Last weeks US News & World Report (Feb 28) has a look at teen literacy. Like most news about education, it's depressing as all hell:

Close to 70% of eighth graders read below the “proficient” level, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, meaning they can't easily spot the purpose of a passage and find supporting evidence.

Willard Brown, a teacher in Oakland, California, observes that his students “think, ‘My eyes passed over the page, and I pronounced all the words.’ They don't realize that they really didn't get it.” I find things like this far more apocalyptic than anything Tim LaHaye could dream up. After all, horsemen and the sound of trumpets are, to be gentle, unprecedented. But a brave, new world where we've disconnected from literacy, from history, from reality—well, it wouldn't be the first time, and as my 10th grade history teacher was fond of saying, “they don't call them the dark ages because it was cloudy a lot.”

It's not all bad news, of course. The US News article covers a range of innovative programs being tried across the country. Actually, “innovative” is a word which here means “common sense.” The Oakland teacher concerned about his student's eyes just passing over the page has a simple program:

Brown asks his classes to tackle new material—how atoms bond, for instance—by marking up written handouts and then wrestling as a group with what the text really means. What can they figure out from the wording and graphics about why atoms join together? What does the process look like—can they see it in their heads?

...On the other side of the country, Monica Ouly is taking a similar tack in her family and consumer-science class at Springhouse Middle School in Allentown, Pa. ... Language skills are also being stressed by a surprisingly wide range of teachers at New York's Bronx Lab School: Not only do Karena Ostrem's ninth graders routinely translate math equations into word problems, but her colleague Kristin Smith has created a “word wall” in her art room...

The list, I'm happy to say, goes on. And the best news is that these ideas are grassroots ideas, spreading from teacher to teacher; they're immune to the far right's paranoid (and mostly unfounded) fear of the NEA; they fly under the radar of the far left's pointless (and intellectually insulting) “everyone is special” doctrine. Most importantly, they're immune to the real threat: the bipartisan, awful obsession with standardized tests. Mostly, anyway.

When Brown began working on reading skills on his own several years ago, he found that other chemistry teachers typically got weeks ahead of him in the fall. “But I could get ahead by spring, because there was opportunity for independent learning—the text started to make sense.”

I had several classes in high school where I fell victim to a teacher who was concerned with how we did on “The Test.” Once or twice, they were concerned because the school's budget depended on the test. A couple of times, they were concerned with the college credit students could earn by taking the AP test at the end of the year (in Utah, there's a huge cultural pressure to have some college credit when you get out of high school). In every case, the result was the same: I checked out, tuned out and often didn't even turn up.

I know, I know—liberals harp on teaching to the test a lot, and it often seems like mere sniping at the administration's No Child Left Behind act. But teaching to the test really does defeat the point of education, and it really is a serious problem. After all, even Ted Kennedy was a co-author of NCLB—everyone likes this horrible idea.

The purpose of education is to teach children how to think, not what to think. And in the rising sea of darkness that is the American education, our only hope lies with teachers like Willard Brown, teachers who teach.

Politicians and bureaucrats LOVE standardized tests because they think they will lead to STANDARDIZED PEOPLE. Won't that make running a school system, the Department of Labor, AMTRAK and all the other bureauacracies easier. Polling and making election commercials would be a lot easier. I think you get the point.....and by the way that urge for control is the ONE AND ONLY reason for the NCLB Act. Guy

Posted by  Anonymous @ 9:42 AM

 

Tennessee (which is coincidently smack dab in the bible belt and big on standardized thinking and no oringinallity, just follow this little black book of teachings called the bible WITHOUT questions) is big on NCLB and testing, big amount of time spent on them, maybe that why TN school system in 46th in country!
Laura

Posted by  Anonymous @ 2:11 PM

 

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