Michael Swickard
“Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers.” – H. L. Mencken
Public education suffered a setback 30-some years ago. Student scores started dropping. Conventional wisdom said schools were doing something wrong. Politicians quickly decided only interventions by politicians could cure this problem.
Politicians blamed bad teaching for the drop in scores. The teachers blamed the lack of parental involvement and the quality of parenting compared to the parents of yesteryear. Often the blame was placed on the whole generation of students who were not “like we were at their age. We walked 20 miles to school…”
The Education Industrial Complex contended that lack of money was the problem. So education budgets doubled and doubled again. The results continued to slide. Politicians decided there was not enough data to judge schools and teachers. The Testing Industrial Complex exerted a powerful lobby in Congress. For the last decade schools have concentrated on more testing and less teaching to decide if teachers and schools are good.
Maybe the dropping results were really due to a number of things. Concurrent to the education drop there was widespread adoption of cable TV by most households and the wholesale purchase of the Atari 2600 game consoles along with lots of arcade-style games. These two innovations were both incredible time wasters and distracters for the youth.
Schools cannot change all of the increasingly distractive elements of our society, but they can use those interventions that have been shown to work.
Three issues
We have three issues: First, despite education being free, at least one third of students do not graduate high school. Secondly, many young people entering the job market show educational deficits. Finally, there is a syndrome that may explain to the first two: students come to kindergarten with vastly different skills and abilities, and we know that those who do not get on grade level in the first year often never do get on grade level.
For more than 100 years our nation has tried to use a factory model of education in which all students learn at the same rate. Public education uses this model for reasons of tradition but not effectiveness.
The first place to change education is assessment. Currently students stop their learning activities to take assessment tests. The tests have little predictive value. We do not know how students are doing day by day and which students day by day need more or different instruction.
If we are to improve schools the assessment must be entirely inside the learning activity. This means that all answers are part of the assessment and show progress on the learning tasks. This requires individualized education and also requires the use of computers for some learning activities, since only computers can branch seamlessly. That does not cut out the teachers; rather it changes their roles.
Entering the 21st Century
One issue is that literacy and numeracy are on a continuum that intersects age and years of schooling. Literacy for kinder students may be to know their numbers, letters and colors. Those who do not have these abilities cannot start learning with the rest of the class. More so, each of the literate and numerate activities can be broken into concept areas such as “the silent e.”
Throughout the learning there are well-defined benchmarks that both indicate mastery and can be predictive of being able to work on grade level. These must be used within the learning activities so that at all times the teacher, principal and superintendent can predict when the student, each student, will be on grade level.
The timing of the interventions is the issue that will improve education if addressed. It does not do to learn that students are not on grade level once a year. By then it is too late to help. Every day this information must be in the hands of the educators clear to the top of the district.
Some school districts already are working in these areas. All school districts must step up to the 21st Century in education. These interventions have worked and will work if the politicians get out of the way and the schools adopt best practices from states and districts where they have gotten their students on grade level.
Swickard is co-host of the radio talk show News New Mexico, which airs from 6 to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday on a number of New Mexico radio stations and through streaming. His e-mail address is michael@swickard.com.