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.
Chefs serve up appetizers to stimulate our palates and whet our anticipation for the rest of the meal. For the nation’s schools the rest of the meal is what happens after Christmas. Here’s a tray of delicacies prepared by education’s cordon bleu experts. As you read, consider sucking on a lemon to cleanse your palate between paragraphs.
The Common Core and its allied assessment consortia remain under fire. Alongside the turmoil surrounding “the politics of the standards’ creation and adoption,” an Education Trust study of “implementation” in middle school classrooms reports that most student assignments “do not reflect the high level goals” specified in the Common Core’s grade level standards. Investigators rated “fewer than forty percent of assignments” as “aligned with grade appropriate standards,” with a “mere six percent” identified as “high range,” prompting assertions that the data reflect the deficiencies in “where teachers are in their understanding” of the Common Core’s “higher standards.”
Given the procession of high-minded curriculum documents that have punctuated the last half century of education reform, it’s hardly surprising that teachers haven’t universally embraced the Common Core. This latest incarnation of high standards, like its predecessors, was concocted in a vacuum, an experts’ brew of nonsense and common sense. In addition, some teachers, like some dentists and carpenters, are admittedly less committed to or capable of excellence.
It’s true, as one Core booster lamented, that written “standards are a lot easier to change than the habits and practices of teachers.” Writing lofty, implausible things on paper is commonly a lot easier than actually doing them. However, the problem with “higher standards” is less where teachers are and more where students are in their “understanding.”
It’s undoubtedly more convenient to leave students’ abilities, apathies, and home lives out of the achievement equation, and it’s fine to endorse high expectations, but wishing something, or teaching it, doesn’t make it so. If what I’m teaching my students and the assignments I give them don’t conform to the Common Core blueprint, maybe that’s because my students don’t conform to it. It’s ironic that education’s experts champion “student-centered learning” while they systematically ignore where students are.
Speaking of expectations, inadequate parent involvement has long been recognized as an “impediment to student achievement.” Recently, however, a social psychology research project concluded that “helicopter” parents’ famously “intense involvement” can also “lead to dangerous dead ends.” This newsflash, of course, is hardly news to anyone, from kindergarten teachers to college counselors, who deals on a regular basis with students long on self-satisfaction and short on perseverance.
The study investigated what happens when parents’ “aspirations,” what they “want” their child to achieve, exceed their “expectations,” what they “believe” their child “can” achieve. Researchers described this “overaspiration” as “poisonous” to student achievement.
Parents may be guilty of harboring loving but unrealistic dreams for their children. But how should we judge education experts and officials? They’ve turned overaspiration into public policy. Their guarantee of universal proficiency, their bandwagon slogans, from “all students will succeed” to the impossible Common Core promise that every child will graduate “college and career ready,” are enshrined in federal law. No Child Left Behind is dead. Long live Every Student Succeeds.
It’s undoubtedly more convenient to leave students’ abilities, apathies, and home lives out of the achievement equation, and it’s fine to endorse high expectations, but wishing something, or teaching it, doesn’t make it so.
Education reform’s inconsistencies go beyond its left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing. School reform’s left hand doesn’t know what either hand is doing, and its right hand doesn’t know it’s a hand. Consider the longstanding controversy over the number of black students assigned to special education. Based on data suggesting that “blacks were 1.4 times more likely” to be placed in special ed classes, advocates have long charged that special education has been used as a dumping ground “repository” for unsuccessful black students.
A 2015 study, however, indicates that when compared to “white students with similar academic achievement, behavior, and family economic resources, black students are actually underrepresented” in special ed classes. Now instead of just being condemned for placing too many black students in special education due to racist, low expectations, schools are also being condemned for placing too few black students in special education due to racist, low expectations.
Brain research rounds out our menu. According to one prominent neuroscientist, a 21st century teenager’s brain is “like a Ferrari that’s all revved up but doesn’t have any brakes.” It’s unclear how that makes today’s teenage brains different from the teenage brains of John Quincy Adams and Wally Cleaver, but it apparently accounts for adolescents’ heightened susceptibility to addiction and their inclination to riskier behavior than their parents typically indulge in.
It also explains why some adolescents need more sleep, a phenomenon formerly attributed to “he’s going through a growth spurt,” but now credited to circadian rhythms and melatonin production. Teenage brain “plasticity” accounts for why adolescents are “extremely well-equipped” for learning, but not for why so many aren’t learning much. Meanwhile, the contemporary adolescent frontal lobe, the seat of “judgment” and “empathy,” is less developed than it will be in adulthood, but it’s no less fully developed than it ever was.
When I started teaching 30 years ago, one popular theory cited the impact of tailbone growth on behavior, a contention apparently resting on the assumption that modern adolescent tailbones are somehow different from Renaissance and 1930s adolescent tailbones, and that’s why 12-year-olds can’t sit still or learn anymore.
The scientific merits of that particular speculation and present-day brain theory aside, the greater danger lies in our willingness to employ science as an excuse for irresponsibility, sloth, and bad behavior. It lies in the false, palliative standard against which we measure ourselves and our students. Yes, adolescents are subject to stress, but today’s school assessments are no more “high stakes” than the SATs my classmates and I sat down to take. Experts warn that adolescents are prone to becoming “addicted to the Internet” and “gaming,” even as they prescribe the Internet and games as classroom teaching “tools.” And what does it say about American adolescents, even into their late 20s, if they find social networking “distractingly stressful” on their brains?
How would they cope on a raft in the Mediterranean? How will they cope with real stress and real responsibility?
Well, it’s almost time for dinner.
Bon appetit.
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