By Mark
A recent Education Week article suggests that we already know how to fix the public school system in America, but simply aren't doing it. According to his CV, the author, Allan Odden, has been a university professor and policy maker since 1972, after spending five years as a math teacher.
The article kinda frustrated me. More than a little. A lot really. I had to walk away from the computer several times.
First, the solutions he suggests for struggling schools: new curriculum, stronger professional development, teacher-leadership, extended literacy instruction at the secondary level…none of these are rocket science.
But Odden's claim is is that we all know how to fix broken schools, we're just choosing not to do it.
To me, the article illuminates two great problems with the education system:
1. The most societally and politically valued "criticisms" of the system and "solutions" to our problems tend to come from people outside the system. Dr. Odden has not been in front of a public school classroom of his own since 1972, yet he is a published "expert" on education thanks to university positions and research he's completed.
2. Research proves again and again what is wrong (and right) in different schools. Why is that a problem? Research and opinions built upon research often ignore the biggest difference between the schools who are getting it "wrong" versus the schools who are getting it "right." The difference is simple: funding. No where in Odden's article does he really acknowledge that the solutions he offers cost money…in fact as you'll see below, he dismisses that concept. Perhaps the reason these failing schools "know how to fix education but have chosen not to do it" is that they don't have the financial support to implement those solutions he's claiming.
The evidence of both these problems is in the last paragraph of Dr. Odden's article:
The bottom line is that the country knows how to turn around low-performing education systems, dramatically boost student learning, and close achievement gaps. And in most cases, the funds to accomplish these goals are already in the system. The problem isn’t funding, it is having the will and persistence to fix the system, drawing on knowledge that exists now.
Really? The funds are already in the system to decrease inner city elementary school class sizes from 36 to 24? And the funds are also there to fix all the leaks in the ceilings of those schools and provide lunches and breakfasts to the tremendous numbers of kids who cannot learn because even their most basic needs have not been met at home? The funds are there to purchase the whole new curriculum he advocates, when even a single text book is $70-$80 a pop? The funds are there to provide professional development to improve teacher performance? The funds are there for fix all our problems and turn it all around?
And we're simply not choosing to use those funds?
Persistence and will is what is missing?
What an insult to every hard working teacher in America.
I just don't understand how our country operates when we'll spend a trillion dollars to ensure that CEOs get their golden parachutes (just one of which, by the way, would fund every penny my whole district needs for THREE YEARS) but staunchly refuse to devote funding to public schools, under the banner that "throwing money at the system will not solve the problem."
I had to apologize to my sophomores this last week. My class sizes swelled this year by nearly 20%. That means 20% more assessments to give feedback upon, and 20% less individualized time I get to spend with each student assessing their actual needs and crafting scaffolding to support them to their learning goals. I apologized to them because I was having to abandon a writing practice with them that I had used for years with great success (and with great feedback from past students) when my classes were slightly smaller. Now, I explained, there were simply too many of them for this proven strategy to be efficient and meaningful. Instead, I'm having to opt for mass-market strategies which I know will be less effective simply because of the loss of individualized attention to each student and the greater constraints that larger numbers put on both in-class and out-of-class time.
When will we realize that, just as with the industrial and banking crises, providing more money actually is the solution to our problems in education?
You’re right, Kristin. We’re in a model which was never intended to ready every child for graduation, let alone college. Unfortunately, the definition of ‘what schools should be’ is so deeply entrenched in our collective identity. Parents expect their child’s school experience to be analogous to their own, perhaps with shinier toys. And not just parents, the school experience of every adult in America looked more or less the same. Suggest a radical change, and it threatens our national identity. The system will keep producing the same results until we can craft a system which looks and is structured wholly different than what today’s adults experienced as younguns. And I just don’t see that happening without money.
I have this book full of photographs by Jacob Riis.
Your post made me think of it because I was trying to think back to when education worked. First, I thought it was effective way back when families pushed their kids and valued education. But then I thought of the book and realized education is more effective now than it’s ever been. The difference is that no one tolerates a few hundred children dropping out, sleeping in the gutter, and dying young like they did in Riis’s time. Now, we expect them all to be able to go to college. Or, at least, be literate adults. People didn’t expect that of schools in the 1800’s.
But here’s the thing – society hasn’t fully accepted what it will take to keep children out of the gutter and make doctors out of them. There have always been families who neglected their kids, the difference is that now schools are expected to make up for that in a way they’ve never had to before. Little Jimmy the neighborhood idiot in 1950 is now Jimmy with a 504 and a teacher expected to help him meet standards. We’re all trained and willing to do it, but we can’t do it if society is throwing the same model and the same funding at us as they did in 1965.
So, you’re absolutely right that fixing the problem is going to take more money. It’s also going to require that society change its mindset from how schools used to be to how they are now.
It is a matter of will and persistence, but not in the way Odden intended. Teachers are persisting to ask for the resources to do our jobs well, and it takes great will to go into a classroom of 38 children and take on the challenge of improving their academic skills. And despite everything, teachers are doing this across the country; it’s just not as popular a topic as how bad teachers are.