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President George Bush -- Proponent Of Results Oriented Pedagogy

Schools are places of learning. Always have been. Many have become places of political fulfillment and social activism. Is this a good thing? Maybe, maybe not. Ever wonder what it costs? Perhaps more than we can afford.

Washington

New Occasions Teach New Duties

It’s morning again in America. It may be a troubled morning, gray and threatening, but each new presidential administration brings something new, generates renewed hope, yet rarely accomplishes what matters most to the American people. We have a new president and many old ideas he’d like to change — things like failing banks, failing auto makers, failing insurance companies, failing job creation, failing health care and most assuredly failing education.

President Barack Obama -- Education Inspired Him To Succeed

Our new president knows there’s no such thing as a free breakfast in America. No matter his good intentions, no matter his personal involvement, no matter the funding model he proposes, the public schools in this country are likely to remain, to put it mildly, exasperating. It’s not our new president causing our problems, but us — ordinary Americans caught up in a media driven frenzy that  disdains credible academic endeavor, ignores two centuries of pedagogical history, and meddles in the affairs of one of our nation’s most precious institutions.

As a nation, we have depowered our schools today just as surely as we depowered our journalists, our auditors, corporate governance and intellectual discourse.

Today’s depowered educators are not prepared to successfully teach public school students to become tinkers, or problem solvers, or productive members of society. Today we teach most students little more than how to prepare for and take tests that will confirm their mastery of factoids while leaving those most vulnerable intellectually unchallenged and uncompetitive in an increasingly complex world.

Thus today’s public schools have become intellectual black holes, political playthings, havens for poorly educated teachers and custodians of inadequately socialized students, and an increasing ward of the federal government. For a nation that cares for its children, respects advancements in every other field, the demise of learned education stings our conscience and lays bare our conflicted visions of ourselves, our culture and our future.

In the real world children posses a wide range of possible outcomes. No two are the same, no two learn with equal ease, no two share the same interests, and no two attain knowledge and understanding at the same rate, or at the same time. We’ve known these things for at least one hundred years, but by act of congress all children are commodities — in the sense that every child is educationally identical and therefore suitable for testing against where they ought to be in their educational development instead of where they really are.

Thanks to Congress, the last four presidents and a burgeoning Department Of Education, book salesmen, curriculum promoters, test developers and local and national politicians have replaced traditional educational theory and practice in nearly all of this nation’s public schools. While these realities may not have had racial intentions, their impact on inner-city children and millions of under-privileged students absent any chance for suburban or private schooling are devastating.

Absent Historical Foundations

Where once the our nation’s education academics focused on the tenets, mechanisms and means of teaching, they now focus on grants, programs and the politicization of curriculum, learning materials, and student needs.

Absent any sense of its own rich history, America’s public schools are left vulnerable to outsider pressures, political meddling, commercial opportunism, and ideology of the day thinking. The horrible truth is that we no longer teach eduction history to most all of our teachers in this nation — leaving them, and many education academics, without a foundation upon which to judge, or basis for understanding the fields of pedagogical arts and learning science.

Neither schools, nor teachers, nor the arts and sciences of pedagogy are new. What’s new is the widespread belief that what we learned about education in the last century was all wrong. It’s the equivalent of doctors declaring that everything they learned about medicine prior to 2000 is somehow no longer valid.

When Money Talks, Wisdom Walks

Money may be the mothers milk of politics, but it has certainly not saved our schools. The public schools need the money — every penny they can get — but an increasing proportion of their funding comes at unacceptable cost to the process, delivery, and quality of education. How come? Do you ever ask who’s ultimately responsible and accountable for running our schools?

The answer is increasingly clear: Political incursion is the Trojan horse that comes with every dollar destined for the public schools. Governmental funding of the public schools includes an ever increasing number of strings, special programs, set-asides, curriculum guidelines, and even demands for testing in lieu of learning to think or becoming a responsible citizen. Special programs for the under privileged, the under fed, the under achievers, the wrongly gendered, and the physically and mentally handicapped are good, but not when they come at the expense of diluting the value or muddling delivery of education to students not so challenged.

Whatever Were We Thinking?

The field of education, like that of medicine, is part science and part art. In education, the teacher is the artful practitioner like a physician is in medicine. In education the underlying science is composed of many areas of pedagogical study ranging from curriculum theory, to the psychology of teaching, how students learn, what motivates learners and a long history of laboratory testing and evaluation from which our nation’s educational model and practices were adopted nationwide.

Second Avenue School -- Unwilling Ward Of The Federal Government

What’s happening in our schools today is obfuscatory and political — for the foundation upon which our schools have been politicized and made agents of testing, not learning, is predicated on the assumption that everything we learned about pedagogy in the last one hundred years was either wrong, or irrelevant. I don’t find this credible, do you?

It is we who have done this, me, you, they, us — by asking for easy money, easy answers, and easy to understand metrics of achievement. The increasing incursion of politics in our schools has thereby distorted the educational process. Look at the schools in your community — hard to argue that politicization hasn’t distorted your schools.

Some believe that the politicization of public schools to achieve social and political goals has confused their mission. There is merit to their argument — for  federal and state government controlled schools have clearly confused taxpayers even more. Yet many still believe the problem with our public schools remains basically one of funding. The implication being that if only we throw enough money at our schools, they will miraculously turn themselves around.

Fat chance.