A Teacher Replies to My Critique of Stanford Professor

The essay below was posted on the Renaissance School web site. 

It was in response to my most recent blog post Reply To Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews.

I repost it because I think it reflects how most teachers feel about reform.

 

Mr. Compton

You know a great deal more than I about the men and women who populate Silicon Valley but I’ve spent the greater part of sixty years inside the US educational system and I think I can speak authoritatively about the lay of that land.

Dr. Labaree argues that the American school system evolved to solve the contradictions between individual freedom and social equality. And he says that kids don’t set their sights on real knowledge until they leave high school. That all fits with my own experience.

He also says—an important point you overlook—that the American classroom is a private fiefdom of the teacher, one where the adult has to figure out a delicate ecology of tyrant and benefactor, fount and facilitator.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that when it comes to their work that schoolteachers are among the nation’s most conservative practitioners. Anybody who tries to tell me how to teach had better spend copious hours in my shoes because everything I do is tied to everything else I do and changing one part of the system will unravel the whole skein.

I’m not defending my colleague’s troglodytism; it drives me crazy when they won’t try new ideas. Yet Dr. Labaree is right, I think, when he says that resistance to outside reformers like the standards movement is preferable to the alternative: reforms invented by business people and politicians with logical ideas and self-evident truths.

The Chinese and Indians and Pakistanis are not challenging the US in some mythical struggle because they got education right. They got their act together when they changed their economic system to mimic ours. It is our individualism that creates guys like Steve Jobs.

I recommend you read Outliers by Jay Mathews friend, Malcolm Gladwell, if you want to see how to out-tech the youngsters from Guangzhou and Bangalore. Or read Gladwell’s essay, “Late Bloomers” to see the folly of pushing teens to save our economy.

I only know the creators of the high tech miracle from what I’ve read about them. You have the advantage of me here. But my impression is that the pathfinders who did that work were not the kind to spend eight hours a night studying for some exam.

I’m sure Dr. Labaree will reply in due course but I’d like to guess his answer to your complaint:

Calm down, sir. The American K12 education system is terrible at imparting knowledge to young adults but it’s been terrible at doing this for at least one hundred years. And cultivate some humility. Your reforms, that seem so logical to you, may make things worse. You may be misreading the Asian miracle, its causes and its lessons.

Jerry, Oakland, California

 

Comments

[Sherri Harvey]

Dear Jerry of California:

I am writing to you as a Professor of English in the CSU system. I am wondering, Jerry of California, if you think the lecture-based classroom is enough to prepare students for the rigors of a current workforce that demands so much more than it did 40, 30 or even 20 years ago? Do you think professors with tenure who have been granted legal stagnancy think that teaching students to use Google Docs or teaching students to blog is necessary to prepare them for employment upon graduation? I have heard colleagues say that they do not need to teach anything other than their subject in the classroom because students already have enough exposure to the internet, and I ask you, do you agree with this?
Unravel the whole scheme of what? How can you make a general claim like this without really acknowledging that the 19 C educational system with classified patterns and structured information delivered by methods of lecture by defunct methodologies that often do not help students see real world application is acceptable? And when you say “reforms invented by business people and politicians with logical ideas and self-evident truths”, isn’t this what an educational system that pays administrators more than teachers, that allows cuts to be made to places like writing centers while putting up new buildings, and raising the cost of tuition to do so somehow does NOT involve making POLITICAL DECISIONS by businessmen? What do you consider administrators--? Education has become a business, if you haven’t noticed. What used to be granted to every student in California is now granted to maybe ½ of the people it used to serve: because education is a business. And that business is on the verge of bankruptcy because it is not producing students who can compete in a 21st C workforce.

How has that workforce changed? The answers are endless. Yes, part of the blame falls on society. But the question we should be asking is: what can we as educators do to help our students do more than survive, but actually thrive, in a competitive workforce that demands so much more than it did 10 years ago?
I couldn’t agree more with Gladwell that the social aspects of our personality determine our success, but neither can I deny the fact that the culture that we, as educators, are expected to prepare our students for is one that demands new and different skills that our forefathers who (were mostly white men by the way) designed our current educational system. Do you really think the lecture method still works when our youth today have such different challenges? Different social realities like shortened attention spans, demands for multi-tasking, texting and emailing replacing face-to-face communication, multi-cultural world views all change the way every single one of us think. We can’t really ignore the fact that society is changing the demands placed upon our youth after graduation, yet we still have a whole set of educational standards still catering to the needs of a 19 C society. So I don’t expect teens to “save our economy” but I do, as an educator, believe in helping teens, and young adults, connect the dots that a college education provides them while employing methods like creative thinking, symbolism, logic that have the ability to break through the apathy of our current youth.

When you say “Calm down, sir. [in response to Bob Compton] The American K12 education system is terrible at imparting knowledge to young adults but it’s been terrible at doing this for at least one hundred years.” And that, somehow, makes education’s shortcomings acceptable? The problem lies with the fact that in the past 10 years, our culture is changing so rapidly that our current system is not preparing students for the demands of a 21st Century workforce. The objectives of education really haven’t changed at all despite the fact that society has, and will continue to do so. You claim that K-12 has been terrible for the past 100 years—do you think that a society with changing needs will be met by this system that fails children not only in k-12 but beyond into college? How could that be so?

Sherri of California (San Jose)