By Marion Brady
An Open Letter to Federal and State Legislators
To: State and Federal Legislators
Over the last decade, for all practical purposes, you’ve taken over American
education. Convinced, as you apparently are, that education professionals lack
standards, and don’t want to be held accountable, this is understandable.
In your new role, there are several things you should keep in mind.
First, you’ve taken on an awesome responsibility. The future of about 53,000,000
students is now primarily in your hands. As adults, they’ll sit in judgment on
your decisions.
Second, the human brain is the most complicated thing known. That its
capabilities and potential can be measured by the machine-scorable tests your
policies mandate is a cruel myth.
Third, your power and influence in support of education are essential. But as
Soviet-style central planning surely demonstrated, "top down" change strategies
are rarely effective. Reform is tough under the best of circumstance. In
education, with its myriad layers of management between you and students, "top
down reform" is probably an oxymoron
Fourth, you’re blaming teachers and students for education’s ills. When you
scapegoat, not only are you unfair, you close your mind to other, even very
obvious, explanations of poor performance.
Fifth, you’re assuming that market forces—choice and competition, reward and
punishment—can work the magic in schools they sometimes exhibit in the
marketplace. A few days spent in a real classroom would show you that, for both
teachers and students, the satisfaction of doing something worth doing, and
doing it well, motivates far more effectively, for far longer, than promises of
money or the shame of publication of test scores and school rankings.
Finally, you need to know about a problem which, because of its centrality, must
be addressed before any other reforms can possibly make much difference
Educating is about what’s taught and learned—the curriculum. Goals 2000 and No
Child Left Behind freeze in place a curriculum designed in the late 19th Century
for different people, facing different problems. In the name of
"accountability," you’re forcing teachers and students to do the wrong thing
better.
In 1984, John I. Goodlad and a team of researchers completed a massive study of
American schools involving 27,000 individuals. Summing up his findings in the
book, A Place Called School, Prospects for the Future, he wrote "The division
into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view
of knowledge. Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling
becomes increasingly cut off from the human experiences subject matter is
supposed to reflect."
Your own educations were no doubt of the "subjects and periods" sort, prompting
you to think that a fragmented approach to knowledge is acceptable. Reflecting
that assumption, you’ve demanded "standards"—not standards describing the kinds
of people students should be and become, but standards for each school subject.
Schools are in the knowledge business. Knowledge is "all of a piece." Humans
learn seamlessly. But the thousands of state standards you’ve caused to be
written ignore this fact. Those who wrote them for various school subjects
obviously didn’t talk to each other, much less recognize and take advantage of
the mutually supportive nature of knowledge. The result is perpetuation of a
"mile wide and inch deep" curriculum, a curriculum acceptable not because it
makes sense, but because its familiarity has caused us to stop thinking about
it. For evidence of its superficiality, consider how little most adults can
recall of what they once "learned" at great state expense.
When, in the 1980s, the direction of K-12 education began to be set by leaders
of business and industry rather than by professional educators, fresh thinking
about what’s taught stopped. For example, a promising approach to the study of
history, science, language arts and other subjects, based on World War
II-spawned general systems theory, was emerging. You've made its further
development pointless because standardized tests can’t measure the quality of
the complex mental processes involved in systems thinking. The initiative has
been abandoned.
Your "reform" legislation ignores the integrated nature of knowledge, reflects a
simplistic view of how students learn, imposes measures of accountability which
emphasize minimum standards rather than maximum performance, and slam the door
on innovation.
Left in place, that legislation will bring not merely educational but societal
disaster. Revisit the No Child Left Behind legislation. And this time, talk to
educators.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
(To sign the petition, go to
http://www.petitiononline.com/gmd4285/petition.html. For further information
visit
http://home.cfl.rr.com/marion/mbrady.html)
For More Information Contact:
Florida Coalition for Assessment Reform
310 Michigan Avenue
Tel: 850-265-6438
FAX: 850-271-3136
Internet:
fcar@i-1.net
