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.
In George Orwell’s “1984,” Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth. His job is to rewrite history so it conforms to Big Brother’s ever-changing official version of the past. That way nobody remembers what really happened, and Big Brother’s latest pronouncements make sense, at least until the pronouncements change again, at which time Winston has to change history again.Winston has a fulltime job.
So do the many Winstons in the education world. Like Winston, reformers constantly need to edit contradictions between public education’s past as it really happened and public education’s future as reformers plan to reconstruct it, at least as they plan to reconstruct it today.
These plans for the future are allegedly based on lessons reformers have learned from the past. Inconveniently, the actual past chronicles modern school reform’s long series of failures, follies, and bankrupt initiatives that have consistently defied common sense and persisted in the face of what should have been overwhelming evidence.
For example, when the education world finally rejected the whole language method of reading instruction after it had spawned a generation of illiteracy, the president of the National Council of Teachers of English steadfastly insisted that despite the evidence, her organization was “still embracing” whole language because “once you get to know” it, you “believe in it.”
Other times, though, rather than explicitly defying the past, reformers prefer to rewrite it. Consider these examples drawn from a recent issue of NEA Today where advocates have reimagined history to promote their recycled reforms.
Now that No Child Left Behind has taken its rightful place on the ash heap of discredited education reforms, education’s experts are vocal and united in their condemnation of NCLB’s decade of “unrealistic proficiency” mandates. Of course, they were just as vocal and united in their support of those proficiency mandates right up to the moment they changed their minds. Now the same experts are vocal and united in their support for the Every Student Succeeds Act, which bears an equally unrealistic title, imposes equally unrealistic expectations, and will enjoy experts’ full-throated support until the day it doesn’t, at which time they’ll again forget they supported it.
NCLB identified “core academic subjects” as public education’s top priority, with particular emphasis on reading, writing and mathematics. The law’s “rigid testing regimen” determined a school’s success based on its students’ language arts and math scores. This “narrow” assessment focus led to a consequent narrowing of instructional focus, especially at the elementary level, with subjects like social studies “squeezed out” as districts revamped their curricula and reallocated class time in an effort to avoid NCLB’s sanctions.
The arts have a rightful place in public education, but they don’t rank as equals with reading and writing as reasons we established and pay for public schools.
Advocates celebrate the Every Student Succeeds Act’s accent on a “well-rounded education,” in contrast to NCLB’s concentration on “core academic subjects.” Proponents contend that ESSA will foster a “broader curriculum,” a renewed emphasis on “subjects like science and social studies,” and a school day that doesn’t crowd out physical education, music, and the arts.
So far, so good. It sounds at first as if maybe the experts learned at least a small lesson.
Unfortunately, the same NEA Today analysis of ESSA celebrates that the new law will encourage social studies teachers to “focus on the four C’s – collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking.” Are those the topics you want your child’s history class to focus on?
It’s true that NCLB effectively and regrettably reduced the amount of time schools were devoting to social studies, but education history also records that reformers, in their decades-long zeal to eliminate “facts” and “content,” had already reduced history, civics and geography to “community service” and uninformed, unsystematic ramblings about how students feel about “issues.” If that’s all we continue to do with the restored time for social studies, don’t expect graduates to know their nation’s history or the name of the ocean next to New Jersey.
Watch out, as well, for assertions that the inclusion of art and music in ESSA means they now qualify as “core academic subjects.” The arts have a rightful place in public education, but they don’t rank as equals with reading and writing as reasons we established and pay for public schools. This is a lesson reformers should have learned from A Nation at Risk’s 1983 critique of the “curricular smorgasbord” prevalent in the 1970s, which like today’s reform curricula featured “extensive student choice” and resulted in “appetizers and dessert [being] mistaken for main courses.”
Closer to home for me, literally, is a report about student stress that spotlights suburban Millburn, New Jersey. According to advocates, school has become a “pressure cooker.” “Too much homework” and “early school start times,” coupled with “high stakes testing,” the pressure to build an impressive transcript, the “tension surrounding the college application process,” and the competing demands of “schoolwork” and students’ “lives outside of school” have reportedly raised student stress to “crisis levels.”
Students are complaining that they’re tired, and they’re “more concerned about getting good grades than actually learning the material,” neither of which constitutes a new development. Reformers are once again demanding that schools eliminate homework, experts are postponing first period until nine o’clock, and officials are scheduling events like Millburn’s “communal primal scream,” a respite from classes when students assemble in front of the school for an earsplitting “stress reliever.” As part of the schools’ “comprehensive strategy to reduce” stress, officials also provide “therapy dogs” for students to visit on exam days.
I grew up in the town next to Millburn. My contemporaries and I, in both towns, lived and died by our permanent records. We had schoolwork, homework, afterschool jobs, extracurricular activities, and lives outside of school. Before I could walk, I was dressed in a shirt embroidered with the seal of my future alma mater. The air raid siren blared every Saturday at noon, and in elementary school we practiced diving under our desks to prepare for the day when we’d all be vaporized under Soviet mushroom clouds.
Stress? At least I didn’t have to survive the Depression and World War II.
Too many children bear unspeakable personal burdens, but students’ lives haven’t grown more stressful. Perhaps instead of changing the way we remember yesterday, we should change what we expect of ourselves and our students today.
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