public school non-career. Also never mind that most of the complaints about letter grades originate in the minds and mouths of education reformers, not parents.
Mr. Kohn’s isn’t the only creative approach to assessment. NEAToday’s nationwide look at grading practices found, for example, that Colorado districts “want to get rid of D’s.” Other reformers propose “eliminating zeros so that the lowest score a student can be given for an F grade is 50 percent.” That way even if you get nothing right or hand nothing in, you still get as much credit as someone who almost passed that assignment or assessment. According to one enthusiastic district administrator, inflating low grades and giving half credit for work that doesn’t exist is more “equitable.”
Standards-based grading, the Common Core era’s assessment flavor of the month, allegedly “offers better feedback” based on “measurable mileposts and objectives.” Proponents claim that parents “appreciate” the clarity and additional “detail” provided by the multiple category grades that standards-based systems award in each academic subject.
Your child’s grade in English will now appear, for example, as 10 separate ratings in categories like “narrative,” “explanatory,” and “range of writing.” Despite the illusion of added precision, the validity of those distinct category grades is highly questionable, since most assignments simultaneously involve and assess a combination of skills. I’m also not sure how many parents are fretting the difference between whether their algebra student can “create equations and inequalities in one variable” as opposed to his ability to “represent constraints by equations or inequalities.”
Student achievement isn’t declining because parents lack that species of “detail.” It’s declining because too many students can’t or don’t do math.
Falsifying student grades, whether they’re letters, numbers, or narratives, is neither accurate nor equitable.
Relying on false experts who promote such patent nonsense is a large part of how our schools and student achievement got where we find them today.
Reformers are fond of quoting the quip, often attributed to Einstein, that insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” They cite it to prove that we need to replace the “traditional approach” to education with their “transformative” ideas.
The problem with their analysis is that for the past 40 years of school decline, their “enlightened” insanity has been the tradition.
It’s time they heeded their own warning.
If they don’t, at least we should.
The post Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Insanity and the new tradition appeared first on VTDigger.