Amid 'Turnaround Agenda,' Teachers, Communities Overshadowed by Corporate Reforms

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/01/30-2

The conversation about school reform in Washington is replete with big ideas--glossy proposals for “accountability,” putting the “students first,” fixing “broken” schools, all in hopes of making America “competitive” again.

Yet our schools are poorer than ever, and in many communities, the child poverty has deepened while test scores have stagnated. The experts leading the education reform debate have failed to draw a simple equation: a system with adequate resources does better than one without.

The gap in the logic has widened as state governments press school districts to conform to new standards--or else. States are gunning for a competitive grant fund known as “Race to the Top,” which the White House dangles as an incentive to restructure school systems. This hyped-up free-market reform rhetoric seeped into President Obama’s suggestion to “offer schools a deal” in his State of the Union address.

The No Child Left Behind corporate-style reform template emphasizes tests and evaluations, purging bad teachers, and shuttering failing schools.

[mike_c]

1. I came up through that "broken" and "failed" education system...

...during which I failed nearly every grade multiple times, dropped out of high school (twice), never earned a regular diploma, and was for all intents and purposes a statistic of failure. Yet today I have a research doctorate, am a tenured full professor of zoology, and look back on a successful and stimulating academic career.

Just how broken does an education system have to be to turn someone like me into a successful scientist and teacher?

There are LOTS of reasons that students either succeed or fail, most of them completely outside the control of teachers or school administrators. But consider that our educational system has consistently produced more Nobel Prize winners than any other country, and provides opportunities for people with ABYSMAL academic achievement records-- like mine-- to regroup and ultimately excel. That system was fundamentally intact, if somewhat constrained by shrinking public support, so when it began to appear "broken" the real causes were likely elsewhere. The system that produced me and my colleagues needs no reform, as far as I'm concerned. It worked beautifully, just as it has for much of the last hundred years. Sure, we can ALWAYS improve, but the reformers today aren't seeking to improve an already great educational system-- they're seeking to destroy and reconstruct it in very different form.

[RC]

2. Teach to educate. Do not teach to pass a test.

Teach to make the students think. Students are not automatons. Schools are not assembly lines making identical products.
That is what our schools have become. Factories, businesses to make money for supplying the workers on assembly lines.

Teach critical thinking. Teach love of reading. Teach curiosity. Make learning rewarding in itself, not so much for the grades, which are necessary, but for the confidence knowledge and facts brings to the holder.

[mmonk]

4. Yep.

Teach them how to learn. No more rote regurgitation for a test.

[Bozita]

3. "a system with adequate resources does better than one without. "

'nuf said!