There was an excellent article in the NY Times on Sunday entitled "The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools" by David Kirp. He talks about a school district that is having tremendous success educating a demographic that traditionally does not perform well in school. Most of their ideas are common sense, but toward the end of the article he said this:
School officials flock to Union City and other districts that have beaten the odds, eager for a quick fix. But they’re on a fool’s errand. These places — and there are a host of them, largely unsung — didn’t become exemplars by behaving like magpies, taking shiny bits and pieces and gluing them together. Instead, each devised a long-term strategy reaching from preschool to high school. Each keeps learning from experience and tinkering with its model.
Upon reflection, this quote seemed to encapsulate nicely a tendency I've seen in many schools: to react instead of deliberating, planning, and executing. The essence of what makes a school great (i.e. solid curriculum, eager students, and a wise faculty) has not changed since Plato opened his Academy thousands of years ago.
Yet in the United States, we are always looking for the panacea for our education "problems". We have become so obsessed with "evidence" (evidence of what?), "standards" (which, oddly, are open to wide interpretation and often are not standard at all), and "accountability" (accountable to whom? and for what?), that we have lost sight of the real purpose of schools: they should be a place for students to discover themselves and the world, a place focused on learning. The complication is that learning is an organic process; authentic learning doesn't happen on time tables.
We are so hell-bent on trying to quantify and measure learning (which, I think the argument could be made, is a fools errand), that we have lost the essence of what makes learning great. In place of the living organic process that is authentic learning, we have substituted something dead, because it is easier to measure, because it stands still for us.
Like an avid collector of butterflies, in trying to capture and, literally, "pin-down" a rare beautiful specimen, we have forgotten that to pin it down, we had to first kill it. In so doing, we took it out of its context. Butterflies weren't meant to be looked at in collections pinned-down to Styrofoam; they were meant to be seen in a fleeting glance, riding on the wind, passing us by before heading on to some other place, mysterious, tenuous, and elusive. So too with learning.
I would argue that we need to recapture, reconnect with, the elusive and mysterious side of learning, and embrace the fact that learning is not always perfectly describable and quantifiable. There are valid non-quantitative ways of evaluating learning. That, I believe, is the territory we must explore if we are to make our education system great.
School officials flock to Union City and other districts that have beaten the odds, eager for a quick fix. But they’re on a fool’s errand. These places — and there are a host of them, largely unsung — didn’t become exemplars by behaving like magpies, taking shiny bits and pieces and gluing them together. Instead, each devised a long-term strategy reaching from preschool to high school. Each keeps learning from experience and tinkering with its model.
Upon reflection, this quote seemed to encapsulate nicely a tendency I've seen in many schools: to react instead of deliberating, planning, and executing. The essence of what makes a school great (i.e. solid curriculum, eager students, and a wise faculty) has not changed since Plato opened his Academy thousands of years ago.
Yet in the United States, we are always looking for the panacea for our education "problems". We have become so obsessed with "evidence" (evidence of what?), "standards" (which, oddly, are open to wide interpretation and often are not standard at all), and "accountability" (accountable to whom? and for what?), that we have lost sight of the real purpose of schools: they should be a place for students to discover themselves and the world, a place focused on learning. The complication is that learning is an organic process; authentic learning doesn't happen on time tables.
We are so hell-bent on trying to quantify and measure learning (which, I think the argument could be made, is a fools errand), that we have lost the essence of what makes learning great. In place of the living organic process that is authentic learning, we have substituted something dead, because it is easier to measure, because it stands still for us.
Like an avid collector of butterflies, in trying to capture and, literally, "pin-down" a rare beautiful specimen, we have forgotten that to pin it down, we had to first kill it. In so doing, we took it out of its context. Butterflies weren't meant to be looked at in collections pinned-down to Styrofoam; they were meant to be seen in a fleeting glance, riding on the wind, passing us by before heading on to some other place, mysterious, tenuous, and elusive. So too with learning.
I would argue that we need to recapture, reconnect with, the elusive and mysterious side of learning, and embrace the fact that learning is not always perfectly describable and quantifiable. There are valid non-quantitative ways of evaluating learning. That, I believe, is the territory we must explore if we are to make our education system great.
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