Just A Thought
David De Ruysscher
Mira Loma High School
Education in the United States has a long history of being a controversial and touchy issue. How students should be educated, what they are taught, how long they are taught the subject and by whom, how they should be tested, what those test results mean, the implications of those tests… the list is very long and could go on and on. Looking past all of the rhetoric, lingo and statistics, it all seems to boil down to this: it's a competition of VISION. There are a host of players that try to influence education in order to promote the way they think schools should be run and students educated. The most prominent players in this are the big five: the federal government, the states, school districts, parents and finally, the teachers themselves. There's not enough room to go into all five in this small space, so let's just focus on the first in the list: the federal government. We'll get to the others later.
Unless your brand new to the ranks of teacher-dom, you've heard of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a legacy of the former presidential administration. The focus of NCLB was, bluntly put, to teach to a test in order to show that the students can master the information on the test and take standardized tests with a high level of skill. A basic problem with that approach is that there isn't a lot of need for test-taking skills in the working world, and all of that test prep time takes away from other types of thinking, learning, creating and those other serendipitous teaching moments where you and your class go off on a tangent and explore and learn a whole new area. Are these other areas easily testable? Measurable? Quantifiable? No, not really, so they don't fit well into the vision of the federal government and their idea of what education should be.
Along comes the new administration, and many in the education field looked forward to the funeral of NCLB. However, their anticipation was a bit premature, as the federal government now has a new plan called The Race to the Top Assessment Program. It too focuses on standardized test scores, but it adds an insidious new wrinkle: the big, juicy carrot of billions of dollars of grant money for the states IF they will tie in the student's scores on the test to the teacher's performance and perhaps even their pay. The last time I checked that was illegal in the state of California, so lawmakers here, drooling at the thought of a few hundred million dollars of taxpayer money, want to change the law so that educators are held accountable for their students' test scores. Quantifiable. Measurable. But is that really vision? Do the feds need a strong prescription of reality to show them the error of their ways? Perhaps a cold shower of reality would snap them back to their senses. This is still more of the same old standardized testing treadmill, with a convenient new scapegoat on which to place the blame for students that fail or underachieve.
When it comes to new pools of funding, lawmakers, school districts and schools will often try to become everything to everyone in order to cash in. They lose their own vision and adopt someone else's; willing to pay big bucks to make things happen their way. Are we really that cheap? Gullible? How long until another vision du-jour comes along, and we dump this one in order to sell ourselves, and our vision, for more cash? Is that what education is all about? Perhaps we should resist the temptation provided by those with deep pockets who try and buy our loyalty, our schools and our vision of what education really is.