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.
Inservice meetings specialize in Truth. Anyone who disagrees or expresses any doubts about the current “bold initiative” is branded “afraid of change.”
“There, there. Don’t be afraid,” they tell us. “It’s a new paradigm.”
I’m not afraid of change. I’m afraid of bad change. I’m against bad paradigms. I’m also not fond of experts whose “research-based” Truths repeatedly prove not to be true.
For years, experts charged that traditional K-8 elementary schools were relics of the 20th century “factory model” that didn’t suit early adolescents’ “unique nature.”
Now a “majority of studies” indicate that placing sixth- through eighth-graders in “dedicated middle school buildings” is exactly the wrong thing to do. Students who didn’t attend “typical middle schools did significantly better on GPAs, standardized math and reading tests, and state test composite scores.”
In addition, a recent New York study concluded that the 6-8 middle school configuration actually “intensifies bullying” and “makes life more difficult” for sixth-graders. Apparently, being the “bottom dog” in a 6-8 middle school denies them the status they enjoy in K-8 elementary schools as one of the big kids. The “academic and social drawbacks” are “real and significant,” affecting both “academic achievement” and the overall “student experience.”
Predictably, “students in the highest grade” in any school configuration “reported less bullying.” However, the study also determined that younger students experienced less bullying in schools with larger grade spans.
While transitions between schools can be stressful, the “transition from elementary to middle school” is “harder on students” than the eighth grade transition directly to high school. Students making the extra transition via middle school typically experience “higher rates of bullying, math and reading achievement declines,” higher absenteeism rates, and “less connection to school.”
In short, 6-8 middle schools, supposedly created to meet the unique needs of early adolescents, are “not as healthy an environment” for early adolescents because the grade span is short and all their students are “close to the same age.”
Since transitions are stressful, you might be wondering why middle school proponents went out of their way to manufacture an extra transition. You might also be wondering why they inserted that transition at precisely the age when it would be most stressful. I don’t have an answer, and I’ve sat through 30 years of middle school indoctrination sessions.
At one workshop the presenters posted all the objections that teachers usually raised. Whenever somebody dared to object, the workshop leaders pointed to one of the posters and shrieked, “Killer phrase! Killer phrase!”
I’m not kidding.
Now many of those killer phrases are the new gospel. The new ideal configuration, kindergarten through eighth grade, would make my grandmother feel right at home.
“Honor thy middle school” isn’t the only commandment from education’s Mount Sinai that’s been subject to recall. “Learning styles” theory traces its origins back to the 1970s. Disciples claim “learners can be classified” according to their learning style using “diagnostic tests.” Teaching students according to their particular “style” will allegedly “result in improved learning.”
Proponents have developed over 70 learning styles models, complete with diagnostic instruments. Inconveniently, a recent study circulated by the National Institutes of Health presented the scientific community’s consensus that there is “no evidence to support the use of learning styles” as it’s been prescribed by education experts for the past four decades.
Researchers agree “most strongly” that the “basic theory of learning styles is conceptually flawed.” In fact, the consensus regarding the theory’s “weaknesses and harms” is so broad that what education experts touted for decades as indisputable instructional truth and “best practice” has been redesignated the “learning styles myth” by psychologists and neuroscientists.
In science circles it’s been a myth for almost two decades. Related “neuromyths” include the widely accepted education world fictions that “individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style,” that students are either left-brained or right-brained and that this explains “differences in learning,” and that each child’s learning style is “dominated by particular senses.”
One investigator found only “very limited evidence” that learning styles exist or that they can “reliably” identify “differences in learning needs.” She determined it’s “unhelpful to assign learners to groups or categories on the basis of a supposed learning style.” Another flatly stated “there is little evidence for the benefits of matching teaching style to a preferred student learning style.” A psychology professor currently serving on the National Board for Education Sciences concurs that students’ “alleged learning styles don’t count for anything in accounting for task performance.”
Studies purporting to document learning styles’ “large impact” on achievement have been “shown to be based on flawed methodology.” Actual impacts are “generally low or negative.” While learning styles are “championed by a wealth” of education experts and enjoy “the backing of a handful of enterprising educational gurus,” the theory is “backed by weak or altogether absent science.” Very few guru-cited studies “even used an experimental methodology,” and those employing an “appropriate scientific method” typically “yielded results that contradicted the popular theory.”
Learning styles is collectively described in research literature as a “disproved, harmful treatment” that “wastes teaching and learning time,” has “not convincingly shown any major benefit,” and “has no place in education theory and practice.”
Nevertheless, over the years school districts have spent fortunes on learning styles classroom materials and guru-led professional learning. As a result, three-fourths of American teachers still operate under the illusion that learning styles is a valid basis for instruction. They’ve been promised for decades that learning styles make learning “easy” and that “making learning easy will increase learning.”
Unfortunately, neither premise was ever true.
And what was once Truth has become a myth.
Again.
You might think that having been so colossally wrong about these two sample truths, as well as so many others, might temper education experts’ arrogance as they impose their latest bright ideas.
It hasn’t. They’re just as wrong, just as arrogant, and just as inclined to browbeat dissenters when it comes to proficiency-based education, standards-based grading, “trauma-informed” schooling, and every other current passing fad.
The prophet Jeremiah lamented that his wayward people weren’t repentant enough to be ashamed. He could have been talking about education experts.
They don’t know how to blush either.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Peter Berger: Yesterday’s truth is today’s myth.